We did some more concept art for the logo for our game. We've been brainstorming quite a bit, and I've been thinking about how I'm going to go about coding it all. I've started modelling a bit as well, and I've created the base Unreal project which is currently loading. So far we have 4 people interested in working on this game with 2 or 3 more potentially.
Some more concept art for our narrator/tutorial guy who will guide you through the game. He is an amalgamation of the Chesire Cat/ The Great Gazoo/ Freddy Kruger/ Mario Slacks/ Cartoon Devil. 
My brother was going for a evil Danny Davito vibe for the game guide guy.
I also did some concept art for a couple bosses, which I tried to make anthropomorphic bugs. The top one having a spider head, and the other a wood lice head.
Some concept art for the medium, which will be called in if you don't haunt the people out of their house before a certain amount of scares. There will also be ghost hunters and an exorcist that can do damage to you to lower your goo.
WORKING BI-LINE:
Welcome to the realm of the
dead! Haunt a house, scare the living but conserve your scare goo!
ELEVATOR PITCH
Ghosted is an action
adventure where you get to scare people out of their homes. Protect
the living realm from monsters, but don't get low on goo. If you get
too low on goo you will be banished to Crud Caverns to hunt for more
goo.
The style of the haunting
part of the game would be Haunting: Poltergeist Guy/Spy vs Spy. It
would also include some poltergeist type mechanics, where you can
make noises or throw things, and we were also thinking about adding a
possession mechanic were you would be able to possess people or
animals. When scaring the living they would react like the old Ghost
Busters toys where their jaws dropped and eyes popped out. Kids and
animals would be more attuned to being scared or noticing you.
Pretty much at the
beginning you die in our game, then you enter the tutorial which
we're planning to have narrated by a beetlejuice/the great gazoo type
character, that will tell you your job is to shut down unauthorized
portals located in the living realm. The tutorial will take you
through how to scare the living, how to shut down portals and how to
fight the monsters responsible for the illegal portals. The reason
for haunting the people out of their houses is, you need bring the
monster through their portal in the living realm to defeat them. As
you scare people, you use up “goo” which is essentially your
health when your in the living realm. When you run low, you are
teleported to the Crud Caves, which we will try to make as a creepy
cave system built like a maze. You will have to collect more goo,
and defeat the creatures that dwell in the cave to refill your goo
bar. If you use too many scare tactics without scaring the tenants
out of their house, they will call in, either a medium, ghost
hunters, or an exorcist.
To cut back on the amount
of activities that would need to be animated for the ai you need to
scare, you would also be banished to crud caverns when the sun comes
out. You would inhabit their house a few hours before bed, until
dawn. We will base the scare meter of the living ai on the line of
sight of the ai when a spell goes off, or by a sound radius to draw
the ai's attention. The finished game would have 4 minor boss
monsters with a final big boss that you defeat at the end.
Oculus Username: Jarrod84
OLP 2018 Blog Post 1
Hi All!
Excited to share my first update and get this ball rolling. The project
I'm going to be working on is tentatively titled "Mail Snail" and
here's what it's all about:
Hi All!
Excited to share my first update and get this ball rolling. The project
I'm going to be working on is tentatively titled "Mail Snail" and
here's what it's all about:
Mail Snail is a lighthearted VR game about the excitement and mystery
moving to a new town. Playing the game is all about collecting,
exploring and uncovering untold stories. The player joins Post the
Snail as they move to a new town and begins his new life there. To pay
the bills you will start a mail courier service which will bring you to a
variety of quirky neighborhoods (and neighbors) around town.As your business grows you’ll have the time and the cash for other
hobbies like decorating your new home, writing to pen pals, and growing
your stamp collection.
The goal is to create a fun, casual game for people who
prefer slower paced experiences built around a central narrative, and
simple mechanics like collection, upgrading and relationship building.
I'm still in the process of nailing down the exact gameplay format, but
from a high level the Snail is an NPC which you have some control over
as the first person player. More of this after I try some different
ideas out. There's several great games I'm looking to as inspiration
including Moss, Night in the Woods, Luna, and Neko Astume.
I
started to write out documentation right after bootcamp ended, and am
polishing up the game design document to get a handle on my vision for
the project as a whole. I decided my initial submission will
essentially be a Vertical Slice - a short demo that shows off the core
elements of the game including the basic game loop, and visual style.
To keep me on track I've also started a Trello board, yay organization!
On the development side of things I've setup my Unreal 4
project and have started some initial work on levels, environment art
and UI. I've decided to keep the art style dead simple for now, relying
on unlit gradient textures. This has a lot of benefits - it's cheap,
fast to use, and looks great in VR. To facilitate this I made a
"gradient sheet maker" in Substance Designer. I brought the Substance
into UE4 and can now make an infinite number of gradient sheets all
within the engine. This lets me tweak colors super quickly in game as
shown below.
This
is the first model I made this past weekend, Post's house. Everything
in this scene is textured using a single 256 gradient sheet, with the
exception of the mail sign (Please ignore the gif compression :P) If
you haven't checked out the Substance suite for texturing, I highly
recommend it, it's been a huge time saver for my workflow. That's it
for now, next week I hope to have updates on the game controls and UI to
share.
Hello! My name is Alejandro, but I go by Aquma. I'm working on a VR time machine for Los Angeles. The current idea is to take places of interest throughout the city, film what it looks like today, and then 3D model from that spot what it might have looked like 100 years ago. Or even 1000 years ago! Who lived there and what was it like? I'm inspired by some analog VR technology -- the View Master! I have one slide of vintage LA and I find it magical, like a portal back in time. So I wanted to try and adapt this experience in a way that's a different kind of immersive and more historical to tell the story of the land and its peoples.
The first step I want to do is spend a little time to research. Get in touch with the people at Lost LA, a local KCET show that goes deep into LA history. I can hopefully talk to Nathan Masters who runs that program and has access to all of the wonderful historical photos in the USC library collections. I want to reach out to my friend Natalie Gravier, who was also a member of the inaugural Launch Pad program with me back in 2016. She made a similar historical meets modern VR project that looked at art deco tunnels of the 110 freeway (the country's first!). I also want to talk to some of the people from the Tongva community (one of LA's indigenous peoples) to hear some of their history and get their input as well. My current list of potential places to film and deconstruct/give back to nature are:
- the Santa Monica freeway that leads from downtown LA to the pacific ocean and the beginning of the Hollywood freeway downtown (which at Broadway used to be a hill that the city destroyed). Both of these routes were used by the areas Indigenous people for traveling/trading.
- Chavez Ravine where Dodger stadium currently sits, atop 3 displaced Mexican American neighborhoods
- Mt Lowe Railway which was a railroad and little community in the mountains of LA (good hiking spot).
- The LA river that used to be natural and had orchards nearby. Union Station sits where Chinatown used to be. What did all that look like before it became a concrete aqueduct and a gentrifying arts district?
And I'm sure I'll think of other places as I learn more history. I think the trick is to not get too caught up in the potential of finding a perfect location and instead just picking one and finding the magic within.
That's it for this update! Good luck everyone.
