GLAC - StoryMode - Prototype

About GLAC:

 The University of Sydney and the Institute of Archaeology in Belgrade, in partnership with the Museum of Srem and the Institute for Protection of Cultural Monuments in Sremska Mitrovica, are cooperating in a multi-year research project on a late antique building in Glac, near Sremska Mitrovica. The GLAC project is an archaeological dig of a Roman Imperial Palace on this site. 
 The aim of the project is to encourage scholars and students to study the site, and younger generations to get acquainted with the scientific knowledge about the past of the site. Learn more about the project here.

Tasks Undertaken and Completed: 

 Worked on potential narrative framework and went through my mentor’s Sketch-Fab scans of the GLAC project to identify potential site models. Created a User Flow Journey for the “Story Mode” (link to our Miro Board), including an onboarding scene that makes the user familiarize themselves with archaeological tools and methodologies. 
 Agreed with mentor on prototyping this “onboarding scene” as it also has a use case where it can help aspiring archaeologists about the processes in a gamified way. Identified the potential maps from the GLAC Server that can be used inside this experience to give better insight to the user. Implemented scope for inventory and mini-map systems, worked on dynamic terrain editing to recreate the excavation experience. 
 Followed through this tutorial to create this experience, and faced challenges in Terrain editing and Shader pipelines, both concepts with which I am completely inexperienced. After resolving the compiler errors, the experience still didn’t work as it was supposed to, which led me to explore debugging C# scripts. After a painfully long and tiring process for 2 whole days of 10 hours of review, and finally made it work on a demo terrain. Unity crashes when implementing the same with the site’s 3D model, which I think can be fixed by optimizing the number of vertices and triangles on the mesh.

Overall Learnings:

- Learned about archaeological tools, methods, and documentation processes. 
- Learned about the field of archaeogaming and its potential use cases
- Identified reference games that could be helpful for the future of this project.
- Understood the values associated with the GLAC Project and explored gamified storytelling methodologies.
- Explored Unity's Terrain Editor Tool and understood the basics of level design.
- Explored Unity's Shader Editor and Shader graphs, understood the importance of Render Pipelines, and potential use cases of custom Shaders.
- Explored scripting and Debugging with C#, to identify the potential areas where my script may misbehave. This was the most productive technical skill I am learning with this capstone opportunity.