Alright, progressing along. Tilt Brush is officially my default tool for sketching in VR. Don't get me wrong, i LOVE Quill, but Tilt is just so intuitive and seamless to bring in and out of Unity.
I'm going to attempt my first cut scene style animation right after I post this, so will update the result later. It's going to be fun!
Update: It did work, but with very basic animations. I'm still so happy
Second sneak peak. Going to tweak a lot of the arts here a little (a lot) as they are still "sketches" quality for me. It's so hard to prioritize, what do i work on first? Fixing the arts or mastering Unity? Just choosing what to do for the day drive me nuts because I feel guilty i'm not doing enough of the other thing. I work and doing my Masters currently so i have about 2 hours each day after dawdling around. Next week is my Final exam so i will have a lot less time to work on this project, bummer.
Accomplishment: Got the profiler working on the Gear, woo hoo! I think i'm hitting 200 fps due to the vsync, if this is confirmed I think is easily fixable (I hope). Got some basic animation and movement generated, woo hoo! So far the first full scene is coming together along nicely.
I'm going to attempt my first cut scene style animation right after I post this, so will update the result later. It's going to be fun!
Update: It did work, but with very basic animations. I'm still so happy
Second sneak peak. Going to tweak a lot of the arts here a little (a lot) as they are still "sketches" quality for me. It's so hard to prioritize, what do i work on first? Fixing the arts or mastering Unity? Just choosing what to do for the day drive me nuts because I feel guilty i'm not doing enough of the other thing. I work and doing my Masters currently so i have about 2 hours each day after dawdling around. Next week is my Final exam so i will have a lot less time to work on this project, bummer.
Accomplishment: Got the profiler working on the Gear, woo hoo! I think i'm hitting 200 fps due to the vsync, if this is confirmed I think is easily fixable (I hope). Got some basic animation and movement generated, woo hoo! So far the first full scene is coming together along nicely.
The Lorraine Motel
My
trip to Memphis last week was very insightful to my “I Am a Man” VR experience.
I always knew that the Lorraine Motel was a very important part of the story,
but my initial usage of the hotel as a part of my narrative was previously just
on Room 306. As I mentioned in Week 1 of this journey, I agreed not to use Room
306 as it was a part of an investigation I had started previous to the
Launchpad program.
HOWEVER, after my trip to Memphis I realize that placing a
viewer on the outside of the motel might be a more convincing part of the
story, and it would give viewers the vantage point of being on the street to
see King standing on the balcony moments before the tragic event.
When
I visited the Lorraine I noticed that while they kept some components of the
Hotel untouched, there were parts missing from the site that I find in the
pictures, such as the original Hotel Lobby and the pool across from the balcony
that was encompassed by a decorative wall. Luckily, the photographs
communicated enough to give me the data needed to reconstruct the space.
Secondly,
there are some things that the museum kept in tact that match the exact same
things from the photos. A white 1959
Dodge Royal with lime green fins and a white 1968 Cadillac sit parked exactly
in the same location seen in the photos from April 4, 1968. These are great
elements for me to use in the VR space because in an iconic way, the cars and
the Motel Sign “Lorrain Motel” are historic signifiers that anchor you in the
space.
In
my modeling process I created a nice texture map that I then mapped onto a
geometry mapping the motel.
Secondly,
the motel sign is nothing more than a png propped up like a billboard, but form
the distance you are standing in VR there is no telling that the sign is not a
3D model. I was able to find the matching cars as royalty free game assets
online. I then took them into 3DS Max to reduce to polygon count and tweak the
textures. Then finally I brought in a few avatars from Adobe Fuse to populate
the scene. All the avatars are low-poly, but luckily you are standing at a far
enough distance that the characters still feel aesthetically correct.
Here
is a link to a screen capture of a test of the space in VR- Click Here
Crab King VR - Week 7
This week, I added more polish to the game. First, I added Win/Loss conditions to the game. Previously, the game didn’t stop when the player lost (no health remaining), and the game didn’t acknowledge the player winning (defeating the King).
I edited the GameManager to add GameOver and PlayerWin methods. Those methods do multiple things. First they notify the AnalyticsManager. Then they play a short music clip with either win or loss music. Next, they set a canvas to active (the canvas contains “YOU WIN” or “YOU LOSE” text). Finally, in the case of the GameOver method, the scene fades out after a few seconds and transitions back to the Start screen. I then hooked everything up so that the Player and Enemy scripts work with the GameManager to notify the GameManager of the Win/Loss state.
Next, I added the Credits screen. I made a new scene, called Credits, and cloned it from the Start screen. I replaced all the canvas content. Now there is a Scroll View with the game title, “Programming, Design, Story” credited to me, and a list of all the Unity assets I used to make the game. There is also a “Special Thanks” section with the names of a few friends who helped me with testing/bugs.
Next week will be tight, as I will be traveling back to the US from France, but hopefully I will have some time to work on Crab King. I hope to add an Intro scene that explains the story a bit more, but I’m not sure exactly how that should look at the moment.
Week 7
Going deep into new strategies for particle-based “immersive choreography.”
Exploring some cool new scripts for instancing particles, and trying to figure out what the right parameters/constraints are for this type of experience on GearVR. It’s been a lot of trial and error this week with a mixed bag of results. Found a few promising new directions and also hit some performance roadblocks that are still very much work in progress.
Also doing some experiments around interaction possibilities with particle systems, and having fun exploring the notion of diving into an immersive canvas.
... and, preparing to embark upon a new professional/life chapter starting next week!
Going deep into new strategies for particle-based “immersive choreography.”
Exploring some cool new scripts for instancing particles, and trying to figure out what the right parameters/constraints are for this type of experience on GearVR. It’s been a lot of trial and error this week with a mixed bag of results. Found a few promising new directions and also hit some performance roadblocks that are still very much work in progress.
Also doing some experiments around interaction possibilities with particle systems, and having fun exploring the notion of diving into an immersive canvas.
... and, preparing to embark upon a new professional/life chapter starting next week!
Coming Together
I am down in LA again this week to work with the team on a weekend game jam session. By the end of this week, we want to have a prototype we would feel relatively comfortable submitting to Oculus as our submission, which means it's has to be relatively bug free, fun, and aesthetically pleasing. According to our production schedule, we wanted to have all the core features and functionalities nailed down by this Sunday. This will give us enough time to polish up the art, bug fix, and get the game mechanics feeling balanced and just right.
In the past week we ran another playtest with friends and partners. The consensus was that our new UX system was more intuitive and enjoyable. We had two completely new users hop in and they understood how the mechanics of our game work in minutes. This is no small task for a VR game that also adopts MOBA like characteristics. ConjureStrike is now feature complete for the prototype and it is a fully networked 2v2 multiplayer game with multiple classes, abilities, and a spellcasting system. Feature complete doesn't mean fun or aesthetically pleasing, though and there's much work to be done in the next month to tune and balance our game. We need to add music and binaural audio into the mix. In addition, we want to create an appealing intro scene that showcases a bit of the storyline as well as introducing to the player how the game works.
One of the most important things I've learned along the way, especially in game development, is that at least for us, half or more of the features I spent hours laboring away at ended up being largely discarded. Building a fun game seems to be about finding the right balance of simplicity and mastery, and that takes a lot of experimentation. For example, I spent two weeks building a gesture based spellcasting system only to discard it because the frustration of casting the wrong spell outweighed the fun of mastering it. In VR the bar for making things intuitive is even higher than traditional console games, or even mobile. The expectation, because things are so real, is that things are much less abstracted in VR.
Even though I've tossed half of my features, even after spending countless hours on them, it doesn't feel like a waste. Actually, I think that's what product development is fundamentally all about. There are instances, on occasion, where I felt like spending more time thinking through the problem before feature development would have eliminated the need to develop it in the first place, but c'est la vie.
In terms of progress this week, we got a new wand based spellcasting system where wands that are holstered at each side. We also completely revamped the UX so that it's much more intuitive and not statically attached to the viewport. Our playtest was full of bugs, but I felt much more positive about the product than I did after our play test last week. Tony has meticulously hand painted every single texture in our level so our game is getting a really great hand painted, artistic feel to it. You can see it come across in some of our work in progress images. Larry has been doing some great work refining and tuning the level to add more combat zones and geometry.
See you all next week!
Week 7 - Lyn Gaza - Bryn Celli Ddu project
Made some advances in Unity this week, after learning more about native support for VR in Unity and with the latest Google SDK. I’ve been struggling with a course that’s a couple of years old and cross referencing to the Unity and Google knowledge bases. I still need to get my sample model into Unity and build a demo that functions similarly to how our demo will work. This seems like the best way to move forward, since I’m still on hold for the Bryn Celli Ddu models. Here’s an external view of what the model will look like.
Made some advances in Unity this week, after learning more about native support for VR in Unity and with the latest Google SDK. I’ve been struggling with a course that’s a couple of years old and cross referencing to the Unity and Google knowledge bases. I still need to get my sample model into Unity and build a demo that functions similarly to how our demo will work. This seems like the best way to move forward, since I’m still on hold for the Bryn Celli Ddu models. Here’s an external view of what the model will look like.
Currently I’m putting together the working agreement in order for the archaeologist in Wales to share the models with me. She wants to retain ownership of the models, and allow us to use them in the demo. That makes sense, and I’m trying to revise the sample ownership agreement provided by OLP to create something equitable for all. I plan to send her a version by Monday and hope there’s not too much back and forth.
I spent a day at Siggraph last week and VR was well represented. Unfortunately I was limited to the Exhibits Only pass, but there were some good talks to check out. I went to an interesting demo of the Stranger Things VR experience, where they showed how they mapped the experience to incorporate real world objects. I also went to a couple of the Unity talks including a good one by our friend Sarah Stumbo about Unity for XR. She talked about about native support for AR in upcoming releases, which is cool! I’ve also been chatting a bit with a developer friend who is getting involved with the AR kit and Apple based products. We’re planning to meet up next week and share some of our learnings.
Another big part of my process is thinking about how VR can be a means to the end of more complex storytelling. I've recently been in touch with Lance Weiler and I’ve been spending some time exploring the wealth of information he’s made available through the Columbia Digital Storytelling Lab. Ultimately, I see VR as an element that’s part of a larger narrative, and as I’m learning about it I’m always keeping a thought going about how to use it to interact with others and include them in that narrative.
I’ve got two interesting events I’m looking forward to today. Some friends of mine are programming a literary marathon called 90x90 here in LA. Today they’ll host a panel on Interactive Storytelling that will cover immersive theatre and escape rooms, role playing and narrative games, virtual and mixed reality. Should be fun! Then later tonight a gallery in Chinatown called Automata will be presenting an installation/exhibition/experiment called Imaginary Real, that will explore perceptions of reality through projects incorporating interactive technology and VR. Keeping that inspiration and information flowing!
Have a great week, everyone!
Have a great week, everyone!
Dev Blog 7 - Cloudrise
It’s been a week of traveling (and having a shingles outbreak on my face) for me so I didn’t get very much done on Cloudrise. But I did have an awesome time in NYC at the Games for Change conference and VR for Change Summit. I was especially lucky to get a chance to hang out with some other OLP peeps, such an unbelievable awesome group we are! Now I’m home and back in the saddle.
In the coming week Ashley plans to work on the UI for the NPC communication interface, which is super important and pretty much the primary vehicle through which the story is advanced. I will be working on Unity VFX and getting after some rendering bugs that are showing up in the GearVR but not the Unity editor (to the surprise of no one), but if those frustrate me too much there’s some audio triggers that need attending to as well.
I do have one pic for you guys, here’s the habitation pod that our 3D modeler put together for our second scene of game play. It looks so good!! 😄 … and probably has too many verts and polygons >_<
*scifi tiny house of the future!!
I’m working with the modeler to decrease the poly count and tossing out some of the props, but overall I think it might be close to ok since the scene is really sparse other than this one interior so hopefully that will equate to us not having to change too much. I’ll know more once I build it out and take a look.
Until next week!