Week 11 : Oculus Launch Pad 2018 - Due Sep 17 @ 11am PST

[Anonymous]

New Final Submission Date announced - October 7th at 11amPST. 

[QuixoticHero]

No vLog this week as well. 

This week has been sort of hectic and I've been switching into between projects that wasn't Blue Yonder Falls. Though there has been an event earlier this week where I was able to get some positive feedback.

The one thing that was for Blue Yonder Falls, we've played around with the the mocap suit that we recently got. I've just got to do some blocking for the scenes, but that won't be done until after the 18th once we submit it for feedback.
I will also have a rough draft for the title. Which I'm which really excited to show. I think it sort of hits the nausea with the font, with the background subtlety demonstrating the gameplay. Though that would be a biased assumption on my end.
The tasks this week will prep for the feedback submission. Had some feedback from a few places, and I would want to implement it before submitting. 

Outside of Blue Yonder Falls, but within OLP, I currently have two additional projects as well a possible chance I'm going to do a code review on another.
With the two projects, I'm finally getting some assets to try to hack everything together. I would've wished for more time with them, but I'll do what I can. I'm afraid there won't be no polish.
For the project that I might do a code review for, The OLP cohort has been experiencing some problems with their developer of a receivable build. There might be a chance that the developer has been sitting on the project and is now in a scramble to finish it. Once I take a look at it, I'll be able to come up with a report.

Again, it's been a crazy week and it's only going to get crazier. I'm sort of excited!

Stay awesome,
Troy Allen Norcross

[francis_chen_58]

Hi all:

Last week, I focused exclusively on our OLP VR Mexico City (Tropical Realidad) Experience with fellow Launchpadder Marlon Fuentes, and Jennie Mcguirk.

The good news is that the set for Chapultepec Park is pretty much almost done for our prototype!

Many of the animations are ready (thanks Mixamo!), and now it's a matter of camera placement & spatial pacing throughout the scenes.  

Here's a video of the panning stage of the park, including La Danza de las Voladores, and Sotomayor, performing in the park. 

https://youtu.be/S1BUUqfBqT0

Marlon and Jennie spent this past weekend recording audio, including the short story of different ways to sleep in the Mexico City Subway, written by Marlon's father. The next stages include syncing the audio for both our subway scene and the park. The good news is that in VR, my Quill assets are not causing my headset to crash (yay!) 

Best, 

[charlesniu]

Project Locomoto Development Blog #12:
I Found It

Hello Launchpad!

Last week I looked for conviction and this week I found it! It was like something out of a movie, an act of serendipity, but I found a direction I'm inspired by and can stick with, and came about when my roommate recommended I scrap the central mechanic of my game!

Rather than Cosmonote, a climbing based rhythm game, or Theus, a scaling based puzzle game, I met both halfway and ended up with:

(Placeholder first pass at logo)

Homeward is a multiplayer VR platformer utilizing my Lean Walk locomotion system, but with an additional social twist (read the Medium post to learn more!). The concept came about when I finally came to grips that something had to be done about the jump mechanic in my Lean Walk system, which was giving my testers headache. The old jump mechanic required players to perform a physical jump while wearing their headset, which was very disorientating. I scrapped that and opted for a trigger-based system - as the user holds down trigger, I apply an upwards force to their character. The effect works like a jet pack, and that inspired me to set the game in the space-themed world of Cosmonote.

On Saturday I hosted a Demo or Die with Launchpad folks in the Bay Area. It was a lot of fun checking out everyone's projects and having people go through my buggy first prototype of Homeward. I came out with a lot of helpful feedback.

Here's Troy and Neilda trying out the locomotion mechanic:


For more info, check out this week's medium blog: https://medium.com/@projectlocomoto/developer-blog-12-i-found-it-99cf6194fd1c

See you next week,

Charles Niu

[azra_isakovic]

Hi!

This past week was wonderful with infusions of stress and pressure since the deadline is coming up. I needed to shoot some pick up shots so I did that with Nir on Friday. Nir and I spent a few days together working and he is just amazing! He helped me with my project a lot on the technical end! We actually work really well together. 

We reshot some scenes with Karla because I wasn't happy with all the footage or the sound from Sunday. I wanted to get more variety and make it more scenic. This week I am going over it all to piece together the whole story. Nir and I also hired someone to help us with the Unity build for the 20th submission deadline. 

Hope everyone has an amazing week ahead of them 🙂 

[belmorea]

Week 11: With Friends Like These

We made real progress on the Android App, and may have actually managed to crack the code on a web-based version as well. Most development work went into the mobile platform this week, and that will continue into next week as well.

The art side continues to be problematic from a project perspective (but for good reasons on a personal level!). We ultimately found 2 artists we liked who could do some free work for us, one on the VR side and one for concept art. Our VR artist’s baby dropped early, so he had to leave the project to finish preparing for that. Our concepting artist had an accident that caused such bad injuries (9 broken ribs to start :-/) that he has not yet been able to confirm if he will be able to finish the concept art prior to the deadline.

Given where we are timewise, I have decided to take an active role in the art pipeline and will literally learn it from scratch in order to be a backup resource to get some pieces into the demo game by the 7th. Will probably end up making some calls into the artists in the program for some help (hell yes, OL’Pals!) since it’s going to be an extra busy 2 weeks!

[PlumCantaloupe]

This week has been a rush as the pressure mounts to submit something substantial. I have also been doing much more project management than I am comfortable with, making sure everyone on the team has everything they need to continue moving forward, while I solidify concepts and experiments into concepts along the way. It is an important job though and I am especially glad now that I have budgeted for another WebVR developer if we get funding.

I have also reached out to my old cello teacher about helping with the music and foley. He has grown to be an amazing sound engineer and it would be great to have him on this project, and pay him for his time. Generally, I see a project like this as a wonderful opportunity to bring together amazingly talented people together I know to create a wonderful VR experience, help them pay the bills, and to hopefully help them get more interesting work in the future as I feel their talents are vastly underrated. It would make me so happy to help them step up, just as others have done for me (such as being accepted to this program). Fingers crossed!

Also, the backend developer has made great strides in creating a system for a "teacher" to invite students to their "VR classroom/campfire"; and some more refinement from the modeller on the Roseland Theatre!

https://sketchfab.com/models/babf972ac6074bf2a11c11c95500aed7

[jesseayalajr]

This week we scouted the location and possible film angles. We mapped out a total of 11 camera positions in the Christopher street and Sheridan Square park the area outside and around the Stonewall Inn. 

We also set up a test shoot location for the interview pieces. To make this sequence easy to edit it will be filmed on a white seamless background. This also enables our ability to add voices to the project in the future. 

[madomfeh]

Not the greatest news for this week.

Windows  10 auto-update bricked my computer and causes a restart loop in a blue screen.? I'm attempting to recover with my data in tact via a usb boot drive... If it can't be restored it shouldn't be very difficult to re-create as the hardest part was learning how the viulsualizer worked. I have a version from a few weeks ago to build back from as well but I would rather not lose time on this. Moral of the story: always use source control. 
Hopefully there's better news coming next week.

[shayao]

Blog Post #10 (for week 11)

I was out of the country for about 2 weeks for a business trip. It was for another VR educational program I have been working on at work. I realized that I can also try to reach out to some culture organizations/ museums and see if they are interested in the OLP program and interested in promoting it, and even be the customers later.  

At the same time, our animator quit unfortunately and we tried to find some more people to work on the animation part we need within budget which is not fun and easy. For fastening the process, I also purchased some more assets for the environment, and arrange them in Unity. We will try to catch up with the new hire this week. and this week I will work on the voice over which can help the artist to work on the animator. 

Hope everything goes well this week!

[jordan_jonesbre]

The past week has involved lots of playtesting of the main “puzzle” mechanic in the game and the context around it. With the outline of the level for the demo finalized and grey boxed, we have been testing multiple movement options as well as the main interaction to make sure it not only fluid, but is tutorialized in a way for the players to understand.

As you see above, the main interaction involves picking up an item (that is abstracted into being a blue box at the moment) and using a magic wand to draw your own version of that item. We found that the interaction is working well, but the collisions on all the items needed some tuning. In the following week consistent playtesting continues, the rest of the art assets for the game are scheduled to be completed.