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Week 8: Oculus Launch Pad (Due Aug 13 Midnight)

Anonymous
Not applicable
This week we will have another Friday Office Hours - hope to see you there!

58 REPLIES 58

kathrynhicks
Protege
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 8
This week, I attended an Animation Festival in Atlanta. While there, I handed out more shots to animators, made a prop, and 2D visual effects guide. Overall, we were not as productive as I had hoped to be, but I am expecting to make a lot more progress next week.
 
Next Week
I plan to meet with sound designers to have them “work their magic” for my film. Hopefully, I will have the animation complete, as well as 2D VFX done.

Lauren
Protege

Crab King VR - Week 8

This week was pretty hectic, as I just got back to the US on Monday. I decided that this week I was going to learn to make cutscenes, and that’s exactly what I did.

I made a new scene called Intro, and started work on the cutscene. I had updated my Unity build to 2017.1, which enabled me to use the Timeline functionality (after watching a few tutorials). I started off by copying the Main scene so that I had an environment and a crab model. Then I used Timeline to make a movement animation of the crab approaching the user/camera. It’s a simple 2 keyframe animation that just moves the crab in a line while also animating the “forward walk” in a loop.

After that I downloaded the Speech Bubble Manager asset from the Asset Store, and set it up in my project. After a few minutes of setup, I added anchor points for the dialogue, and set up the manager to display the cutscene dialogue. Writing the dialogue was one of the hardest things I did this week. I got so used to coding that when it came time to use my “softer” skills, it took me a minute.

Finishing my first cutscene (even though it was very simple) really increased my confidence in my Unity skills, which is always good. Next week I hope to add the ability to skip the cutscene that I worked so hard to finish, and an Epilogue scene for when the user wins the game.

theextendedmind
Explorer
People are posting such cool stuff on here.  I'm glad I wait until Sundays to post here.  This has been a very operational week on my end.

Fellow OLP Clo Dorvilias and I put together a formal agreement as part of our goal to keep this project running smoothly.  Secondly, I made a first draft of the budget.  It might be interesting to share the basics here.  I talked with a game company in Portland and they said to always include these line items in any experience budget:

1. Development and Implementation
2. QA
3. Art
4. Audio
5. Strategy / Marketing
6. Design
7. Project management

but of course, ymmv.

While agreements and budgets are important, the experience is the really fun part.  We are still trying to following the schedule that I posted last week.  We also blocked off a couple days to chunk some work.  

 >Week 6: Experience Planning with @GangstaClo.  Lots of articles exchanged.
>Week 7: Get sharp on the exact strategy
>Week 8 Program the prototype
>Week 9: Testing with educators and general public.  We are aiming to have at least 50 people do the experience.  
>Week 10: Analyze results / Revise prototype

nicole_babos
Protege

This week I worked on building additional assets for the
Start Screen. I created a tree and three different mountain meshes in Blender.
I also added color to the train and placed it with train tracks in the
StartScreen. The StartScreen is going to be the main hub for our game and I
want it to look like a train depot and set the mood for the game. We still need
to wire up the gameplay for the StartScreen, so hopefully we can finish that
next week.

7swqjqhfobty.gif



In the meantime, we’ve been polishing our art assets. We
increased the variety in our passengers, and provided more accessories for them
to give a lively feel. We also spent the week retargeting our animations and
improving their general feel. Each animation feels livelier and varied. Our
passengers have different behaviors and ticks that give them a feeling of
distinctiveness that we didn’t feel was quite as polished before.



Overall, I still feel like there is a lot left to do before
submitting the demo and I’m feeling overwhelmed. The ‘Office Hours’ meeting on
Friday was helpful but also made me stress out about what’s left to do. I’m
looking forward to the next video call that discusses submission. Knowing what
is necessary for demo submission will be a big stress relief so I know what to
focus on in these final weeks.

Nicole
www.fancybirdstudios.com

virtuallyfifer
Protege
NEURO-EXPLORER WEEK 8
Acquiring extra help, finalizing team, and purchasing major model structures.

We are excited to announce we added a wonderful Unity Dev and talented multi platform VR artist to the team. The developer will start working with us this week, and the artist is already working on things from Germany.  We also have purchased some great models that will really bring our project forward. 



2l25stkk0xnv.png
Beautiful right?

We started with the first series in our tour of the brain involving the brain stem, which is basic evolutionary brain that predated homo sapiens. This includes the Medulla, the Pons, the cerebellum, and the midbrain. We sent this off to Germany to get chopped into pieces and colored, and then from these pieces we will create large room/events with the help of additions and decorations from Tilt Brush that the user will navigate through.  We are really excited to have the whole team together for the first time and make an amazing experience.
See you next week

youtnodknoem
Protege

Our concept artist, Tony, whipped up some really cool concept art and 2D animations for our game this week. We hope you like it 🙂 (viewable on the original blogpost on the webpage http://conjurestrike.com/2017/08/14/feature-complete/)

This week I worked on the final networking pieces to have a complete game. We created a menu interface that allows users to select their team as well as their class. In addition we added a debug mode so that it's easier to test the prototype. Finally we made the disconnect and crash logic a lot more robust. Before, if a player logged off or disconnected mid game, the game would break. Now our game gracefully handles disconnection.

The end of the week brings the completion of our core feature list. We now have a fully functioning team based multiplayer game with different classes and abilities. However, the final month of the program is definitely going to be the most challenging so far, as there is definitely a ton of polish we want to get in, including a First Time User Experience, audio, bug fixing, VFX, and a cohesive feel for the level. Below you can see the current work in progress of the blue team's main base.

 

This week I also had a great time meeting up with 10 or so Launchpadders in the bay area. We got to try out each other's apps, catch up, as well as just have a great time in general.  We are definitely looking forward to the next one!

That's it. See you all next week 🙂

Anonymous
Not applicable
This week I had a chat with Nico the sound designer and he put me in touch with another music producer who helped me out with some new beats. Quick turnaround too...loved the first rev he sent. I have trouble asking for iteration when someone is working for free though. We still need to implement the new sound to see how good it works with the game. 

This week wasn't as productive as it could have been. I'll be back with a better update next week!

AnwarBey
Protege
Week 8 in the dev world of PLASMA BlastBox for gear VR

-We have managed to get the alien Jambars into the scene and shot at them. They have no reaction just yet, they simply disappear after they are hit. Next steps are to get them to charge at the player, creating a sense of worry fear and a need to defend ones self from the oncoming threat

-I had a show and tell event for PLASMAworlds VR. I invited friends and acquaintances, 30 people in total came to the studio and tried out what we have created thus far. It was a successful event, we set up a google form survey with 10 questions for people to answer after they tried the gearvr experience. The feedback was powerful and will undoubtedly guide us to the end of the month, everyone wants to journey deeper and explore more.

- Next items of dev we are working on is getting all the rest of the assets into the scene, animations, skybox painting etc etc. a high overarching priority is creating a narrative that takes the player from beginning to end, leaving them with a delightfully experienced feeling while at the same time asking for more

-Lastly but not leastly, just finished a fun game dev party session with a few awesome launch padders. 

Everyday is an adventure in this development and the opportunity to bring to life that in which has never existed in reality before, let alone virtual reality. Cheers.- Anwar

Thudpucker
Honored Guest

Everything is in!
Environment, character, animation, sound. All of it. Now for some solid
testing.



The biggest
obstacle/ challenge I keep coming across with this project is "how do I
make this feel real?" Honestly, in my completely biased opinion, this is a
first good pass. Not perfect, but certainly good.



I'm starting to run
this in front of some folks that I trust. This is great for three things:




  1. General feedback. People seem
    to be genuinely impressed and have a good time, even though the
    conversation is pretty short. I've gotten lots of requests to do it again,
    which is a good sign, right? But for folks who know

  2. Learning how people behave in
    it.  This is vastly different from
    soliciting feedback from people. I'm observing them and making my own
    notes. If there's one thing I've learned over years of development, it's
    that people will often try to spare your feelings on feedback. Also, a lot
    of people are not good at identifying areas that need work.  Some big things that I've noticed:


    1. This takes a lot
      of introduction. I need to tell people what to expect and how to behave.
      I need to get some sort of "conversation tutorial" in there.

    2. People are insecure about
      talking at first, but they warm up to the idea very quickly. Gotta figure
      that out

    3. Folks still like to take a
      moment to explore the environment, even if it's something banal like a
      restaurant (albeit a very nice restaurant!). It doesn't matter if they're
      well-versed in VR or this is one of their first times, they love to
      explore.


  3. Building database for the
    conversation machine learning. The more data points we get in there, the
    better it is.


Another big thing
that we've noticed is that the voice-to-text service that we're currently using
isn't the best. Lots of bad translations there. We're on Unity 5.6 now, and
there are some limitations because of the .NET version. Unity 2017 opens this
up a lot more, so we're going to explore that next week and hopefully improve
our success ratio there.



Other than that,
it's more and more testing!!

valerieechevest
Protege
Week 8 Update

 
I met with a filmmaker Tuesday who is interested in helping with my film! He has a lot of experience and available time this August. We had a great 2 hour meeting discussing my ideas and how to make the most out of the 360 experience. The goal of the project as a whole is to expose a larger audience to inequities that exist in DC that prevent low-income communities from attaining healthy lives and drive action among viewers to improve the situation. We’ll provide options for what the viewer can do that range in engagement level. This way, even people who do the lowest engagement level action will build self-efficacy that they can create change and increase social modeling of civic engagement behaviors.
I also met with a public health policy professional colleague about measuring the effectiveness of the film in driving action. We created a first draft model for testing the effectiveness. Ideally, the project will prove that 360 film is more effective at driving civic/ social good action than traditional means. This finding would provide the next step in evidence of why & how 360 film can be used for good. It is widely acknowledged that 360 film drives empathy, but there aren’t current studies that show it is more effective at actually driving people to do something with their empathy. My project will provide this evidence so that more funding can be driven to help create VR for social good and more good can be done in this new medium! Sharing empathy is important, but tying that to actual action that drives change is how we can use VR to make the world a better place.
 A big week ahead as we close in on the final month!