ond Open Day is an interactive game where players can experience life on the Gold Coast and the Bond University campus. It is a mobile game simulation of the real-world environment set at Bond University.
Prototype Concept
The Lego game concept advances the animated 3D environment, adding user interactivity and potential audience engagement. This helps immerse players in the experience, directing narrative and the user's attention. We can communicate with our audience while entertaining them. This can provide benefits such as generating new interest, promotion, marketing and community engagement. We will build an interactive game set in our reconstructed Bond University Campus, providing a series of exploratory and parkour based mini-games showing off the campus and animated environment.
The Lego theme and game genre enables us to deliver a fun and friendly application appealing to the wider student body and local community, while being appropriate for the executive audience, and in alignment with the values of the institution it represents.
Production Method
We will use the Unity Lego asset pack to add player control and interactions built on the foundation of the Gaia system.
The Lego unity asset has its pros and cons. It comes with some stylish characters and animations out of the box with ways to build on these and other game assets with the integrated brick building system. It features attachable scripted prefabs that can be used to add interactivity to a game scene but lacks integration with much else of the Unity ecosystem or even itself without additional modification. Scripts do not work globally and the package is designed to cooperate specifically with itself and its target build to WebGL, including publishing permissions.
Cinemachine is embedded as a controller and ties in with the input system which only uses Unity’s “Old Input System”. We were not able to get gamepad, virtual/touch controls and mouse/keyboard working universally using rewired to map controls traditionally, but were able to implement independently across Mac, iOS and Android platforms.
We replaced Unity input with Rewired standalone module, creating a Rewired input controller mapping input actions to output controllers per each hardware device or virtual control. We used Rewired Cinemachine Bridge to take control of mouse X and Y input independently.
Using Cinemachine meant quick switching between our Lego player and Cinemachine rig for rendering and animation. We did find the Bond Arch geometry heavy on performance during camera movement while rendering using real time lighting, but compensated for this by screen recording unity recorder to capture every frame. The output from Unity’s recorder was not usable quality.
When building game scenes involving more activities and moving parts, we will modify real-time environmental properties of Gaia to refuse computational load. Depending on scene location we can reduce shadows, reflections, time of day and real-time lighting, biome resolution and density, procedural skies, wind zones and weather systems.
We have built 4 mini-games into separate scenes, linked together by a menu intro scene and win/lose transition scened from each game. This minimises load times and player wait time on death, and boosts runtime performance. We also disabled time of day, weather, reduced wind and reflections in the 2 heavier scenes.
The final Mac build plays smoothly at 60fps with headroom using animated assets, with a reduction to roughly 30fps at the height of heavier configurations.
