cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Week 11: Oculus Launch Pad (Due September 3rd Midnight)

Anonymous
Not applicable
Please share your Week 11 update. Please note Ebony is out on vacation until September 5th. 
54 REPLIES 54

d3ham
Protege
UI and Scale

This week has all been about developing a nice UI and landing space for the VR experience. The way I have envisioned it, is to use the historical photos at the very beginning of the experience to to set the tone/mood. Some of these photos I've been studying for the last three months and they still move me emotionally. 

a067ez6f8fja.jpg

The thing that I noticed about the main Menu UI in studying other VR experiences is how many use an intimate scale. The UI seems very small and up-close. This I find adds to the drama of the first "VR Scene" in the overall experience. We play with the drama of closeness and far / small and large. 

9iavv2np9j67.png

For my experience I have also brought the UI into a much closer and intimate space to allow the user to study the photos before the experience begins. The actual background of the environment is black, so the pictures appear to float in a semi-circle. This UI, with the perfect sound track I hope will set the emotional tone of the VR experience. 

Pressing forward for the last week!!!!

youtnodknoem
Protege
This week I took some personal time off before some major crunch time next week. My team has continued on the artwork and sound front, doing a second visual pass. Next week we will continue working on polishing the mechanics and aesthetics of the game as well as increasing accessibility and ease of use with minor feature tweaks and improvements

sumakproduction
Protege

I just spent some time procrastinating by reading blog posts
from last week and this week. Wow! You all continue to impress—let’s keep it up
for this last week!



This week was productive, though some things took a bit
longer than expected so I’m a day or two behind from where I want to be. I
built a container app for my 360 videos on Unity this week. I hadn’t finished
my videos yet, but I wanted to spend some time to make sure I had a working
app. Ran into bugs, but I finally got something working. Unfortunately, I
probably won’t have time to add interactivity before the submission deadline. Not
that big of a problem though, I can fill in the gaps with the written proposal.



Another bummer is that the photogrammetry models I wanted to
include in my experience are not ready yet. I’m hopeful they’ll be set to go by
early this week, but I’m prepared to do without them.



Overall, I’m confident I’ll have a demo that conveys the
vision for my project. Game plan for this week: finish up the trailer and focus
on filling in the gaps with the written proposal.



 






chinniechinchil
Protege
Tania Pavlisak - Enliven VR week 11

Every year Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) has always been a big industry event here in Seattle, so I know I would not have much time to work on developing Enliven VR much.

On Sunday night, after I posted the previous blog, I started to learn the submission process to put the latest build onto Oculus Store. I printed and read all the documentations from the website, watched and took notes from Nathan's video, created a built, created storekey, signed it once, then got stuck on the jarsigning process. I kept getting nothing but errors. Every time I got an error, Google was my best friend and helped in finding answers. I recreated the build several times, tried several different storekey, and jarsign just wouldn't budge. I went to bed feeling frustrated.

On Monday morning, I went back to Google, looked for more information, and started noticing pattern of people who had issue when their filename had weird symbol like numbers or signs. Also some people mentioned that we should shortened the path name.  So I created a new folder on my D:/ drive, put my new build there with really simple name. For the keystore, I use really simple password, again, no number or symbol. Then voila, jarsigner worked!!!  I was so happy.  Gabor reviewed the app really quickly too, probably because I posted it around lunch time. Thank you Gabor, hope you had time to eat lunch.

People in the discord channel, Lauren, Tyrus, and another person (I'll remember your name once I can get to discord!) helped me on the whole process. For those who need help, hop on discord 😄

I spent Tuesday and Wednesday at PAX Dev. There were not many VR talk this year, unlike last year. The VR vibes last year was all about "give it a try, dev!  Don't worry about failure, nobody knows what's going on."  This year, it's more like "okay, we made mistakes, here what we learned." 

Currently I am at PAX. My mission is to try as many VR experiences I can try. It can be challenging since the lines are really long!  Bethesda is showing Fallout VR, Doom VR, Skyrim VR, and earlier I noticed the line was already 3.5 hours wait. There are a few indie VR games in smaller booth.

My other mission is to find some people who are willing to try my app. I had one lady volunteered this morning. She said she were a bit prone to motion sickness, and she did not have any discomfort using my app, which was great for me. There is also a special room here called AFK room where people can find safe space when they feel overwhelmed in the convention. I dropped by there earlier, talked to one of the organizer to see if I can demo my app there. He said to drop by tomorrow and have organizers try it first. We'll see what happen then.

See you next week!

PunkGodYugoslav
Protege
CalmBox Project -- Kathleen Kamali

This week I spent, talking to my friends in the industry about VR in general, project proposals and budgets. I'm also at PAX this weekend and have been asking a lot of VR devs about their challenges! Next week I just want to put the finishing touches and submit to the store hopefully on Thursday or Friday?? We'll see what happens 🙂 

tyruspeace
Protege
Week 11

Like a few others in the OLP crew, I'm at PAX! I'm there as part of Indie Minibooth. I've been standing next to my game for most the last two days, but I did manage to visit with a couple of you and it's been great! I look forward to being able to roam the show floor a bit more today.

This is, of course, very unfortunate timing for my work on Guardian Protector for OLP.  I only have one week left! Yikes!

While I'm mostly doing PAX this week, I was able to chip away at a good few bugs that got in the way of the game: AI movement, bomb sound VR comfort, and the ability to pick up things without launching neighbors into the horizon have all proven pretty significant improvements!

I'm currently deciding how to prioritize story and content for my demo. I believe that having a solid story intro would really do a great job of selling the experience and world I have in mind for the game, but that doesn't matter if I don't actually have enough time to execute it! I plan to alter my story plans to require less new graphical assets and timeline scripting, while merging it more thoroughly with my tutorial so I have less recording to do this week.

I'm not sure I'll record vocals for this! Voiced dialog really does help pull in most players and VR subtitles aren't great, so I'm definitely leaning toward it... but I'm also going for an alien and detached vibe, between the literal alien invaders and AI robot main character. Cute squeals and mumbles *might* be the way to go on this one!

marmishurenko
Protege
Maria Mishurenko — Awere
This week was dedicated to testing and refining the interaction design. We got a lot of great feedback from the testers and integrated some new features. Next week we'll continue to test — this is the best way to make a better app!
Also this week google ARCore was released and we immediately jump into it. The thing is — it's almost impossibe to broadcast from gear vr, but I want so much to show other users what's going on inside the app! So with ARCore we created simple multiplayer and now we are almost able to broadcast in AR the stuff that's happening inside Gear VR. Sounds complicated, so it's better show:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzzAED21nWY&feature=youtu.be

Also I created another bit of interaction — relaxation sequence with avatar before experience. 
99ei5ia7oogi.gif

Still concerned about creating alpha build, but I think it all should be ok! 

Good luck all with the final submission!



virtuallyfifer
Protege
NEURO-EXPLORER WEEK 11
Finalizing Visualisation and Story Timing.

This week we have completely redone most of the Tilt Brush work. There are some struggles importing things into Unity because of a "limited vertices per mesh" rule. This forces us to import drawings in pieces which can be a tedious process. We do have a concept video of Act One finished.

Act One is a simple tour of the brain stem informing the user of the important parts with some pauses to allow the user to experience their surroundings.




We are very excited for the next week and look forward to having an amazing demo to propose to the community.

Anonymous
Not applicable
NOODLES - Kim Nguyen -Week 11

Got a surgery last Wednesday.  Woo hoo!!!

What I've got done when I'm not on anesthesia:

bsgmtvgf5j95.gif

OK Bye!

nicole_babos
Protege

This week was filled with more polishing and iterating on
testing feedback. We added some additional sounds to the game and we added some
new particle effects (confetti upon disposal and steam to the steam train). We
also adjusted some minor things such as tweaking animations to make them
smoother.



I also uploaded a build to the ALPHA channel. Despite
following the steps to generate a new Android Manifest , I received an error “APK
is debuggable”. After researching, I found out this was due to the fact when I
clicked “Build”, I had the checkbox “Development Build” checked. Oops. After I
unchecked that and rebuilt, the build uploaded just fine to the ALPHA channel.
Yay! I also created a logo for the game and uploaded that with the build. 

z6h0vipcibi9.png



Since my build was available via the ALPHA channel, I
reached out to OLPs for testing/feedback. A huge thank you to Jeff, Hessvacio,
and Tifa. Your feedback was greatly appreciated! I also had my non-gamer mother
and her husband play test. She’s never done VR before and it was an interesting
experience. I also had three other friends play test and they gave some
valuable feedback.



Based on the feedback received, we accomplished several
items. We added Instructions/Credits/Resignation marquees to the Starting Hub. We
added more music and a few more audio files. We added two new Reticles for more
interactivity/direction. We updated the train’s colors. We adjusted the permissions
when first installing/accessing the game in the headset.

g2dbah3zwe95.png



Overall, the game is coming along nicely. With only one week
left to submission, we only have a few “nice to haves” left on our to-do list
and a final review of the proposal. With our build appearing stable, we’re
working on integrating a couple additional levels that help round out the
gameplay. This has been a wild experience, and I’m looking forward to seeing
everyone’s final product!


Nicole
www.fancybirdstudios.com