This week, we started development on a pet-care simulator prototype in VR, letting users interact with their pets and educating users on how to take care of them.
One of the ambitious tasks we started this week was adding a fully 3D animated dog to our game. We recognized that making pets seem realistic in our game would be challenging, so we wanted to test the feasibility of 3D animation in our game. Currently, we have a rigged and modeled labrador pulled from Sketchfab, which we used to make a custom idle animation for our dog using Maya, an industry-standard 3D animation tool. We believe that the current idle animation looks professional, but animating the pets moving around will likely require some sort of procedural animation that we will investigate further next week.
We also added the ability for pets to move around and pathfind their way to specific locations. We did this using Unreal’s built-in navigation system. We also have the pets moving to the location pointed to by the player pawn when the right trigger is pressed. In the coming weeks we aim to make the movement more realistic, possibly using animation-driven movement.
We created a living room environment with several pieces of furniture pulled from Sketchfab, as well as a bag of dog food and a dog bowl. The player can grab the bag of dog food and hold it near the dog bowl, upon which the bowl will fill with food. Additionally, we implemented a stat system for the dog with four elements: health, hunger, energy, and happiness. Hunger begins at 0, incrementing by 1 every 20 seconds while the dog has not been fed and capping at 100. The other elements begin at 100, decrementing slowly over time at varying speeds. When hunger reaches 80, happiness and health decrease more rapidly. We hope to implement several other stat changes in the future, including decreasing the energy stat and increasing the happiness stat when the dog goes to the park. To describe another implemented functionality, when the dog’s hunger exceeds 30 and the bowl is filled with food, the dog will teleport to the food bowl and eat the food, causing it to disappear. In future updates we hope to implement a smoother transition for moving the dog to the food bowl.
Sample Footage
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