Phase 3 (audio)

This game is primarily focused on engaging the auditory sense of the player more than the visuals. The concept is based on playing Tibetan bowls. A Tibetan singing bowl is a type of bell that vibrates and produces a rich, deep tone when played. Also known as Himalayan bowls, Tibetan singing bowls are said to promote relaxation and offer powerful healing properties.

Considering the limitation of skill sets for the development of correct assets in the given time frame, we modified the concept a bit and created hanging bells that can be tapped by the player to produce soothing sounds. Each bell will produce a sound of a different frequency.

Problems Faced

The code to make this section of the game was simple: I used input touch, so when I touched an object it would play the sound attached to that object. It took several attempts just to realize that the script was working properly on unity, but not on the mobile app.

To resolve this issue, we tried different audio formats, different settings in audio sources, and even changed the version of Unity. All these changes did not help as the sound would play on Unity but not while building the game.

While looking on the internet, we discovered that many people faced similar audio problems when they worked with similar AR formats. Hence, we changed the Vuforia plane finder to Vuforia target image, so when we scan an image, objects appear and we can tap on them to play music. This solution also didn't work, because the phone didn't play the app. Then, after a long discussion with Chris and trying the app on his device we realized that audio was playing. The issue was that the audio source in the app was interacting when we used an android device, but not on an iOS device.

The bells were made using blender, but when we extracted the file to Unity, the bells became transparent, so after discussing it with John, he helped us by making the bells solid in the blender and helped us to extract them to Unity. Each bell is connected with rope that has been created using the hinge component, so the bell has nice physics and movement to it.