Week#2 had some really interesting updates. Keep going on the updates they look great. Keep in mind only 2 paragraphs are necessary with a few pictures, anything above that and you are killing it. We do not give points on blogpost but they are required for the program. Please add your post by adding a "COMMENT" below. Have an awesome week!

WIP logo designHi folks,Another week another Mail Snail update coming at you.This week's rundownInitial snail character concepts madeFinished a first pass of the UI menu design and functionalityAlmost completed a first pass on the game controlsContinued on environment assetsThe most exciting update was getting a first pass made on concepts for Post the Snail by Taylor Sauer. She's an amazing artist and these really hit the lighthearted style I want to achieve with the game. The model will be started soon so I can't wait to share progress on that.I've been making steady progress on the controls, and hope to have them in a good place soon so I can move other to some of the other complex tasks for the prototype, such as a narrative system which will allow you to interact with other characters. Today I plan to jam on some modeling to continue building out the hub level. Goals for next weekFirst pass on Post model completeInitial controls finishedFirst pass on the hub level completeStart work on the narrative systemThat about wraps it up, time to get back to work!

Close-up of a leaf. Plant cell. Visible textures of a plant surface give a sense of tactileproximity and invite us to extend our senses (and consciousness) to emotionally relate/interactwith the plant.In my last post I had mentioned I havedecided on the slice of the experience from “Reconnect! TheAmazon Medicine Garden.” I am thinking through how to go about visuallyshowing a user’s encounter with one of the medical plants and its spirit. Iwant to carefully design the steps that will effectively establish user’sgradual immersion into the environment. Basically, it’s about how to guideuser’s inner feelings that will then exteriorize into emotion and prompt aninteraction. There are still many questions to consider at this point. I’d like to have the user feel invitedinto interaction by arousing the deeper layers of feeling of interconnectednesswith the VR environment and its elements. For example, I want the user to feelcompelled to interact with the plants because of their movements, textures, and“aliveness” to the point they emanate a distinct sense of having a subjectivity– even if they are not anthropomorphized. I am hoping that the voice of theindigenous guide who will be speaking in native tongue when introducing theplant will contribute to enveloping the user into the environment. To accomplish this, I am first focusingon the visuals, which ought to be compelling in a way to invite touch andinteractivity. To do that, I realized this projects needs the followingartists: 1. 3D model designer, 2. Unity Developer, and 3. Animator.So my next step is to pitch this projectto my colleagues and see if they are interested in working on it.Lots of work ahead of me!

Next week, I hope to post more screenshots of our prototype work with and without code that we will test.This week our team met and discussed the following:Social and MarketingLanguage Issues WorkflowTechnical prototyping without codeStandup/Next Actions Per Team member There was also stuff I forgot to mention last week, I worked on prior during OLP bootcamp days that we discussed at our meeting, budget related to pricing and had some other inspiration art that is helping our creative direction for environment art and controllers. 1. Social and MarketingIncorporating a social element for marketing and advertising the app and getting users to learn how to write their first names in the tutorial app video. I’ve asked Erica Layton (Oculus LaunchPad and ARVR Academy alumnus working at NormalVR) to give the demo she gave me this week to my team, so they can get an idea for various ways to incorporate more social aspects of learning language, including writing out our first/last names, sharing on social media, and UI brush choices with controllers to make the experience more interactive and fun. I’ve asked Erica to come visit us at Mozilla XR Studio during open office hours on Friday to showcase her invite-only demo for our team.2. Language issues affecting our UI and interaction with the controller.More specifically we found after listing out a few words of our characters broken down with each character and English translation, various nuances in the Tagalog language that change our character that impact both the words themselves what is pronounced and what is silently written or omitted, as well as how a brush is held (“tusok” or the word “puncture/stab/poke”) instead of brush strokes and swishes are meant to accent specific syllables/vowels as screen above.3. WorkflowWe also talked about the workflow of our interaction for incorporating sound in preparation for the Adaptive Sound lecture by Niko to make sure we understood the handoff of each piece of our work, so that users can learn Tagalog words, with English translation verbally spoken and heard and visually seen in concert with our hip hop (graffiti spraycan, DJ scratch, drum sound), and Kulintang (traditional Philippine instrument) sounds that will trigger upon brush strokes for creating letters/characters and words in our app. 4. Technical prototyping without codeWe discussed using Sketchbox and all the other content creation tools including Masterpiece VR in concert with Quill, Tiltbrush, and our tool for prototyping our ideas outside of a whiteboard before putting everything in Unity next week so that we have something to try whether or not my code breaks for whatever reason. We tested out downloading from our Oculus accounts at XR Studio to ensure that we can view my sketch prototypes so we have more product to work with and less on the whiteboard next week.5. Standup/Next Actions Per Team member Standup/Next Actions Per Team member - responsibilities each team member would share with the rest of the group next meetingErin - My major to-do items include Coding the controller (with or without a fancy brush UI) from scratch based off of OpenBrushVR (Tango), FusedMan's work, Unity VR Tutorial: How To Build Tiltbrush from Scratch (my O'Reilly Creating Augmented + Virtual Realities co-editor Vasanth Mohan's work on YouTube, who is also in Oculus Start), AR cross-platform development from my other co-editor and friend, Steve Lukas, who is also in Oculus Start. Attending another community event in the FilipinX American community to obtain some pure sounds to capture, recording DJ scratch sounds from Filipino American world champion DJ’s, DJ-Q-Bert and DJ Shortkut of the Invisbl Skratch Piklz. The first one is more important but the 2nd one is fun too. Angelo - 3D bird art conceptKristian - more sound and script of what is said/pronouncedTroy - working with Erin on integration 3D art, controller and soundCreative - Erin’s request to Angelo and Kristian on Creative is to find other UI similar to the brush below and bird.Technical - Erin’s request to all team members, moreso Troy and Angelo on PC laptops they think meet their standard and preference to share with the team to make our VR portable for demos when we have a prototype we want to test for folks outside of Mozilla’s XR Studio on Fridays and into the community for user testing.Administrative non-product stuff we discussedMarketing our appWhat kind of laptop we would like to purchase that would have a fast GPU, that we find Apple MacBooks to be limited though preferable with a whole other suite of programs designed well for Mac including audio/sound editing and other creative art creation tools.Stuff I forgot to mention last week Pricing our AppI forgot to mention that we also discussed other various issues surrounding pricing our app. We want to keep it free since we are opt-ing in users to collect data, but if we had to charge for our app, we would keep it to no more than $5.00 per users. We want our app to be accessible for as far out the Philippine diaspora throughout the world and the Filipino America community exists in the U.S. Kristian’s views of his video doing Baybayin on A+J received numbers in the millions, so we wanted to consider how we would capitalize on this as a new project of his to expand reach for our audience beyond the Oculus store and traditional social media ads, knowing we already have a list of folks we can easily demo with to partner (Museums) and earned media from the Filipino, Asian American, and AI communities outside of XR in the Bay Area and nationally. BudgetWe also discussed our budget early on for our team and what we would like each member to contribute and receive based on that in the short term. Everyone is in agreement and has various expertise, capacities, and contributions to the project that are all valuable, complementary, and distinct.Lastly, in our prior week we also discussed some creative direction for art. I had some trouble embedding some code from Sketchfab, but here is also some art we found inspiration from we are using to help guide more of our look and feel of the app overall.This was some one of the concept arts we liked the most for the bird and paintbrush controller. This was some of the type of ocean/sea art we used as inspiration for look and feel of our app's environment art. Quill - Lost at Sea by Nick Ladd on SketchfabLOST by Alexandre Blain on Sketchfab

BYF Development update week 3Made some progress since the video, but regardless this is a quick overview what happened for week 3 and what's to come.https://youtu.be/iFLSOwXDvqc

Character Conceptualizing -Oculus Launchpad Week 3 REFLECTION ON THE PROGRAMSince the Weekend EventI was online for this week’s presentation It gave me a lot to think about, and I came away from it wandering about about how to market our experience, and find our audience to let them know it exists. While it’s still early, I feel strongly that our team hs a strong concept that well executed could create a really unique experience for participants, one that would be difficult to have in a medium other than VR.PROJECT UPDATESDEVELOPING THE CONCEPTNow that we have a clear sense of the overall concept we began to focus on developing different aspects of it as well as how they will interact to create an integrated experience.Character DesignOver the course of the week our Character Designer Oona Holtane completed several iterations of explorations of the character of the young girl. After she worked in parallel on three different design directions for a round or two we all agree on which of one of the characters stood out the most. Oona then completed a further round of refinements of the character that was selected.At the same time Oona also managed to share early developmental sketches for the character of the cat. One stood out immediately, and she quickly followed up with a more detailed design based on the initial rough images. She did several poses for our Modeler Kyle Houseman who completed his work in a few days. Kyle passed off his completed model of the cat to Character Rigger Michael Schabbing who has started rigging the cat.Environment DesignRiley Frambes our Environment Concept Artist completed the first illustrations of the child’s bedroom based on the design constraints he was given. Riley found a number of ways to further elevate the concept by making additions that followed from the design that we hadn’t spoken about when we handed offed the materials. It was exciting to see.By Riley Frambles By Riley FramblesSystems DesignThe development team, Hector Manual, Joshua Chang, Roberto Rodriguez and J. Humberto Arriaga have met and talked about the flowchart of the experience, assigned follow up tasks, and are in the process of writing the code for the introductory tutorial, and testing it with placeholder animations.ORGANIZING THE PROJECTThe systems set up in previous weeks for tracking work on the project, and coordinating and collaborating between team members in their various roles continue to be helpful. As we add additional team members and are further along in the development of the prototype we look for ways to make better use of them, or shift how we use them to accommodate the different needs of the people working on the project.BUILDING THE TEAMWe added one additional person to our team since last week, Mario Gomez. Mario who is originally from Mexico currently lives in Seattle, Washington where he works as a dramaturg. The focus of Mario’s work on the project will be to offer a first-person perspective and conduct additional research as necessary on the culture of Mexico.Thank you,Lou + The Tinker Studio Team

Week 3: Oculus Launch Pad 2018 - Due July 23 @ 11am PST

82 Replies

kinjutsu
Protege
7 years ago
WIP logo design

Hi folks,
Another week another Mail Snail update coming at you.

This week's rundown
Initial snail character concepts made
Finished a first pass of the UI menu design and functionality
Almost completed a first pass on the game controls
Continued on environment assets

The
most exciting update was getting a first pass made on concepts for Post
the Snail by Taylor Sauer. She's an amazing artist and these really
hit the lighthearted style I want to achieve with the game. The model
will be started soon so I can't wait to share progress on that.

I've been making steady progress on the controls, and hope to have
them in a good place soon so I can move other to some of the other
complex tasks for the prototype, such as a narrative system which will
allow you to interact with other characters. Today I plan to jam on
some modeling to continue building out the hub level.

Goals for next week
First pass on Post model complete
Initial controls finished
First pass on the hub level complete
Start work on the narrative system

That about wraps it up, time to get back to work!
maja_manojlovic
Protege
7 years ago
Close-up of a leaf.

Plant cell.

Visible textures of a plant surface give a sense of tactile
proximity and invite us to extend our senses (and consciousness) to emotionally relate/interact
with the plant.
In my last post I had mentioned I have
decided on the slice of the experience from “Reconnect! The
Amazon Medicine Garden.” I am thinking through how to go about visually
showing a user’s encounter with one of the medical plants and its spirit. I
want to carefully design the steps that will effectively establish user’s
gradual immersion into the environment. Basically, it’s about how to guide
user’s inner feelings that will then exteriorize into emotion and prompt an
interaction. There are still many questions to consider at this point.

I’d like to have the user feel invited
into interaction by arousing the deeper layers of feeling of interconnectedness
with the VR environment and its elements. For example, I want the user to feel
compelled to interact with the plants because of their movements, textures, and
“aliveness” to the point they emanate a distinct sense of having a subjectivity
– even if they are not anthropomorphized.

I am hoping that the voice of the
indigenous guide who will be speaking in native tongue when introducing the
plant will contribute to enveloping the user into the environment.

To accomplish this, I am first focusing
on the visuals, which ought to be compelling in a way to invite touch and
interactivity. To do that, I realized this projects needs the following
artists: 1. 3D model designer, 2. Unity Developer, and 3. Animator.

So my next step is to pitch this project
to my colleagues and see if they are interested in working on it.

Lots of work ahead of me!
erinjerri
Protege
7 years ago
Next week, I hope to post more screenshots of our prototype work with and without code that we will test.
This week our team met and discussed the following:
Social and Marketing
Language Issues
Workflow
Technical prototyping without code
Standup/Next Actions Per Team member
There was also stuff I forgot to mention last week, I worked on prior during OLP bootcamp days that we discussed at our meeting, budget related to pricing and had some other inspiration art that is helping our creative direction for environment art and controllers.

1. Social and Marketing
Incorporating a social element for marketing and advertising the app and getting users to learn how to write their first names in the tutorial app video. I’ve asked Erica Layton (Oculus LaunchPad and ARVR Academy alumnus working at NormalVR) to give the demo she gave me this week to my team, so they can get an idea for various ways to incorporate more social aspects of learning language, including writing out our first/last names, sharing on social media, and UI brush choices with controllers to make the experience more interactive and fun. I’ve asked Erica to come visit us at Mozilla XR Studio during open office hours on Friday to showcase her invite-only demo for our team.

2. Language issues affecting our UI and interaction with the controller.

More specifically we found after listing out a few words of our characters broken down with each character and English translation, various nuances in the Tagalog language that change our character that impact both the words themselves what is pronounced and what is silently written or omitted, as well as how a brush is held (“tusok” or the word “puncture/stab/poke”) instead of brush strokes and swishes are meant to accent specific syllables/vowels as screen above.

3. Workflow
We also talked about the workflow of our interaction for incorporating sound in preparation for the Adaptive Sound lecture by Niko to make sure we understood the handoff of each piece of our work, so that users can learn Tagalog words, with English translation verbally spoken and heard and visually seen in concert with our hip hop (graffiti spraycan, DJ scratch, drum sound), and Kulintang (traditional Philippine instrument) sounds that will trigger upon brush strokes for creating letters/characters and words in our app.

4. Technical prototyping without code
We discussed using Sketchbox and all the other content creation tools including Masterpiece VR in concert with Quill, Tiltbrush, and our tool for prototyping our ideas outside of a whiteboard before putting everything in Unity next week so that we have something to try whether or not my code breaks for whatever reason. We tested out downloading from our Oculus accounts at XR Studio to ensure that we can view my sketch prototypes so we have more product to work with and less on the whiteboard next week.

5. Standup/Next Actions Per Team member
Standup/Next Actions Per Team member - responsibilities each team member would share with the rest of the group next meeting
Erin - My major to-do items include
Coding the controller (with or without a fancy brush UI) from scratch based off of OpenBrushVR (Tango), FusedMan's work, Unity VR Tutorial: How To Build Tiltbrush from Scratch (my O'Reilly Creating Augmented + Virtual Realities co-editor Vasanth Mohan's work on YouTube, who is also in Oculus Start), AR cross-platform development from my other co-editor and friend, Steve Lukas, who is also in Oculus Start.
Attending another community event in the FilipinX American community to obtain some pure sounds to capture, recording DJ scratch sounds from Filipino American world champion DJ’s, DJ-Q-Bert and DJ Shortkut of the Invisbl Skratch Piklz. The first one is more important but the 2nd one is fun too.
Angelo - 3D bird art concept
Kristian - more sound and script of what is said/pronounced
Troy - working with Erin on integration 3D art, controller and sound
Creative - Erin’s request to Angelo and Kristian on Creative is to find other UI similar to the brush below and bird.
Technical - Erin’s request to all team members, moreso Troy and Angelo on PC laptops they think meet their standard and preference to share with the team to make our VR portable for demos when we have a prototype we want to test for folks outside of Mozilla’s XR Studio on Fridays and into the community for user testing.
Administrative non-product stuff we discussed
Marketing our app
What kind of laptop we would like to purchase that would have a fast GPU, that we find Apple MacBooks to be limited though preferable with a whole other suite of programs designed well for Mac including audio/sound editing and other creative art creation tools.
Stuff I forgot to mention last week
Pricing our App
I forgot to mention that we also discussed other various issues surrounding pricing our app. We want to keep it free since we are opt-ing in users to collect data, but if we had to charge for our app, we would keep it to no more than $5.00 per users. We want our app to be accessible for as far out the Philippine diaspora throughout the world and the Filipino America community exists in the U.S. Kristian’s views of his video doing Baybayin on A+J received numbers in the millions, so we wanted to consider how we would capitalize on this as a new project of his to expand reach for our audience beyond the Oculus store and traditional social media ads, knowing we already have a list of folks we can easily demo with to partner (Museums) and earned media from the Filipino, Asian American, and AI communities outside of XR in the Bay Area and nationally.
Budget
We also discussed our budget early on for our team and what we would like each member to contribute and receive based on that in the short term. Everyone is in agreement and has various expertise, capacities, and contributions to the project that are all valuable, complementary, and distinct.
Lastly, in our prior week we also discussed some creative direction for art. I had some trouble embedding some code from Sketchfab, but here is also some art we found inspiration from we are using to help guide more of our look and feel of the app overall.

This was some one of the concept arts we liked the most for the bird and paintbrush controller.

This was some of the type of ocean/sea art we used as inspiration for look and feel of our app's environment art.

Quill - L ost at Sea by Nick Ladd on Sketchfab

LOST
by Alexandre Blain
on Sketchfab
belmorea
Explorer
7 years ago
Week 3: we *finally* have a spec that will get us through to the submission deadline!

The multiplayer / multiplatform (Go vs iPhone/Android phones) technical elements took a while to plan out, especially given how back-end / server heavy the build needs to be to realistically demonstrate the gameplay, and the amount of time people are willing to commit without pay, but we managed to test out some of the riskier technical elements and have a solid approach that works for our resourcing constraints.

Design-wise, we also switched to a space themed setting (moving away from standard dungeon/castle styled mazes since there are quite a few of those on the store already).

Since much of this week was spent redesigning the environment and researching / learning / testing the technical elements required to write out the spec, we don't have much to officially show off now, but we will soon!!
QuixoticHero
Protege
7 years ago
BYF Development update week 3

Made some progress since the video, but regardless this is a quick overview what happened for week 3 and what's to come.

https://youtu.be/iFLSOwXDvqc
abaraka
Explorer
7 years ago
Good Morning,
This has been the busiest week of my life. (I cried twice. haha) So, my team and I are just a few days out from shooting another project. I promised to teach a week long cinematography class to high school students. I'm also a mom to an eleven month old and a wife. The great thing is that my team and family are crazy supportive. They will not let me give up. They bolster my creative. <3
My team and I are working out the kinks of navigating the virtual reality story-telling world. We all come from a traditional story-telling world. I will be using this same team on our next project, the one I'm pitching to Oculus, and I know the ship will be running smoothly. My team is bad *ss. We are all women of color in the cinema & tech world. It's rare.
So, I teach class to high school students and I did not want to miss the opportunity of showing the kids virtual reality technology. The Oculus Go came in super handy and they absolutely loved it. I used there feedback about the experience to inform my creative around virtual reality storytelling. I'm confident that we are in a good place with our concept.
Lastly, we had a call with a producer at own who we pitched our concept to. He was thrilled by the idea. So we are going to push forward with that idea and have begun the development and research stage.
Here are photos:
aa_lique
Protege
7 years ago
072318 -
This weeks Goals:
- [ ] Finish basic development & layout of environment (prototype) using MAYA
- Get apk setup on Headset GO
- Complete script and storyboard - done
- Contact resources for moCap - Have 3 contacts re: and Got great technical advice from Caroline Running Wolf and Neil Short regarding  what’s best to use.

WATER (working title) is an immersive interactive experience to
bring awareness about the status of water on our planet. It is an
artistic piece and inspired by Laurie Anderson's "Chalkroom.

"This week was full of challenges re: set-up the Headset for development and coding issues. I am proud to say that I accomplished it.
Side-loaded the app onto the headset - took 2.5 days, researching and
finding tutorials that helped. There was nothing specifically for the
Mac debs, as usual, so I had to fill in the blanks and wing-it. A bit
frustrating but as of today - Woopee! I got it done. I feel so
empowered!!! Now can focus on to developing the navigation, UI and the
story.
Design and Prototyping environment continues. I decided to base the environment on the molecular structure of water. 
Searching for assets that can be used for prototyping.
3D MODEL

IMAGE REFERENCES

SCHEMATIC:

Look and Feel:
At this point, I want it to have an
abstract-art look. At the beginning, I always struggle with what style
to embrace when I create a new work. If I knew "Quill" better, I would
use that tool. But I do not have enough time to learn it. I find the
optimization is always an issue. So keeping basics for now. The final
release version will have the bells and whistles.

Mechanics:
Laying out the elements that will be interactive:
whale or dolphin
sphere/tank with large water drops moving around inside
water nymph appearing randoml
Navigation:
1. Deciding on one of 2 different navigation methods:
     - visitor uses controller to teleport around the environment via waypts & interact with
      elements  OR 
    - visitor to stand stationary and interacting with a controller
2. Visual & sound cues for activity in other areas of the environment to encourage visitor to be curious, stroll and interact with elements

Not sure whether all those functions and attributes will be included in the first prototype
for Sept. But that is the goal.

Next week’s Goals:
- Finish environment
- Load environment into Unity and into GO
- Work on mechanics
- Research & sketch development for water character. Start modeling
- Get commitment and set dates for Mo-Cap session
- Research for more placeholder assets
asierarranz
Protege
7 years ago
This week has been awesome:
Connecting VR communities at TLP Tenerife.

I have been speaking about my VR experiences, including all the Oculus Launchpad experience, at Tenerife Lan Party, one of the biggest geek festivals in the world.

The Google Developer Summit was happening during this week here too, so some of the participants have been trying my previous 6DOF "Mario Kart" experience with a bigger circuit, it is made with Daydream, but it works in Oculus too. (Please Oculus, I need the Santa Cruz to get rid of the bulky Lenovo Mirage!)

Reaching VR and eSports communities, starting the marketing strategy

About the project, this week has been more focused on reaching the communities to prepare the way for marketing my game, I am going to explore a B2C + B2B model, with the game in the Store and some kind of collaborations with sponsors to support the development, I am working full time on this.

In the game side I am now working in the following parts:

Probably the game is not going to be an underwater game, but will have some underwater parts
Working on the weapon/toll switching system
I am exploring the possibility of starting with a multiplayer experience

I am returning today to US, I will probably meet this week Maria and Gordey, they are part of the OL2018 program and they are at NY too, so we will share some thoughts about the work we are doing.
Kaelfel
Explorer
7 years ago
Oculus Set-Up & Quill

(July 6- July 13)

I was able to borrow a computer from DMG that’s compatible with the Oculus Rift. The only issue I had was the Oculus applications are taking forever to install, I waited for hours for it to endlessly install, but it never installs until I updated the windows and the Oculus store. However, when I updated it the headset had an orange led and the visual display is not turned on.

Here are some solutions I have tried, I’ll be listing them in case other people have the same issue or as a future reference:

-Reinstall Oculus multiple times
-Used the compatible check: the results were check mark with a plus sign.
-Installed the Oculus Patch March 2018
-Drivers update: "The best driver for your devices are already installed".
-I tried all the ports available
-Re-plugging the port on the Oculus headset
-Setting all the USB ROOT "allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" to false.
-There's no cable extender
-I also did some changes on the Bios, following a random tutorial online.
-When doing the Oculus set-up I can not progress further when it requires me to put on the headset.

Troy Allen Norcross, James R Laudermilk and Joe Gabriel help me and gave suggestion on fixing the headset problem.

Here are the links they’ve shared
https://support.oculus.com/guides/rift/latest/concepts/rgsg-3-ts-setup-troubleshooting/

https://riftinfo.com/how-to-fix-oculus-rift-orange-light-and-black-screen

Manually updating the driver fixed the display issue. I learned that Windows is not connected and/or communicate with other things that are in the computer. Going through AMD’s website and finding the right update fixed the problem.

---

After fixing the issue I tried some of the free applications offered in the Oculus store. Through trying the experience and game offered in Oculus I learned how designers work around with space, purposely placing objects outside when they don’t want you to interact or collide with those objects.

My first painting experience in VR is tilt brush, but from playing around with Quill I love the tools it offered. I am still getting familiar with the tools. Playing around with space and scale allows me to think about and quickly design and compose environments without committing much time in modelling in Maya.

---

SUMMARY: I had a problem with setting up the Oculus Rift, but it was later resolved with a window update and an AMD driver update. Tested some free games and experiences. Getting familiar with some of Quill’s features and tools.
SkyeShark
Explorer
7 years ago
Stay Hydrated Week 3

This week has been super exciting! I'm still working on making more assets, and I've got a new team member! My friend Alessa is an unreal technical artist whose offered to help out on implementing mechanics and help me get better at the more technical aspects of unreal! That brings my team up to three people - Me (Environment art, Prop art, Game design, Creative Direction, etc.), Alessa (Development, Unreal engine technical artist), Eve (photogrammetry expert/prop artist). When I first came to Launchpad, I honestly had no idea what I was going to do or what to make of the program but its inspired me to get this done! Regardless of if the prototype gets funding, I will not stop until Stay Hydrated is shipped :) !

I never really considered myself a game designer or anything, just a prop/environment artist, but here I am with a fully formed idea and the will to get it done! Thank you so much for inspiring me to do this, Oculus! Its funny too because before the bootcamp stay hydrated was nothing but "walk around in the desert for some reason" -- the bootcamp really inspired me to work out all the details and mechanics. Also, so did my making a vacation of the drive out to california. On my way to bootcamp I actually stopped and hiked at the Painted Desert, AZ and almost passed out from dehydration. It was over 100 degrees and I misjudged the difficulty/distance of a short climb back up a hill after going down to the lower valley. I got seriously fatigued and dehydrated, started to experience dizziness and such -- I should've known better, I hike in the desert all the time - but this experience was really valuable for inspiring this game. It was a gallon jug of water that let me recover that I bought at an ice cream shop at the top of the hill in the park that helped me recovered and that same gallon jug is going to be the main hero asset of Stay Hydrated, once I make the asset. That experience is what gave me the key core component for gamifying my "hike around in the desert" idea!

Anyways, here's a screenshot of a car I'm working on that will be rusted out/abandoned in an abandoned mining town on the Mojave map (the prototype):

And here's a sketchfab scene I made with some of the assets as a little promo for the game, I'll probably be adding to it later as I get some more stuff done, but yeah.

Stay Hydrated Promo Scene
by SkyeShark
on Sketchfab