Forum Discussion
133 Replies
- hisaacdelrHonored GuestOLP2018 Blog Post #1
I took this first week to explore the capabilities of the Oculus Go. I tried out experiences such as VVR, Face Your Fears, Pet Lab, and more to get a sense of what kinds of controls would work well in 3DOF. Still working out which of two ideas I want to do for OLP but both involve an inventory system which I'm designing the UI for with pen and paper for now and early stage implementation in Unity. I know things that I want to explore are multiplayer & procedurally generated environments and I'm currently doing research on how to accomplish those as well. Lots of learning! - Jarrod84ProtegeWe did some more concept art for the logo for our game. We've been brainstorming quite a bit, and I've been thinking about how I'm going to go about coding it all. I've started modelling a bit as well, and I've created the base Unreal project which is currently loading. So far we have 4 people interested in working on this game with 2 or 3 more potentially.Some more concept art for our narrator/tutorial guy who will guide you through the game. He is an amalgamation of the Chesire Cat/ The Great Gazoo/ Freddy Kruger/ Mario Slacks/ Cartoon Devil.My brother was going for a evil Danny Davito vibe for the game guide guy.I also did some concept art for a couple bosses, which I tried to make anthropomorphic bugs. The top one having a spider head, and the other a wood lice head.Some concept art for the medium, which will be called in if you don't haunt the people out of their house before a certain amount of scares. There will also be ghost hunters and an exorcist that can do damage to you to lower your goo.WORKING BI-LINE:
Welcome to the realm of the
dead! Haunt a house, scare the living but conserve your scare goo!ELEVATOR PITCH
Ghosted is an action
adventure where you get to scare people out of their homes. Protect
the living realm from monsters, but don't get low on goo. If you get
too low on goo you will be banished to Crud Caverns to hunt for more
goo.The style of the haunting
part of the game would be Haunting: Poltergeist Guy/Spy vs Spy. It
would also include some poltergeist type mechanics, where you can
make noises or throw things, and we were also thinking about adding a
possession mechanic were you would be able to possess people or
animals. When scaring the living they would react like the old Ghost
Busters toys where their jaws dropped and eyes popped out. Kids and
animals would be more attuned to being scared or noticing you.Pretty much at the
beginning you die in our game, then you enter the tutorial which
we're planning to have narrated by a beetlejuice/the great gazoo type
character, that will tell you your job is to shut down unauthorized
portals located in the living realm. The tutorial will take you
through how to scare the living, how to shut down portals and how to
fight the monsters responsible for the illegal portals. The reason
for haunting the people out of their houses is, you need bring the
monster through their portal in the living realm to defeat them. As
you scare people, you use up “goo” which is essentially your
health when your in the living realm. When you run low, you are
teleported to the Crud Caves, which we will try to make as a creepy
cave system built like a maze. You will have to collect more goo,
and defeat the creatures that dwell in the cave to refill your goo
bar. If you use too many scare tactics without scaring the tenants
out of their house, they will call in, either a medium, ghost
hunters, or an exorcist.To cut back on the amount
of activities that would need to be animated for the ai you need to
scare, you would also be banished to crud caverns when the sun comes
out. You would inhabit their house a few hours before bed, until
dawn. We will base the scare meter of the living ai on the line of
sight of the ai when a spell goes off, or by a sound radius to draw
the ai's attention. The finished game would have 4 minor boss
monsters with a final big boss that you defeat at the end.Oculus Username: Jarrod84 - AnonymousI started working on my tech documentation during the flight home from bootcamp. I've been doing research to help me finalize my tech documents before any coding / visual work starts. My research has been focused on industry, sale history, Indiginous Futurism (what has been done / not done / successful / not successful) assets available / pricing, artists available, Oculus Go SDK features / requirements, process of supporting both Go and Rift, my specific target market (posting surveys, updating social media with new contacts, discussions offline with target market - - my documentation (living documents / drafts) should be completed within this week and I will begin setting up our Unity3D project skeleton and Oculus Store with my project name, genre, temp visual placements and assets.I'm also reviewing tactics to integrate my old AIBots API into my Unity project with ML-Agents (not sure if that is going to be viable yet, but I'm looking into it.)I have decided to use Unity3D Cinemachine, Timeline and Post Processing because I've had great results with it in past projects & experiments.
- shashkesProtegeOLP2018 Blog Post 1:Me and Matt (my co-founder of Virtual-Bytes.com) have decided to continue our regular patreon posts dedicated to our VR experiments to update our followers about being accepted to Oculus Launch Pad and about the project we decided to create.EMOVJI - an asynchronous message platform that will let users send their exact
movements along with an easy to choose greeting such as “Happy Birthday” or “I
miss you” to their friends and loved ones.We explain our reasoning behind this project and start reviewing the different back end options we are looking at to rapidly prototype this. Feel free to read/watch more:https://www.patreon.com/posts/19826287
https://youtu.be/TB_qz6GGxPQ - kinjutsuProtege
- kinjutsuProtegeOLP 2018 Blog Post 1
Hi All!
Excited to share my first update and get this ball rolling. The project
I'm going to be working on is tentatively titled "Mail Snail" and
here's what it's all about: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.
If you want to keep up with the project outside of the OLP blog you can find me on Twitter @elysebk - Aquma4LivezProtegeHello! My name is Alejandro, but I go by Aquma. I'm working on a VR time machine for Los Angeles. The current idea is to take places of interest throughout the city, film what it looks like today, and then 3D model from that spot what it might have looked like 100 years ago. Or even 1000 years ago! Who lived there and what was it like? I'm inspired by some analog VR technology -- the View Master! I have one slide of vintage LA and I find it magical, like a portal back in time. So I wanted to try and adapt this experience in a way that's a different kind of immersive and more historical to tell the story of the land and its peoples.The first step I want to do is spend a little time to research. Get in touch with the people at Lost LA, a local KCET show that goes deep into LA history. I can hopefully talk to Nathan Masters who runs that program and has access to all of the wonderful historical photos in the USC library collections. I want to reach out to my friend Natalie Gravier, who was also a member of the inaugural Launch Pad program with me back in 2016. She made a similar historical meets modern VR project that looked at art deco tunnels of the 110 freeway (the country's first!). I also want to talk to some of the people from the Tongva community (one of LA's indigenous peoples) to hear some of their history and get their input as well. My current list of potential places to film and deconstruct/give back to nature are:
- the Santa Monica freeway that leads from downtown LA to the pacific ocean and the beginning of the Hollywood freeway downtown (which at Broadway used to be a hill that the city destroyed). Both of these routes were used by the areas Indigenous people for traveling/trading.
- Chavez Ravine where Dodger stadium currently sits, atop 3 displaced Mexican American neighborhoods
- Mt Lowe Railway which was a railroad and little community in the mountains of LA (good hiking spot).
- The LA river that used to be natural and had orchards nearby. Union Station sits where Chinatown used to be. What did all that look like before it became a concrete aqueduct and a gentrifying arts district?
And I'm sure I'll think of other places as I learn more history. I think the trick is to not get too caught up in the potential of finding a perfect location and instead just picking one and finding the magic within.That's it for this update! Good luck everyone. - the Santa Monica freeway that leads from downtown LA to the pacific ocean and the beginning of the Hollywood freeway downtown (which at Broadway used to be a hill that the city destroyed). Both of these routes were used by the areas Indigenous people for traveling/trading.
- QuixoticHeroProtegeHow do I start this off!
I had the hardest time trying to say, "Hello, my name is Troy Allen Norcross...
Well at least I got that out of the way. I've created a video for the first week, and I will be able to show some of the work at least within the next two weeks. A lot of has been concept and really knowing the direction before we start sprinting.
Anways, here's the link:
https://youtu.be/zUy6h4zOj4E - KaelfelExplorer
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 - PlumCantaloupeProtege
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.