Flower Delivery
(sound on)
Spring 2024 Graduate Level Course
Unreal Engine 5.3
The goal of this project was to create a virtual experience that can be fully experienced without vision, to conceptualize a prototype for partially or totally blind players. Smaller goals within the project included creating accessible game features and mechanics, as well as successfully guiding the player to a specific location using audio cues, and ensuring player orientation by way of specific sounds and ground materials. Stretch goals, which were not fully realized within the time it took to create the project included a more robust set of item and audio descriptions, menu and UI items complete with audio descriptions, and other visual aides.
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My personal contribution to this project was to create a "guide system" which would focus the player on the nearest objective, or "waypoint," for a short period of time to reorient themselves to a particular area. This system was complete with a distance tracker to tell how far away a player is from a waypoint, as well as a Text to Speech input that will provide audio feedback for players.
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BLUEPRINTS
In order to create a feature in which players can orient themselves toward an objective, I had to make sure of three things: the waypoint guide would effectively rotate the player toward an objective, notify the player that this has happened, and tell them approximately where they are after the fact.
Part1: Setting the Waypoint
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This Blueprint searches for the nearest waypoint to the player, by running through each Unreal Actor of class "WayPoint." It will then set a variable to be utilized later.
Part 2: Activating the Guide
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If a player presses the Left Alt Key (or on the GamePad, Left Trigger), this Blueprint will call the previous Set WayPoint function, in order to retrieve the correct waypoint. It will then focus the player camera onto the selected object for three seconds, ensuring that as long as the player is moving forward, they are moving toward this objective.
Part 3: Text to Speech (TTS) and audio feedback.
Now that the previous two sections have been executed, the player will need to know where they are, and what's happened. The node Play Sound at Location provides auditory feedback that the event has been triggered. Then, a channel is added during the activation sequence, which is plugged into Speak On Channel. Attached to this is a sequence of strings and variables, which when appended together will provide information on the waypoint such as its distance to the player, and which waypoint the player is looking at.
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