It has been a tumultuous few weeks, having just graduated from grad school and very happily being thrown into a new job. However! I have settled on the project I would like to focus on for the summer, and am very happy to introduce to you Squawk. I actually did speak to a few of you about this when we all met up at Oculus HQ. I have noticed that it’s been my favorite project to talk about ever, and having been hastily scrapped together during the flurry of a single semester, I have decided to revisit this project. I won’t let this one dissipate into a wasteland of forgotten prototypes.
To give an overview of Squawk, it is a two-player experience for the Rift where participants take on the roles of a separated mother and baby penguin. Players must find each other before night falls. What makes this activity challenging is that players are trying to find each other in a penguin colony, where penguins look incredibly similar to each other. As for controls… we developed Squawk for the Oculus Rift Development Kit 1 (DK1). With a poorer screen resolution and no touch controllers to speak of, this is how we laid out the game:
To begin, we asked the two players to keep their headsets face down on the table and tab through a “slide show” on their respective computers giving the background story of the experience (separated mother and baby penguins) and also the controls for playing. The controls are as such: standing players must keep a mouse in their hand and hold down the left mouse button for moving in the direction of the player’s gaze and the right mouse button for squawking. Squawking at other penguins in the game (AI penguins) gives the player hints for what direction they should be going in.
Players are then instructed to put on headphones, the headset, and hold the mouse in their hand and wait in the lobby until the other player had done so, as well. The game then commences after all this set up.
It’s a convoluted, multi-step process. On the DK1, it makes sense; text is impossible to read. This is why we had instructions and set-up on a computer screen as opposed to in the headset. However… there have been so many advancements in VR, rapidly developing every month, that it’s time to completely revamp our project and re-design it. Our steps in the past week have been to meet, which we did, and to flesh out a plan for what our week-to-week tasks are going to be. To briefly introduce ourselves, I’m Natalie, and I am a visual and interaction designer. I have particular interests in UI design and art direction. My teammate, Steve Cha, is a game designer. Together, we coalesce to create the team that works on Squawk. Through these weekly blogs, I hope you learn more about me, my teammate, this project, our process, and our growth throughout this period of time. I look forward to reading all your posts, as well!
In the next blog post, I will speak about the particular strengths of Squawk, its weaknesses, and how Steve and I will work from there. I also want to introduce you to the fundamental experience goals that drive the intent of Squawk. Expect Week 2 updates... this week!
