Week 9 - Da Crunch!
So fish are flying in Scene 3, but I still can't catch the doggone things. (Dakota checking in with Red Flute)
Modeled, textured and used way points to animate the fish flying past the user... while the user stands on the giant sea turtle on the way to the edge of Hell. The user should be able to grab the fish but they're moving too fast. If I slow them down, it loses a rather stunning visual effect.
What I may do is create a (huuuugggge) trigger on the fish so if you just swipe them, they fall to the user's feet or something along those lines. At this point, the user can store the fish in inventory to use against the sea serpent in a later scene.
Modeled a Chinese bow and Shu statues (Sanxingdui) based on authentic artifacts for Land of Dead scene:
The bow works smoothly with the Rift - did a bow animation for the string-pull. Used gesture recognition so that all a user has to do is raise his/her right or left hand to spawn an arrow (this allows for left- or right-handed users). For later fight scenes, this functionality makes for a fast load-n-shoot. No searching for a quiver full of arrows.
Used Koreography to trigger events from the audio track -- the narration -- and that plugin works like a dream.
Aiming to finish four scenes for the MVP and constantly testing the piece in the headset. The final scene will be the visit to Meng Po, the Broth of Oblivion and divination with a hot iron rod.
So fish are flying in Scene 3, but I still can't catch the doggone things. (Dakota checking in with Red Flute)
Modeled, textured and used way points to animate the fish flying past the user... while the user stands on the giant sea turtle on the way to the edge of Hell. The user should be able to grab the fish but they're moving too fast. If I slow them down, it loses a rather stunning visual effect.
What I may do is create a (huuuugggge) trigger on the fish so if you just swipe them, they fall to the user's feet or something along those lines. At this point, the user can store the fish in inventory to use against the sea serpent in a later scene.
Modeled a Chinese bow and Shu statues (Sanxingdui) based on authentic artifacts for Land of Dead scene:
The bow works smoothly with the Rift - did a bow animation for the string-pull. Used gesture recognition so that all a user has to do is raise his/her right or left hand to spawn an arrow (this allows for left- or right-handed users). For later fight scenes, this functionality makes for a fast load-n-shoot. No searching for a quiver full of arrows.
Used Koreography to trigger events from the audio track -- the narration -- and that plugin works like a dream.
Aiming to finish four scenes for the MVP and constantly testing the piece in the headset. The final scene will be the visit to Meng Po, the Broth of Oblivion and divination with a hot iron rod.
CalmBox (Kathleen Kamali)
Today I have to make another super quick note since I'm traveling again this weekend. But some updates...
New cave! That will eventually take you to a meditation space that means another environment I have to build...
New friends! I mean, they just kind of stand there for now. But they do add some atmosphere.
Not pictured is the new relaxation object which is a potion bottle with semi-realistic liquid physics. It's not as glittery as I want it now but progress has been made. Just need to add tool tips and more sound to what I have so far. And then just completely construct the meditation cave...
Today I have to make another super quick note since I'm traveling again this weekend. But some updates...
New cave! That will eventually take you to a meditation space that means another environment I have to build...
New friends! I mean, they just kind of stand there for now. But they do add some atmosphere.
Not pictured is the new relaxation object which is a potion bottle with semi-realistic liquid physics. It's not as glittery as I want it now but progress has been made. Just need to add tool tips and more sound to what I have so far. And then just completely construct the meditation cave...
I'm excited to welcome Alex, who will be working on our composition and sound design to our team. Alex is an amazing musician and he's already produced a few amazing tracks for Conjure Strike! You can listen a sample of his work in progress below:
https://soundcloud.com/andy-tsen/conjure-strike_gameplay_draft-1
In his own words, Alex described his creative process when doing the tracks for Conjure Strike:
When approaching any creative project, with multiple people involved, there is always a balancing act that requires each creator to use their own ideas and cleverly mix the tastes and nuances of their partners to achieve a cohesive blend that everyone can feel satisfied with. Creating music for games is no different. When I started to compose for Conjure Strike, I first needed to set the tone. I began with a simplified chord progression on the piano. From there, I began to add elements that I thought would appear in this new world the team had created. I added orchestral strings, a haunting fantasy flute, and building drums. Since my background has mostly been in rock bands it was only natural for me to set the piece into traditional song form with an intro, build, and outro. What I am beginning to find out, it that the music required for games requires and more nonlinear and flexible structure so that the songs can subtly switch from "exploration" to "battle mode" while keeping the player fully immersed. The whole process has been technically new, yet still familiar as the main objective is the same: evoke emotion and help tell a story.
This week was a big week for our team, we finally have a full prototype of what the final product would be. We have a fully textured environment as well as a fully working 2v2 experience. In addition to the core gameplay, we also added a full voiced and guided tutorial as well as a basic menu screen for our game.
Since our game has complex game mechanics to master, it was important for us to build out an onboarding flow that explained the mechanics to the user. We noticed that we would have to spend the first 5 - 10 minutes of the game explaining the mechanics to our playtesters, a luxury we won't have for Oculus Playtesters. Luckily I have spent much of my career as a product manager and game developer optimizing "FTUEs" (First time user experiences)
Our game has a simply splash screen menu where you can press any button to start, and then it goes into a guided tutorial where a sentient temple guardian walks you through the basic process of movement, spellcasting, UX, and shooting your weapons. In our playtest it was instantly clear that even the rough sketch of the tutorial was doing a better job teaching players how to play than we were, but we received some good feedback, namely:
- Because we are using positional audio for our guardian, the user sometimes could not hear what the guardian was saying missing out on crucial parts of the tutorial
- Users often skipped past listening to the entire audio cue, looking instead at the waypoints and visual tooltips. This meant that the tutorial was easy enough to follow, but that users would not know how to do critical things in the game.
One thing I was not prepared for was how time intensive script writing for the tutorial and getting all the sound clips hooked up was. By the way, if you are lacking voice talent and need placeholder sounds for your game or experience, Amazon Polly offers a free tier of service that will do text to speech readily. In addition, you can control things like speed, volume, and voice all through an easy to use graphical user interface.
Okay, about to get on a plane now. See you all next week. Hope you guys are making good progress 🙂
Week 9
This week was all about publishing to the Alpha channel of the Oculus Store.
I started by making a build of everything that I’ve done up until now. I made an entry on the Oculus Store, set up the name, etc. I uploaded the APK to the Oculus store, and during validation it failed. My manifest contained invalid values. After some research I found a sample correct manifest, which I altered to my specs and placed in Assets > Plugins > Android. When you place a manifest there, Unity uses that instead of autogenerating one.
I re-uploaded to the store, and this time was told that the application was signed with Debug keys, not Release. After some more research, I figured out how to use the “Existing Keystore” and “Create New Keystore” options which are slightly confusing. I saved a keystore, gave it a password and uploaded. Same error. This time I realized that though I had created a keystore, I had failed to create a key. I created a “release” key and tried again.
I passed the release signing phase and then hit a new error. The app was signed with Signature Schema V2, not V1, which Oculus does not support. The link they provided plus more Googling told me that the only way to support V1 was to switch the build system to Gradle, make a custom Gradle file, then add “v2SigningEnabled false” to the Gradle file.
I tried that, and everything seemed to be going smoothly until I clicked “Build”. The project would no longer build! There was an error, where Gradle could not find the method “v2SigningEnabled()”. Out of desperation, I tried upgrading Unity to 2017.2 Beta.
This led to errors with OVR. I allowed Unity to automatically update outdated APIs, but that doesn’t cover the case where APIs are removed. The “OVRLint” class references now-deleted methods/properties, which I had to comment out. Finally, I was back to square 1 with a project I could run within Unity.
I tried building with Gradle again, and received both the same error AND a success message. When I checked the APK, it was not updated, so I guess the error won. I’ve posted in the Unity forums and Oculus forums, so hopefully someone will come up with an answer there.
EDIT: I switched back to the internal build tools, away from Gradle. I’m now following the video that Nathan A. Haskins posted in the Oculus Launch Pad Facebook group. I’ll post after the process how it went.
EDIT 2: IT WORKED!! Thank you Nathan! This video really saved my bacon and I’m going to recommend it to everyone in the group, especially those doing Gear VR development.
Untitled Music Project - Week 9
Here we go!
I'm delighted to announce that we made good progress on the deck of the experience. Here are a couple of snapshots:
All 5 episodes are outlined and the artist and I are now working on fine-tuning the story arc.
Exciting!!
Celine
Here we go!
I'm delighted to announce that we made good progress on the deck of the experience. Here are a couple of snapshots:
All 5 episodes are outlined and the artist and I are now working on fine-tuning the story arc.
Exciting!!
Celine