Making of The Slime Lab - a team effort

What we want to explore and create is a pet game experience with creating and customizing your own cute slimes in a Virtual Reality world based on Meta Quest 2. The game is inspired by Tamagotchi and PokemonGO, which has earned lots of reputation attributed to their playability and people's love for cute creatures. Thus, our goal is to successfully simulate the characteristics of slimes just as a real-life creature in the VR world, where players can interact with them and customize their own pets if they are willing to. 

• Lack of VR development experience

Since all of the members in the group had no idea of developing works with graphs and interaction based on VR devices, it was a big problem for us to learn about it as a beginner and complete the project in such a stressful time limit. We have to get used to the pace of development and stuff with connecting Quest 2 to PCs and address this problem often during the development period. 

• Softbody Simulation

 The main challenge we faced in the very beginning was how to simulate the characteristics of the slime, as they should be soft enough to act like a flabby and sticky creature. We have several tries on it. The first one is to implement a spring-like structure for each slime so it could interact with the ground in an elastic manner, but it could cause problems of clipping when the player throws slimes to the ground too hard.  The second try is to apply a lattice deformer as a model for each slime, as it succeeds in simulating the visual effect that we want. It creates a lattice-like structure that encircles the whole model of the slime and has vertices at the positions of the vertices and center of faces on the cube where each vertex could reflect and deform in the case of collision.  

Chenyi Wang - As the lead developer, my main responsibility is bringing to life vivid images of Slime. This includes developing the innovative Slime shader and the Slime emotion system. I also refined our initial Slime soft-body simulation solution to achieve a real-time effect that's both clipping-free and more vivid. In the realm of game assets, my role extends to modeling the foundational Slime meshes. Additionally, I've taken the lead in designing and constructing the game scenes, involving a detailed process of modeling in Blender, texturing in Substance, and handling lighting and materials within Unity. Moreover, I have implemented a VR inventory system that enhances player interaction, allowing them to collect and store items seamlessly in the virtual environment. 

Binghe Feng - I primarily function as a support member, offering technical assistance for both design and user experience aspects. Regarding design, I am responsible for constructing early scene demos in Blender and ensuring iterative updates align with gameplay changes. Additionally, I contribute to the creation of expressive features for slime characters, designing unique outfits such as bunny ears, crowns, and star effects in Blender for higher-level slimes. I also create game posters during display sessions.  In terms of user experience, I conduct live evaluations, summarizing feedback points that enhance our understanding of VR device interactions and improve overall user experience. 

Yeqi Wang - I was responsible of the design of the slime in terms of viusal effects, motion logics and characteristics of our slime in advanced levels in this project . I contributed much work in both Unity and Blender where I implement VFX effect of slimes such as lightning, coin bursting etc. and model novel outfits for higher level of slimes inclduing leaves, treasures etc in Blender. I have also contributed to the slimedex system as an UI which recording the types of slime that the player has unlocked with the famous DOTween library. 

Yukun Cui - I was responsible for implementing the first prototype of slime physics. In addition, I also designed and created several slimes with custom shaders. Game play wise, my contribution is mainly on the framework of managing slimes, including writing the base class for holding slime data, and the merging feature on top of it. Asset wise, I contributed to the 2D art of the slimes, including facial expressions, some UI elements and most of the slime icons.

Zhongyue Wu - I mainly contributed to the VR Interaction part of the project, including the VR navigation, grab interaction, slime merging interaction (together with the feature implementation). For the merging part, I also designed the merging logic with a custom merge tree. I also created new slimes with Blender and other tools for the textures.