The Adventures of Ranger Raccoon
Role:
3D Gameplay Engineer
Software:
Unity, C#
In a truly innovative game experience that promotes respiration health through the use of engaging gameplay, become the masked hero Ranger Raccoon in this new and innovative adventure that promotes healthy living with breathing exercises through a series of exciting challenges to keep the woods safe!
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Patrol the national park.
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Help a mother duck find her ducklings.
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Blow bubbles to soar up mountains.
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Create gusts of wind to navigate a sailboat.
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Putting out forest fires.
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Build a new cabin.
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Fish for lunch.
All while learning key breathing exercises for better health using two-step and four-step breathing exercises that their clinician can directly prescribe directly into the game. Explore the park and engage in entertaining mini-games all with a novel device currently in development at the University of Texas at Austin!
Contributions to this Project
Procedural Map Generation
When designing the running portion's map, our goal was to keep the patient's health and safety in line. We wanted a way to guarantee the breathing exercises weren't too strenuous and evenly spaced based on the input of the doctor's prescription. My suggestion was a procedural map that generated the pathway of Ranger Raccoon's travels based on the doctor's input, our map tiles. and how much time we anticipated for rest between each exercise to prevent straining the player.
Map Configuration
Our endless runner map was made of four types of tile:
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Regular/Running Tile
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Jump/Action Tile (requires breath input)
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Turn Tile
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Minigame Tile (6 Minigame Choices)
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Based on criteria determined by experimentation, a random tile would be chosen and then determined if placeable decided by surrounding tiles. If the title was placeable, the tile type was added to a list. Once the list filled the exercise time determined by the doctor, the minigames chosen by the doctor were evenly spaced and added in between the sections of tile types, and the tile types were then placed in game as prefab objects. Tiles were placed based on what direction the player was facing and how far the player moved ahead for efficiency purposes.
Doctor-Facing UI Input
In order to receive individualized prescriptions from doctors for their patients, we needed to add a system to collect and keep data throughout the entire game of the doctor's prescription. This required a persistent data system, which I created through Unity's JSON system.
Two objects: exercises and exercise data (prescriptions) were created in order to communicate the input through the JSON file. Each exercise held data like inhale/exhale length, hold length, exercise type, and exercise theme, and each exercise data object held all the exercises for the prescription. Exercise themes were carried over as indexes (0-5) into the endless runner to appear as tiles, and all the other data was used in calling and creating the correct exercise when transitioning into minigame mode.