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

[Anonymous]

Please share your Week 11 update. Please note Ebony is out on vacation until September 5th. 

[kathrynhicks]

Kathryn Hicks
Project Title: Tall Tales of the Aerona Temple
Type: 360° 3D Animated Film
Logline: A member of the royal Sasquatch family stumbles upon an ancient evil that threatens the prosperity of his homeland.
Characters: Zannis (Sasquatch) & Kaga (shadow demon)
 
Oculus Launch Pad Blog Post Week 11
This week was spent on animation, finishing models, and texturing. The animation is getting wrapped up tomorrow, and my team is preparing to upload content into the Oculus Store before the deadline.


First layer of texturing by Kane Liu


Moss texture test by Kane Liu

Statue models by Jonathan Gilboa

Next Week
Wrapping up for the finish line!

[dilanshah]

Hi OLP and Co. 

At the culmination of this week, I have done enough work to submit a functional build––but it's lacking in interaction points. Looks like I'll hold off on store submission of a build (though I read folks offering their wisdom to get one submitted) to tidy the environment and gear VR controller features this coming week.

As well as the learning experience has been for me, my experience is that I probably squandered my time in the middle weeks on engineering a project timeline or trying to gain team members. 

Right now, I'd like to offer this concept art I put together for a wall growing system (those are mushrooms of a kind in the bottom right hexagon)


Retouching my project proposal, budget, and app as the last set of items for the program.  Lastly, I'd like to point out that I don't know what I would've been making if I wasn't in this OLP program but I consider the program to have been a great catalyst for me. Thanks all.

[prettydarke]

This week I got the piece finished and had some folks try it out. Feedback was mixed. There are some powerful and resonant moments but other areas that were deemed distracting. I agree that the piece is unresolved, but I think I will just go ahead and submit to Oculus, while continuing to explore the most impactful way to present this kind of material. The good news is that all of the core functionality is in, making it a lot easier to get meaningful feedback. 

Next week I've got a big meeting and I start teaching a couple of classes, so timing is definitely going to be rough. But the last thing to do is see if I can get the build working on multiple platforms - I'd really like it to work for Web, make a few cosmetic tweaks, and get all of the budget and pitch stuff together. I've got some drafts going but definitely going to be working under a bit of stress to get it all done and submitted.

[jesmin_ngo]

We're almost at the finish line! This week, we finished:

• pen that when dropped, floats back to staying with the storybook
• changing text when the pen is held over specific words
• highlighting the available nouns on the storybook yellow
• adding more assets to our library, focusing on ones we think users would want to play with
• refining our speech processing so that pronouns are filtered out, as well as articles of speech like "the" and "a"
• refactoring our API calls so that they are faster
• improving our asset searching algorithm, so that it can do "fuzzier" word matching (aka spawning the most similar file even though it doesn't match exactly what the user spoke)
• lots of research going into hyponyms/hypernyms/synonym searching -- we want to find the appropriate object to spawn even when the user didn't say an exact match with what we've named our assets. For example, when the user says "daffodil," a generic yellow flower should still appear even though we don't have an exact asset for daffodil. When the user says "cop," the algorithm should recognize that our "police" asset is equivalent.

It's going to be a stretch, but we're working hard to make the deadline! Fingers crossed to hope that work deadlines, moving apartments, and other distractions don't impact our ability to work on the project too much.

[murascotti]

This week I focused on AI programming and thought about interesting ways to have the player interact with the AI by responding to its actions.  This is definitely one of the two most challenging aspects of my game prototype (the other being VR design challenges with 1:1 movement) because it is a complicated choreography of AI behavior, gameplay, and story.  

I purchased a character that has motion capped animations from the Unreal Engine Marketplace and added it to the scene in my prototype. I began by figuring out how to make it detect the player’s position, how to make it move on a Nav Mesh, and how to develop the story that is driving the scene through meaningful interactions with the AI and the main character.  

One of the ways I approached this problem was by writing a short script as if the interaction were an action scene from a movie.  Writing out the script with dialogue and basing the action lines on what animations I had available helped me carve a pathway forward into figuring out the best way to tease elements of the gameplay.  

This week is definitely going to be brutal.  I have a lot of work that needs to get done, however, I work best when the pressure is on!  My plan each day is to wake up at 630am, go for a jog, grab coffee, and work on Forged in the evenings until midnight.  On Thursday I’ll game jam on it for as long as I can go, and submit Sunday the 10th!   

Good luck to everyone this week!!  We're almost to the finish line!

[jacqueline_assa]

This past week, we continued to polish our demo. We decided to change the name from SpaceNoodle VR to TinkerSpace VR in order to communicate more of the purpose of the game which is ultimately to explore and learn through tinkering. We also played around with animations to add to the universe to make elements of the planet interactive. We created a really fun effect with the water (see video). We also have been exploring different lighting and color options - the idea being that the colors and lighting within the planet change once users complete the challenges/adventures. We also focused on how we are going to guide the user through the demo which ultimately, we landed on text cues and using the environment as a guide itself through lighting cues. This upcoming week, I'm meeting with my group of high school student play testers to test out the demo from the standpoint of learning objectives. While so much time has needed to be devoted to designing the world, I really want to make sure that students feel like they can learn something from this game and that it is fun to play (and not just beautiful). For the demo, we have the player exploring the world and finding pieces of a rover that they must assemble and then code to move around the planet. We have so many ideas for how students can learn hardware and software coding within this game so its hard to pick just one for the demo but we are really excited about how this platform could expand in the future!

 

[Anonymous]

Final push happening this week. I've got the unity project coming back to me from my offshore dev team and a local dev friend of mine is going to help me put some final final touches on it this week. I'm not super happy with the last few weeks of progress, but I can't change that now. Pushing forward! 

Just a note to my future self...
Offshore team and zero budget is not an easy combination. I don't want to be in this position again. I just don't feel good about asking people to work for free, then when paying projects come along its so easy to not give any attention to the unpaid projects. Live and learn. 🙂 All will be ok...at least nobody hates each other! 😄 

[CourtsideXperie]

11th OLP BLOG - Progress, App Edits and Innovator's Playground

Progress

We are looking forward to the fall! We have multiple classes at a
Fitness club where we will supplement our product as well as with a
company that is partnered with Durham Public School system that will be
implementing some of our curriculum.

We are excited about approaching a time to where we can become cash
flow positive. We are looking to build a sales force shortly that will
push our product to other schools, organizations, and fitness clubs.

Grinding

We are putting the last of our app together for the September 10th deadline. 
It is approaching fast and we are putting the last additions to our
product.  Our vision is starting to become more clear.

We know that the market will demand a way to implement a training
and education product that is not a novelty item.  We feel as if our app
can be just that.  Schools are looking for a way to actively learn.  We
want that solution to be us.

Stay tuned on what happens next after the Oculus Launch Pad submission deadline.  We believe this is just the beginning!

Networking

This week we attended The Cambridge Educators Design Lab’s, Innovator’s Playground, fundraiser and community event.

The Design Lab provides a container to
foster educators’ creative ideas by linking entrepreneurial and
designing thinking concepts to the classroom to create new ways of
supporting students. The Lab engages students, teachers, families and
community members in action-based collaborative problem solving. This
iterative process involves gathering information about educational
issues, developing possibilities, and evolving them into viable
solutions for improvements.  These potential solutions are tried in
various classrooms and afterschool programs in the community.  The
Cambridge Design Lab’s first partnership is with the Cambridge Public
Schools and the Center for Artistry and Scholarship.

At the Innovator’s Playground, we had a great
conversation with a Cambridge Public Schools math coach, Matt Dunkel.
Matt asked great questions and offered some thoughts on how we might get
BTE into The Cambridge Public Schools and Cambridge Youth Basketball
practices. We are hopeful!

http://www.studygreatness.com/olp/10th-olp-blog-progress-app-edits-and-innovators-playground/
FYI this is where we study the greatest at there craft and apply it to what we do. 

[CatsAndVR]

https://youtu.be/0hjUR5O9OGs
It has been an interesting learning experience that coincided with some life ups and downs.
Since the computer crash and subsequent replacement I have been working on Purrgatory.
May not be what I want to fully submit for LaunchPad but as stated it is a life experience

Though It may not be a winning submission it is a start and I will continue and hopefully something close to what I want will be playable by OC4. I took a break from VR writing so I can put some blinders on and it has helped. 
Really dig what people have done so far and look forward to playing those games soon and sharing mine in the future.

[madomfeh]

This week, I continued integrating voice commands into the game interface. The team worked on character design and constructing the model for the main character.

We are also working on bringing the environment together, really trying to set up a  tropical scene, and creating an arena for battles.

We found the speech to be a bit tedious for the user in gameplay, so we are thinking of reorienting it as a health/spirit-replenishing mechanism.

https://youtu.be/TOcg1DHwqnQ

*Just realized posted this in week 10 earlier rather than 11*