Log 4

The Game

For the EXPO, we have prepared a complex real time strategy game with card game elements set in a fantasy world in feudal Denmark-Norway. To support this remixed break-off of reality, the player takes the role of the mad King Christian VII expanding the united kingdom of Norway and Denmark into unknown territory. Being mad, however, may cause your mind to play tricks on you and make you hallucinate dangers such as the Slattenpatte. Defend your Kingdom and your loyal citizens.

The monsters are not the only thing you must take care of. You are encouraged to keep your citizens happy too, providing art, food, gold, wood, might and - most importantly - happiness. These combine to your score as well as fodder for gaining achievements in the form of real, public domain artworks from the permanent exhibition of ARoS, gleaned on the informative art walks in the early weeks of the project.

Expanding your Kingdom provides growth in the form of resources, allowing you to build out from the castle through playing cards representing different buildings. These resources your underlings can be made to gather from the varied topology of tiles.

The multifaceted experience combines augmented reality techniques, cultural immersion and mechanics driven gameplay, giving way to potentially hours of mastery and lighthearted edutainment.

Other than the game, we also made a hand drawn poster on a provided whiteboard and a printed out set of instructions and QRs to our 13 question questionnaire, as seen below.

Methodology

To manifest this digital good we used techniques from the creative fields. In the first phase, EXPERIENCE, we predominantly used the following course-provided methods. All of them are broken into an exercise and a reflection on that exercise.

1. Culture Safari

As mentioned in the The Game section, we first went on an art walk with a guide to be inspired and find paintings to be represented in our game. This simply involved amateur photography of personally preferred details and paintings as well as the story behind them, given by museum staff and instructors. One story we particularly found inspiring as an orienting basis was that of the artists behind war paintings who had to be physically present during the violent altercations. This was made into a game by previous contenders of the game jam and used as a good example for us to hone our efforts towards stylistically.

2. Empowered Participation

The group was divided into 5 game developer roles (e.g. artist, narrator, crafter) based on a grid of ones own perspectives and others perspectives regarding each role’s tasks and reflection. As we largely agreed beforehand on who wanted to do what, what we gained from the exercise was solidification of those choices as well as clearer definitions of what to expect from one another in the form of written down responsibilities. Specifically,

Artist: Enok. Responsible for ensuring a cultural visual narrative. Taking inspiration from and modifying and combining historical facts to promote the visual cultural heritage aspect of the game. Expressed in 3D models made in Blender with subsidiary atmospheric work by Peter, such as an original soundtrack and building the space that the game takes place in, i.e. the shed with reactive lights.

Story teller: Eduard. Responsible for creating an appealing narrative in the form of a back drop for the game. All of why the events in the game are taking place, and fitting it within the frame of culture and values of the European Union.

Crafter: Eduard, Enok, Peter. This role blended with the other roles as to fully realise the visions of the Narrator and Artist, etc. E.g., a series of paintings had to be hung on the wall in the background, requiring both skills of coding as well as 3D modelling to have them react to the different game states.

Game Master: Peter. This role took care of making the gameplay make sense, most notably in terms of EU-values. The different statistics that are being kept track of and used in the game are based upon these, such as Law of Rules and Democracy. Here happiness stands in for public opinion, incentivizing you to keep your citizens appeased and ruling the Kingdom intelligently. It is of course not lost on us that the game indeed represents a monarchy and thus has little literal democratic representation.

Designer: Eduard, Enok, Peter:  How can we meaningfully interact with the game world? We opted for a mixture of direct and indirect manipulation as specified in the technical description.

In the end, these roles were interchanged and combined to fit the developers wants and the projects needs and everyone touched on some part of every role. It gave some initial structure for the game's development, but on the other hand, it also meant you had to have a great overview of the project when you inevitably had to change hats.

3. The Ideation Wheel

This tool played a key part in producing the ideas for the games that we chose from. Essentially, you slide concepts around a wheel and fit a series of ideas together in a line. We ensured that the handful of game ideas we came up with were bounded in this framework. The concrete game idea for the game known as AR Kingdom were Human Dignity (Next to Law of Rules and Democracy), Simulation/Senses, Cultural Stories and Remixing Utopia/Dystopia.

Human Dignity: Human dignity emphasizes that all individuals have rights, independent thoughts, and values that must be respected. In our game, this principle enables the possibility of democracy - allowing citizens to voice their opinions and influence the ruler’s decisions. This transforms the gameplay from a pure dictatorship into a more democratic simulation, where the player must balance between listening to the people and achieving personal goals. Survival and maintaining the stability of the kingdom - especially the castle - depend on finding this balance.

Simulation / Senses: Our gameplay simulates real-world governance by reflecting democratic principles. The player rules an empire by striving toward their goals while maintaining harmony with the people. The simulation also includes a historical setting enriched with fictional symbolism, inspired by Danish and Norwegian cultural heritage.

Cultural Stories: As mentioned in the simulation section, the game conveys cultural narratives through its mechanics and environment. It highlights aspects of culture and history. Players can remix the story, altering the course of events based on their own ideologies and cultural viewpoints.

Remixing Utopia / Dystopia: The game allows you to shape your kingdom according to your beliefs and decisions in a basic sense. By agreeing or disagreeing with your people, you influence the direction of the Kingdom. Prioritizing efficiency over harmony may lead to failure. As the leader, you have the power to guide the future of your kingdom - whether it becomes a utopia or a dystopia is entirely up to you.

In the second phase, the Play phase, we used 6-8-5 game sketching. This proved fruitful for consolidating all of our 5 ideas into concrete game mechanics, as the task's objective was creating interaction mechanics for the game. We also received feedback from the Expert Council, and in preparation to this, we had to sharpen our pitch further to get the most out of the experience. Articulating our idea and getting feedback was pivotal to simmering down the raw game idea into something useful. Particularly due to the feedback being exactly that, that the game was too big. In the final iteration, the game is still a leviathan.

Below is a sketch from the drawing session, showcasing some mechanics that mostly did not make it into the game, as example of the first 
mentioned method:

In the Playtest phase, we created multiple demos to get a feeling for how much work it would be to implement the game and to try out different mechanics and visions that each of us were interested in. We also had a playtest of the best demo we had made.

In the Create phase we had to make a stand as well as a questionnaire which is described in more detail in the Evaluation and Insights section. This pushed the game to completion.  Below can be seen a playtester trying the game outside of the expo:

Attribution of Assets

Most assets were home-made, but the surrounding room and the table comes from here: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/props/furniture/alchemy-lab-props-41758 

Technical Description

Regarding the technical aspects of the game, which are concerned with AR/VR interactions, we have the following:

• Card from the deck, grabbable direct manipulation
• Cards on hand Gaze + Pinch interaction
• Gaze + Pinch building spawning based on the  card selected
• AR challenges:
  • Gameboard + deck projection to real table
  • Direct manipulation by touching the virtual objects on the real table

Card from the deck, grabbable direct manipulation:

Very briefly, the key idea is to add a grabbable built-in building block script to the cards' prefabs that we wanted to make multiple instances of. We had in the scene being spawned one card at the deck, given that a specific threshold was met, and given that the user grabbed the card towards himself and reached a specific card-to-deck distance threshold, the card would teleport to the user's left hand, being prepared for the next phase. 

We specified for ourselves the cards we wanted to have in our gameplay, describing also the number of instances to be spawned during the gameplay for each of the card types. We stored this information in a stack, popping one card for each deck-grabbable interaction. 4 other cards are popped for the next technical implementation, explained below. 

Cards on hand, Gaze + Pinch interaction

Given that the user grabbed the card, he will have attached 5 different cards to his left hand, having 5 different options, given that he has the resources needed to choose from. More technically, the cards are aligned on the x-axis and have a specific space gap between each other, where they only have the possibility of rotation according to the y-axis only, such that they are always aligned towards the user.

Regarding the interaction, we have implemented a simple gaze + pinch interaction mechanism, where you simply look towards the card you want to select, then you pinch.

The other 4 cards are removed, leaving only one card in the left hand. 

Gaze + Pinch building spawning based on the card selected:

Given that the user is now left with only one card in the left hand, he simply now gazes at the tile where he wants to spawn the building the card is representing, then pinches. 

AR challenges:

The main augmented reality (AR) challenge was projecting the game platform onto the real-world table where the player interacts with the simulation. We successfully implemented this despite the limitations of the Meta Quest 2. Our solution requires the player to use the headset to define the surrounding walls and the exact position of the physical table using MRUK and Anchors. Once this setup is complete, the game automatically places the virtual board onto the real table.

The other aspect of making the sensation more real given the interaction with the game board, was to add direct manipulation interaction with the platform. This was done by adding a game prefab to the index finger of our OVRHand and adding a sphere collider, giving the possibility of trigger actions if the finger collider and the colliders from the table gameObjects collide. We only filtered the important colliders, being mobs, tiles, and buildings. The main interaction is to touch a mob, and the target tile/building you want the mob to either move on to or be assigned the job of the building.  

Given that the user touched both the mob and the tile beneath the mob, we stored the mob and we checked if the mob was already assigned to the touched tile, which it was; therefore, we only store the reference to the mob and we ignore the move action. The move occurs only when touching a different tile or a building. After the action of moving the mob to a specific location, we remove the reference to manipulate another mob accordingly.

Very briefly, about the main optimization issue to be fixed in the future:

The main optimization issue that could negatively impact the gameplay is that we extend to have multiple tiles and a more durable gameplay. This is due to our naïve way of spawning and eliminating the mobs/buildings/cards.  Very briefly explained, we simply instantiate those instances, and to remove them, instead of making them inactive and reusing them for future gain, we simply destroy them. This is an inefficient and costly operation.

Evaluation and Insights

We made a questionnaire to go with the EXPO showcase and gave it to people (after the fact due to sustained technical problems relating to AR). We received only a modest number of answers.

1.  The mechanism of managing resources was appreciated.

A significant portion of users (28.6%) appreciated the freedom to manage resources in their own style. This includes:

• Assigning jobs to people,
• Deciding where buildings should be placed,
• Exercising control over societal structures.

This freedom to “remix” history based on personal preferences was well received and is a core concept we intend to preserve. It aligns closely with our goal of offering a personalized governance experience, where the player's choices shape the narrative and direction of the kingdom.

2. The interaction techniques and flow aren’t a good mapping to the real-world interaction.

From this statistic, we can conclude that the users had a relatively bland interaction with the game. This is understandable, given that there are many interactions to be made and the mapping between the real-world interpretation of how a user will interact with a real game board and or mixed reality version doesn’t completely align, therefore it can be cumbersome to interact, given no tutorial. 

As in the statistic above, our test methodologies differentiated for some of the users, where we fully explained the mechanism. Given that the mechanisms and interactions are explained, as well as how to generally play the game, the interaction itself was intuitive and easy. As a conclusion, the interaction is straightforward to conduct given an introductory, simple explanation; otherwise, due to the lack of similarity towards a real-world interaction, it’s difficult.

3. The narrative part, bringing the cultural aspects of the game,  has been generally appreciated.

Regarding the story and art, as well as the environmental aspects of the game, people found it to be quite enjoyable. This illustrates that users were embodied in the mystical world we created, being part of remixing a fictional world full of Danish folklore. These elements were represented given the setup, a dark medieval room, having symbolic light sources, regarding the agreement between you and your kingdom, showcased, environmentally, by the candles. 

4. EU values feedback are inconsistent due to the different methodologies used for testing.

The feedback we received varied depending on the methodology used. For some users, we provided prior explanations, including a general tutorial; for others, we allowed them to experience the prototype without any introduction.

These different approaches revealed that the main goal of our game is subtle — it becomes clearer when players are given context beforehand. We intended to highlight values like human dignity and democracy, emphasizing that you cannot rule the kingdom solely by focusing on survival and protecting the main building. If you ignore the people’s needs and opinions, your rule will eventually collapse.

You cannot sacrifice human dignity — meaning people’s rights and perspectives — for personal gain. While this concept is complex and not immediately apparent in a single playthrough, we believe that, in the future, incorporating a tutorial and a better historical narrative (e.g., through dialogue text and an initial gameplay tutorial) could better convey the game's underlying message from the start. Much content related to the other European values themselves was cut too, due to time constraints, such as having each citizen being an individual and having policy cards that would affect certain people. For instance, one may play a ban on some religion, which would affect a subset of the kingdom.

Conclusion:

The EXPO evaluation highlighted both strengths and areas for improvement:

• Strengths: resource management freedom, personalized gameplay, cultural world-building, and strong visual/narrative tone.
• Areas for improvement: intuitive interaction design, lack of tutorials, and the subtle delivery of complex themes like EU values.

Moving forward, we aim to implement:

• A clear tutorial and introductory sequence,
• Improved interaction design aligned with user expectations in AR,
• Expanded narrative elements to foreground our core themes of dignity, democracy, and responsible leadership.

These changes will help transform our prototype into a compelling, meaningful game with a clear educational and ethical foundation.