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Week 2: Oculus Launch Pad (Due July 2 Midnight)

Anonymous
Not applicable
Week 2: Oculus Launch Pad (Due July 2 Midnight)
 
71 REPLIES 71

Lauren
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I made a lot of progress this week. I finished the Unity Courseware and began work on the game. I bought several models, including models for the “regular” enemy crabs, the Crab King, and the underwater plants and skybox.

I started by working on the crab’s movement, until I got it moving back and forth in a straight line with animation. Then I added hats to differentiate the “regular” crabs from one another (Pawn, Knight, Bishop, Rook). I implemented a spawning system (for now, pressing spacebar starts the game), and a system to advance to the next crab after defeat.

Next, I implemented the fighting system. I used the BladeSmith Melee Combat add-on from the Asset Store to set up the claws as weapons and the player as the target. Then I did the same the other way around, setting it up so that a mouse click performs an attack and damages the enemy. I added animations for damage and death using the system as well.

I also updated the movement system so that the enemy crab moves in a semicircle around the player. There are occasional bugs, but for the most part the math works. The speed of the crab is dependent on its level (Pawn through Rook).

I added the ability to block, even though it is currently controlled by the right mouse button. A cylindrical shield becomes activated when the player right clicks and stays active for 2 seconds, then lowers. Eventually this will be controlled by the position of the controller in space.

Finally, I added some bubbles to make the scene feel more like it is taking place underwater!

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I still have a long way to go, including setting up the underwater scene with better/more varied plants, gently moving the plants to simulate underwater currents, and implementing the true control scheme and UI. Right now the camera is controlled via the keyboard and the mouse attacks. The next enemy spawns immediately without any UI or cutscenes. Finally, I need to implement the Crab King using a separate model and stats.

sberky
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Oculus Launchpad Dev Blog 2: Getting Technical Without a Technical Background

This past week, I made a lot of headway reaching out to new contacts in LA, as well as digging into learning new technical tools and skills for my project. I tested out two cinematic VR platforms, one was called EEVO which helps build interactive VR experiences simply. It is a cool platform that helps build teleportation and branching narratives, but the drawback is that it only publishes to their app unless you hire them to build out a personalized app for you. It may be a good option for helping build a simple prototype, but it’s not as customizable as I’d like for my project. The other platform I tried out is called Headjack. This site helps customize and build VR applications which you can export to many different platforms. It also simplifies the design of menus for cinematic content, and it is possible to integrate with Unity for further customization. I spent some time exploring this for my project, and I think it could be a really good fit for what I’d like to build. I just need to learn a bit more about integrating cinematic content in unity before I can use their templates and API. Also a lot of this language is new to me (API, SDK, APK, JDK… maybe someone can help me understand what those mean better, but I am up and running with some practical knowledge on how to use them).

The rest of the week I spent on Unity tutorials. I don’t remember who, but someone posted this very useful playlist of tutorial videos for Gear VR https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLojp5Kr-sMX_nabw9VmqNBc_FoiJC2kR0&app=desktop. I’ve been working my way through that, and built my first functioning test app on Gear VR! It feels like a huge accomplishment, even though it only consisted of a plane and some cubes… Baby steps. Next I’ll be working on testing out 360 video and stereoscopic video integration.


rheo
Explorer
Week 2

This week’s progress has revolved around activating subliminal creative flow for the core ideas.

For me, an important technique in this process is image collage and mood boards, such as the example below.

I’m applying this visual brainstorming process to many different dimensions of the project and it's beginning to really open things up for me.

I've also had some very, very major professional developments in the past week that should inform great progress in July. Not disclosing just yet, but it has been a busy week. And a big week.

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brianrusseldavi
Explorer
We will have 3 blog post this week ... Here is the first from our Unity Engineer Erik : 

https://blog.paperchasegame.com/day-17-90b3f6fc14ec

kenmcgrady
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I have made some strides in getting up to speed with Unity. I have built my first underwater scene with animations. See the included picture for the essence. It could use some lighting, and I am sure I will need to adjust for performance issues, but it's progress!

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In addition, I have been working on ensuring that there are educational outcomes from the VR experiment. I think that it's necessary that in order to decide to build out the final product, a couple scenarios need to be tested for effectiveness. I have constructed a before and after survey to help identify the benefits of such an application. I intend to test this out on a group of students of different backgrounds.

Currently, I am exploring https://keen.io/ as a metrics provider to create programmatic metrics like gaze into the application. Assigning objects in a scene some method to send event data. I think what would be great would be to just have almost every object detect when it's being looked at and then I have access to all of the data to decide what's an effective gaze. If anyone has any suggestions on how to obtain data from a VR environment (I'd imagine fast writes given the unpredictability of the VR view), I'd love the suggestions.


AVCVgames
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Micah - Week 2 | 6/25 - 7/1



Production Progress
Challenge: Unity Lighting
I posted a link in the facebook group regarding the key changes in Unity's Lighting system from version 5.5 to 5.6. Hopefully people clicked on the link because the changes are significant. I literally spent three days tweaking and re-baking my lighting for the test scene I built. Initially, I couldn't figure out why certain trees within the scene weren't lit and other objects were hella bright! It didn't make any sense! Then I found Kamal Akay's blog post which was a real lifesaver (http://kemalakay.com/?p=540). After reading this blog, I was able to rebuild the lighting in my scene and understand how the new shadow and lightmapping options work. The scene looks MUCH better now and the lighting is actually much better than the previous system. However, Unity doesn't provide a lot of detail about this system. Although I spent three days figuring this out, I now understand how it works and should be much better off in creating the first scene of the demo.
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Task: Complete Storyboard/Schematic
Using Gliffy I created a scene blueprint for my first scene. This was helpful in determining the physical size of the environment, but it also forced me to think about how I want the viewer to maneuver through the experience. Initially, I had drawn up a fairly simple room and hallway setup, but I ended up adding an additional hallway and turns in order to make the environment a little more interesting. It's always easier to move around boxes on a grid than figuring this out in Unity! The next step is to do similar schematics for the other scenes.


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youtnodknoem
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Progress

Art

This was the first week the team really dove into the project and began tackling it head on. After some initial discussions, Tony, our artist and creative director began cranking on some work look iterations, painting some rough sketches of what our "base" might look like. . Remember from last week that we are building a VR competitive multiplayer game, so in this case, the base refers to the component of the level that must be captured by opponents. The world is going to be technological fantasy with ancient tech so advanced that it lends a magical aesthetic to the world. The art style will likely be colorful and bright, based off of a low poly/voxel feel. This will give us the best flexibility going forward, and allow us to create interesting unique 3D pieces, while leveraging the plentiful amount of low poly assets in the Unity Asset store.

Design

Larry, our level designer began working on a sketch in 2D of the playing field and started creating a low fidelity 3d mockup of the final level. We want to make sure our level has many of the features that you would find in a triple A multiplayer game like Overwatch or Call of Duty. I personally believe that level design and game balancing is where we can make the biggest impact in the shortest amount of time, given the size of our team. Our plan is to integrate the level design into the environment scene next week, see it in VR, and continue doing iterations on it as the project proceeds.

Engineer and Production

On my side, I began working on the basic multiplayer networking infrastructure required to create a team based multiplayer game. In our game, one core objectives is to pull switches on a monolith in the center of the level of the map in order to summon a bad ass monster. I began by setting up the multiplayer component of that mechanic. I also worked on a tracking spreadsheet and prioritized features. We had to cut more than half of the features I originally scoped, and will probably still have to cut more, if we want a fun, balanced experience.

Tools

One of the things that is so nice about Unity, since the scope of our project is so ambitious, is that there is a free or paid asset for almost anything imaginable, to help you realize your vision. Today I'd like to share some of the tools I've incorporated into my workflow over the past few months. There is still a mountain of work to be done before we have a playable version of our product, but thankfully there are many free assets that are available online that make it feasible.

Photon For Unity (Multiplayer - Free)

Photon is recognized as one of the most user friendly ways to build a multiplayer experience. It's extremely flexible, and free up to 20 concurrent users! It is very simple to use for what it is, but remember to at least double your estimates for any product with multiplayer interaction, maybe more if it's your first time. If you are planning on scaling your product to thousands of concurrent users, or need server authoritative logic, than you'd probably want to use something else, however it's perfect for a smaller indie project. Especially for beginners.

VRTK (VR Input Without Coding - Free)

VRTK is a free opensource toolkit that is cross compatible with both the Vive and the Rift. Exactly like it sounds, it provides a set of tools that allow you to quickly design VR experiences. Some of my favorite are built in interactions include grabbing, and interacting with objects, as well as teleportation. The people that work on it are also super nice and responsive.

Behavior Designer (Artificial Intelligence - $70)

Behavior Designer is like Play Maker for AI. Basically, it's a node based visual scripting tool that allows you to build complex AI behaviors using a behavior tree. If you are a non-coder they have supplementary add on packages that make it easy to mock out all sorts of behaviors without writing a single line of code.  If you are a coder, all of those actions I just mentioned are well documented with source code included so you can modify it and look at how everything works! The UI/UX is intuitive and easy to use, and stable, unlike some other free solutions out there. It's not cheap, but if you are trying to do any sort of complex AI behavior in your game, I can't recommend it highly enough.

Final IK (Animating Player Avatars - $90)

Traditional animation is usually forward kinematic, each individual bone and rig usually needs to be carefully positioned and animated. For example to swing a characters arms out, you'd have to move the arm, the upper arm, the shoulders, the forearm. While these types of handcrafted animations usually look better, they are time consuming. Inverse Kinematics (or IK) is an animation system that works by apply motion to a single part bone on your character and allowing the rest of the character to follow suit. A simple example would be simply moving the hand of your character outwards to swing their arms out. Final IK is an IK solution that also features a VR component for the Rift and Vive. In this way, you can create realistic looking character animations for your player avatar, creating a realistic sense of body presence. Many successful VR titles published in the Oculus store actually already use a variant of this unity asset. (You may have seen the developer's work in Arizona Sunshine)

Of course you can also use final IK to animate pretty much any character in your interactive narrative or game.


That's all this week, see you next week! 

RPVY
Protege
Week 2

Recap: Last week i have successfully set up my project, get a working view in the Gear VR, import basic prototypes of the environment into Unity and Gear dev view, created some basic assets and models. I am new to Unity so this is a learning process along the way as well. 

This week, i knocked out some items that i consider "easy" personally before dwelling into heavy technical integration with Unity such as expanding my assets, 3D models, props, environments and get some basic animation playing. I have built a VR sketch view of the first scene in Tilt Brush just to get a sense of the layout and environment i want to create and play around with camera POV. Importing from Tilt Brush back into Unity is simple enough, but i'm not depending too much on texture import as i plan to use very basic color with shader tweaks for my props and environments. I know from other users that if you are looking for full import it will be more of a struggle. 

Speaking of struggle, the one interesting aspect of VR i find difficult to transition across different tools is the sense of scale. Tilt Brush has a scale measurement to give you a small idea at what scale you are creating for, but while creating the assets, my brain doesn't completely grasp this concept of scale. Meaning, to my brain, everything is at the same scale as me, not necessary the real scale of the model that i'm painting. So this is both interesting and a minor struggle. I do worry that in Unity if i'm not careful the scale can really demand power of processing which should be minimize if published on the GearVR. It runs fine on my test file on the Gear so far so i hope it's not going to be a pain point in the future. 

And lastly, I have a storyboard fleshed out with a working script. Dialog design is more difficult than i have imagined. You want the conversations between characters to flow naturally, if careless, it can really take a step back from the immersion. I need to rethink if i want spoken dialog at all to avoid this issue 

Week 2 Accomplishment: Building more 3D models, props, environment. Sketched out the VR view of what the environment should look like. Storyboard completed. Script semi-completed. 


CatsAndVR
Explorer
Oculus Launch Pad Dev Blog Week 2. 

So entering Week 2 I was in NY and attended a very inspirational event at Sotheby's where I ran into another fellow LaunchPader. 79f28d8uqn9q.png

http://www.catsandvr.com/blog/artofvr

After returning from NY it all hit me that I am this project by myself and I decided the only way to start was to enter my unfinished game in to Pocket Gamers Indie VR pitch event...to my surprise the let me into the competition. I did not win because I was no where as good as the winner but surprisingly people dug my short tech demo and I got a few votes for Magik Cats.  910mtdtp42in.png
At PocketGamerConnects I learned so much about starting my own gaming company and hope to do that in the future. It was amazing that the vision attached to just a interactive menu was considered tres cool. The Dev Evangelist at Pocket Gamer took some time to even discuss development with me.
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So Far I have an interactive menu but I produced a really cool DARKWAVE song for it and the interactive elements are pretty witching. Leaving to get off the Grid for the weekend cause its my BDAY on Sunday and I hate getting older...but hey hopefully I come back more focused and can get into building Level 1. Bobby Venomic....sigilingoff