Interactive Book Design

News & General Discussion
1

I’m designing an interactive book using Unity 3d. I’ve some ideas of how to do this but I’m not sure if it’s the right approach. This interactive book contains around 15 pages, in which 12 of those pages contain apart from text, some animations that the user can trigger. There are also sound effects (e.g. storm sounds, birds singing, etc) and a background soundtrack. It’s very likely that a narrator voice would be present during the reading of the text, because it’s intended to be an accessible application.(e.g. blind people could not read so they have to listen). I’ve been thinking in the following design:

Create one scene per page. The idea is to represent each page through a scene, so we will have around 15 scenes. Each scene will contain sound effects, audio tracks, narrator voice, text of the book and animations that can be triggered by the user. We will concatenate the scenes, simulating the effect of book pages. There are some issues, for example page transitions, up to now, we don’t know if they want some 3d effect, but I could use Page Turn Curl or Page curler (Assets).

Any ideas? Is this a correct way of designing this app? Thanks in advance!

2

This is straying heavily toward implementation (might move to another forum).

Do you need separate scenes? Doesn’t seem that way to me. It’s probably making a lot more work than is necessary. You might consider making a BOOK Component, which has Chapters (Component), which have PAGES (Component). Under each page (technically a page is a left+right), you’d have other game objects/components for the interactive elements, graphics, voices. A simple hierarchy:

  • Book
  • Chapter 1
  • Page 1-2
  • … (LOTS OF STUFF)
  • Textures
  • Interactibles
  • Text
  • Voices
  • Page 3-4
  • etc…

Might could simplify that even further by putting some of the data (ex text, voices on the Page Component). Separate scenes seems like an example of Premature Optimization. Until you know for a fact you need them, I’d keep it simple in one scene.

Gigi

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