Aliah Darke Launchpad - Week 1 "VRGN + The Block"

[prettydarke]

Hey All, I'll be publishing these on my blog as well so I'm just copying the text here. So far I've got a recap of events plus my first week notes. 🙂 My website can be found at prettydarke.wordpress.com

STUFF I’M DOING – VRGN, OCULUS LAUNCHPAD

Hello World,

Been meaning to keep a dev blog to detail my progress over the next few months and now I’ve finally got the kick in the butt to do it. First a re-cap:

1. Started teaching myself to code in March. In April I get my first VR coding gig – I’ve never done VR before and have to get a project demo-ready in a matter of weeks.
2. Sitting in the basement of the Sheraton during the medical VR conference (yay the demo worked) I apply to Oculus Launchpad – a one-day bootcamp for folks to learn and hopefully launch them into VR development.
3. Late April I get another small gig coding a neat little architecture game for a Princeton grad. I have a week to get her a working build for her review (yikes!) but I make it happen.
4. It’s May! I get the final game build to my Princeton friend just days before heading to Facebook HQ (right, I got accepted to the Oculus thing!).
5. May 21st, Oculus happens. My brain is flooded with ideas. So many problems to solve, so little time. I drink all the Kool-Aid. I have such excite. Gonna make all the things

And that brings us to June.

So I’ve been coding for about 3 months now. Still so much to learn but at least I feel comfortable figuring things out. I’m used to doing all the creative work but for the first time I’ve done coding exclusively and I freaking love it.

I’ve also started a group called VRGN – VR, Games and Interactivity. I want it to be a development space for solving new problems and I particularly want to open things up to folks who have never worked within the media or technology. One of the issues I had when I first started making games at UCLA was feeling excluded or inferior and being intimidated because of my lack of knowledge. I don’t want others, especially communities who are marginalized in the tech community to go through that same struggle. Yeah, so, we’ll see how that goes. I’ve never built a community or a studio before but I’m excited for the promise it holds. So, onward.

OCULUS LAUNCHPAD – DEV WEEK 1

Most of my time spent post-Oculus has been housekeeping and research. I tried a few games and experiences mostly looking to see how they deal with UI/UX issues.

I was kind of surprised that there was no way to re-center the camera position from within the Samsung VR application and was specifically looking for applications that would implement this feature. More generally I was looking for a satisfying user experience.

This actually led down a path of VR porn research - yeah, I know - but it's also a logical source of information because pornography is heavily invested in the user experience. It's critical that such an application does not make the user sick, is comfortable to navigate, and does not break the illusion of the experience. In game theory we'd call this "flow," and it's a vitally important concept. I did learn some things, but I'll go into that in a later post.

I want to do so many things in VR (and perhaps I can), but I know how easy it is to get lost in concepts so I decided to go with the initial concept I pitched. When I started to lay out the scope of this simple, straightforward project I realized it consisted entirely of things I'd never done before. Yaaaaay 😕

The big To-Do for this week (done):

1. Figure out the easiest way to get human characters modeled, rigged and animated in Unity. Done. I used a combination of Makehuman, Fuse/Mixamo, Blender and Bastioni Labs along with the extensive Mocap data available in both Unity and Mixamo. I've collected the links and instructions in the VRGN facebook group - but I'll try to dig them up and add them to this post.
2. Design and model a 3D environment for import into Unity.  I tried a few things and decided to learn SketchUp. It's simple but also frustrating. I've been messing with it for a few days and starting to get an understanding of the best workflow. I've attached a video - don't make fun of me.
3. As not to waste too much effort and make everything count, I went ahead and wrote a Game Design Document as well as an Asset Checklist. Because I know I'm really good at generating ideas I wanted something to hold myself accountable to the goals of the project - the pillars, I think Bernie called them? I gotta check my notes. But yeah, even my sandboxing and sketching will ideally be something useful toward the end project. If I'm doing a tutorial why not work on an asset I know needs to be in the game?

Upcoming Goals and Deadlines:

1. Next week I'm going out of town for two weeks so I won't be able to build many assets on my laptop. No environment modeling for sure...oh well that prioritizes things doesn't it?
2. Model the environment to scale with all buildings/terrain/obstacles. Whitebox everything - don't worry about details but get all the physical components in the space. You can model humanoids from your laptop so don't worry about that.
3. For the two weeks you're gone you can work on scripting and choreography between the players and NPCs. The level design and the timing of character interactions is critical to your project.

https://vimeo.com/169647283

[FrancisRedi]

Regarding scale...units are arbitrary, but based on default settings in Unity, a unit is a meter. Using this scale ensures that gravity and any other physics you put into the environment appears to work correctly. For assets, there are many free and for sale items in Unity asset store so that you don't have to build everything from scratch unless you prefer to do so.

[prettydarke]

I knew the scale was kind of arbitrary since things can be re-sized but I was wondering if there was some reference point since I'm building assets in a variety of programs - some way to make the sizes of things fairly consistent with minimal fiddling upon import.

Super helpful to think about how the scale will affect physics too, thanks!

[wanniBusch]

Reading your post and documentation of your goals and what you're doing does inspire me to get moving and stuff done as well! ^_^

[Lupac]

Really inspiring! 

[erica_layton]

prettydarke said:

I knew the scale was kind of arbitrary since things can be re-sized but I was wondering if there was some reference point since I'm building assets in a variety of programs - some way to make the sizes of things fairly consistent with minimal fiddling upon import.



Super helpful to think about how the scale will affect physics too, thanks!

For keeping scale consistent--
Maybe there's a way to move one reference object around between all of the programs you're using?
e.g. make a 1 meter box, export as a common format like .obj, and import into all of your programs, to compare..