Week 1: Oculus Launch Pad 2018 - Due July 9 @ 11am PST

Mail Snail is a lighthearted VR game about the excitement and mystery
moving to a new town.  Playing the game is all about collecting,
exploring and uncovering untold stories.    The player joins Post the
Snail as they move to a new town and begins his new life there.  To pay
the bills you will start a mail courier service which will bring you to a
variety of quirky neighborhoods (and neighbors) around town. 

As your business grows you’ll have the time and the cash for other
hobbies like decorating your new home,  writing to pen pals, and growing
your stamp collection.

The goal is to create a fun, casual game for people who
prefer slower paced experiences built around a central narrative, and
simple mechanics like collection, upgrading and relationship building.
 I'm still in the process of nailing down the exact gameplay format, but
from a high level the Snail is an NPC which you have some control over
as the first person player.  More of this after I try some different
ideas out.  There's several great games I'm looking to as inspiration
including Moss, Night in the Woods, Luna, and Neko Astume. 

I
started to write out documentation right after bootcamp ended, and am
polishing up the game design document to get a handle on my vision for
the project as a whole.  I decided my initial submission will
essentially be a Vertical Slice - a short demo that shows off the core
elements of the game including the basic game loop, and visual style.
 To keep me on track I've also started a Trello board, yay organization! 

On the development side of things I've setup my Unreal 4
project and have started some initial work on levels, environment art
and UI.  I've decided to keep the art style dead simple for now, relying
on unlit gradient textures.  This has a lot of benefits - it's cheap,
fast to use, and looks great in VR.  To facilitate this I made a
"gradient sheet maker" in Substance Designer.  I brought the Substance
into UE4 and can now make an infinite number of gradient sheets all
within the engine.  This lets me tweak colors super quickly in game as
shown below.  

This
is the first model I made this past weekend, Post's house.  Everything
in this scene is textured using a single 256 gradient sheet, with the
exception of the mail sign (Please ignore the gif compression :P)  If
you haven't checked out the Substance suite for texturing, I highly
recommend it, it's been a huge time saver for my workflow.  That's it
for now, next week I hope to have updates on the game controls and UI to
share.

Concept & MDA

Hello everyone,

For a week the concept that I have for the game-experience has changed. Originally it is a virtual simulation of taking care of a bird growing through life stages and eventually passing or leaving. I wanted to create this experience because I felt there is lack of emotion on how the game industry approaches creature/monster raising games. Pokemon, Digimon World, and Monster Rancher are all fun, but the purpose of raising the creature on those games is to combat them with other creature. In addition, PetLab allows you to express your creativity but at the same time, it feels like a factory. I wanted to create an experience that revolves around care and empathy, however, with the current idea it lacks dramatic tension to create a stronger bond between the player and the creature. 

I was struggling to find a game mechanic as well as I was not completely sold with the idea that I had. I was reviewing my notes to find inspiration; from Yelena Rachitsky’s Oculus Experiences, and Robin Hunicke’s Experiential Game Design then I started browsing GDC videos on game design and re-watching Extra Credits videos on YouTube. In the process of finding a more concrete concept, I constantly wrote more question challenging the ideas that I have, then I wrote multiple possible answers. The answers that I have presented more questions.  


While reviewing my notes there was an acronym I was unfamiliar with “MDA” from Robin’s presentation, after searching I came across a paper titled “MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research”. That’s when I was introduced to the idea of dividing the concept into Mechanic, Dynamic and Aesthetic.  From this paper, I can clearly distinguish both my Aesthetic and Dynamic or have an idea for those. The experience I wanted to create matches with the description of Fellowship and Discovery for the aesthetic. I wanted a social interaction between the player and the bird. I also want discovery for the player to have bonding moments with the bird. The main dynamic I have for the player is protecting the bird. To create that experience I need to design an environment that creates tension and will present challenges to the player. As a result, the player should feel compelled to protect the bird from harm. The main actions the player has is to use their hands (controller containing a collision detection) to protect the bird against from harm (projectiles targeting the bird).  

As for the story, I have an outline of certain events occurring, but details are not written. I hope that a basic outline will suffice, because how I design certain parts of the game may change the direction of the story.  

Similar games that I may take inspiration from are Last Guardian and Undertale. Last Guardian contains an experience navigating through space with a giant creature as a companion. Undertale contains a gameplay where you avoid projectiles to survive an encounter. I will also take inspiration from Journey and Ori and the Blind Forest on how they introduce the player on different parts of the game.

For Week 2 I will be working on programming the main mechanic. I will have projectiles that move in different ways but targets the bird, and a collision detection on the hand/controller. 

I’m also hoping that I’m doing the process of developing efficiently. I’m starting off with a mechanic that I believe is flexible with different variations and have an outline of a story to keep me on track with the feeling and experience I want to convey.

Karlo Noel Feliciano, FelicianoArts@gmail.com 

Diversity, WebVR, Social Experiences, Education ...

This past couple of weeks since meeting everyone at Menlo Park have been full of contemplation, insecurity, and optimism. We are all coming to terms with the idea that we must submit something worthwhile in three months, and that we will probably need others to help us. This has been an interesting point for myself as I feel I have a relatively clear idea - I want to explore how we can do education better in VR - but in the past I usually just figure things on my own. I am fortunate that I am both a Professor at a Canadian College and currently pursuing a PhD exploring what education might look like in VR and AR, so pursuing an educational application seems quite reasonable as I am already quite familiar with what is and isn't out there.

Three months is not a great deal of time, but the monetary/developer support and validation of Oculus is a true motivator; particularly as someone not often successful at finding support for my past art and academic endeavours. Because of this it will be crucial to find others passionate enough to work together on this project; but how do we do that when everyone has their own strong ideas of direction is something I am still trying to figure out …

Taking all the above thoughts into consideration, here are my musings for the first leg of this journey.

• I truly believe in WebVR and the A-Frame toolset to move this project along. The openness and accessibility of the web is huge; and I have enjoyed the sensible developer choices and helpful communities of WebVR/A-Frame.
• I have experimented with testing social WebVR in the past so I have some ideas on how to proceed; but now the pressure is on to create something more concrete and fully formed for this prototype pitch.
• I need to form a small team to help with development and content creation.
• For this prototype build my team will likely be small and consisting of those I have worked with in the past as I am not sure I have time to build that team trust with new members currently. If I can get funded I would like to expand this team to include some really interesting people I haven’t worked with before, as it is easier to recruit when you have money to pay :)
• I also acknowledge that I am a white cis-gender male included in a diversity program, and that likely my described desire to create a way for others to share their experiences in my application to this program is the reason why. I have two daughters and one son, and I want to do my part to help define a future where they feel their voices are heard equally, and that they also know how to listen to others. Diversity of perspective should also be reflected in my team.
• Sounds like there will be very few developing in WebVR this Launchpad cohort; but for those of us that are Oculus is making sure we have access to those that make WebVR support happen at Oculus (I am already bugging Justin Rogers with WebRTC and Fixed-Foveated Rendering OculusGO Questions ha). We WebVR devs are fortunate this year, and I will continue reach out the very helpful Aframe and WebVR communities.

Now while I try to build a competent and diverse team of complementary skillsets I also need to figure out my WebRTC problems, figure out if I should host on AWS, and start seriously prototyping how socialVR interactions could help us learn.