Week 12 : Oculus Launch Pad 2018 - Due Sep 24 @ 11am PST

[Anonymous]

Wow we've made it to Week 12

[meredithwilson]

Week 12 Blog
Wroking Title: Retreat


The end is in sight!! All of our game mechanics are dialed in, our environment is pretty much done (huge thanks to Mike our concept artist turned environmental artist who spent a long time atlering the environment so it'd run at 100fps). I've got our sound fx sorted out, the main menu, death screen and end credits are made, and I successfully uploaded a working build to the Alpha Channel ::smile:
Now it's mostly a matter of improving some of our textures and making the menu screen less ugly. I'm feeling pretty happy and relaxed with where things are at and so does the rest of my team. I probably won't get a whole lot done in the next week other than working on the proposal since I'll be traveling (to OC5 y'all!!). However there's still plenty to do when I get back, mostly level design stuff like making sure that the enemy NPC's aren't moving or firing too quickly, etc., nothing that will take too long. 


I can't wait to see everyone at OC5 this week!!!

[ladykillmonger]

Project Name: FacadeVR (a socialVR experience) 
Name(s): Jasmine Roberts, Kanu Jason Kanu, Katherine Mimnaugh
Platform: Oculus Go (Santa Cruz)

This past week we are going to have to really sprint to the finish. (we need to come in from behind) The concept is tight enough we just need to quickly iterate on everything. Because this is a first iteration we are scaling back to thoroughly explain features and make small adjustments

Accomplishments:
Adding music and extra effects. 

Weekend Goals:
-By Saturday, a build will be on the App Store
-To have a UML Diagram of all of the projected features. 

Texturing for mobile is a pain..but worth it.



Postcard:


See you at OC5!!!

[Anonymous]

Speeding up video processing

As we’re working on stitching, processing, and rendering our video assets in the highest quality, we’re starting to hit a bottleneck in the most essential resource: time. Adobe After Effects, Premiere Pro, and Nuke/CaraVR all take a while to process, and with 6K+3D+10bit footage this processing time becomes conspicuous. Processing one frame takes about 30 seconds, and we often do 2-8 passes on our shots before they’re just the way we want them. Add tweaks in between, and you can become busy for months with a mere 10 minutes of footage. Just in time for the Rift 2 release 😉

What can one do? We started by breaking down our footage into PNG sequences, enabling each frame to be processed independently. Then, our amazing VR post-production lead Aaron set up a Deadline-based cluster spanning a few machines so he could execute rendering tasks on all of them concurrently.

Good enough? No! We also optimized the cluster. We went further to utilize Deadline’s concurrent tasks and multi-slave rendering features to fit 2 slaves on each server (allocating a separate GPUs to each slave), with 1 (After Effects) or 2 (Nuke) concurrent tasks per virtual slave. This helped us bring RAM and CPU utilization from 20-30% to 70-80%, which is a lot healthier. GPUs still stay under-utilized at 30-50%, but that’s the way video rendering typically goes.

Now we’re hitting another bottleneck: power capacity (duh). After a couple of blown fuses, we dialed our least efficient nodes down and offloaded the Premier Pro job (the longest atomic one) to our CTO’s place, while using Google Drive to sync the footage. We can’t do much more in the short-term, but will look into adding some cloud-based rendering nodes in the future.

[parwad]

Hey all

Super productive but stressful week.
Signed up for office hours to check issues with our build at OC5
Excited to meet all and learn from amazing sessions.

We came quite close to call it a wrap and test.

We Too Sing AmericaVR is an immersive 3minute virtual reality experience centered on collective narratives of Hate Crimes in in a multiracial post 9/11 America.

More art here

Just testing our build last minute, bugs and fixes and hope to upload it well by the deadline, hopefully!
See you at OC5.

[Jarrod84]

Project: Ghosted

I can't really remember what I did this week from last week.  I haven't been sleeping much due to a problem with a wisdom tooth, and just trying to get stuff done.  I think last week I added a possession mechanic and I added a few more things to this.  Basically you set a ghost trap, and the object comes to life and the player can control it with the thumbstick and some buttons.  We have the vacuum, the doll, and the mask as things the player can control for the prototype.

I also have been working on painting the skins on objects, just to give an idea on how some of the finished art would look.

We've also been coming up with ideas involving diversity and life experience.  We're going to try and incorporate some first nation deities,  there was one called the weetagoo kids used to talk about on the reserve that I can't find on google, so I'm trying someone that knows what I'm talking about.  We're also throwing an idea around where the player would make bets with Jeffisto for items and stuff.  We also want to make the player feel like the new kid in a small town, where jeffisto makes up stuff about the player based on how they interact with him.  We have a few ideas for the people you haunt as well.  This will pretty much be my last week to work on the project as I am moving 3000 kms away, I'll try to get in another playtest and update on my journeys though.  For the rest of my time, I'll just try to work on the ai that the player haunts as I feel this is the level that shows the creative part of the game.   We've also started to include stuff that freaked us out as kids.  The mask in the room is based on a vancouver island first nation mask my grandma had on her wall since I was a kid.

We also have started talks with a voice casting guy, he might be a producer, I'm not entirely sure of his role, but he said he could get me Malcolm from Nostalgia Critic to do the voice of Jeffisto, and possibly Tamara.  We have someone working on our website, and feeding us more ideas too.  After trying some other peoples games I kind of felt deflated, but we'll just do our best, and hopefully I can get everything done before time is up.

[lildub]

Sitching-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W53Ep37udEI

[charlesniu]

Project Locomoto Development Blog #13: Homeward Bound

Howdy Launchpad,

We're coming up on the deadline and I'm crunching like hell to get a demo out with the new direction I'm taking. Among the progress points for this week, I created a new logo card which I added to the new build I uploaded onto the OLP release channel. Here are four of the iterations I made on the logo card, I'm currently sticking with the last one, but feel free to let me know if you prefer one of the other ones.

I created a low-poly blockout of my demo level, a lot of work needs to go into polishing this now. One particular issue I noticed was that solid-block color materials lack contrast points that the brain needs to understand its positional context in the world. I'll have to test out more textured environments.

I also created and rigged up the astronaut character that will be the player model in the game. The rig is still pretty rough and I'll need to clean it up a little, but here's the astronaut performing a walking-backwards animation with some of my past characters, I thought it looked like they were doing a nice little dance so I recorded it.

If you want to read more, including about the technical challenges I faced with the player collider, there's more information is on this week's medium blog: https://medium.com/@projectlocomoto/developer-blog-13-homeward-bound-f7922d61001e

Looking forward to seeing everyone at Connect,
Charles Niu

[VRolga]

This week I rewrote the game script, I created a very detailed description of all the interactions in game, wrote the voiceovers for the narration and characters, recorded the actual voice overs. Niko sent me more music and sound this week, we discussed the details and Niko created the new sound pieces and sound effects. We selected the new assets for the house. The sculptures of the Dragon and Baba Yaga are ready and in the right style, made by Bilibin’s illustrations. Currently working on retopologizing the assets.  

Medium (tool) gives the charactrs a unique look specific to the paintings of Bilibin – smooth with local colors, thick, fluid plasticine like lines. The style overall matches Bilibin’s stylistic very well.
3D characters and some objects will be sculpted in Medium and retopologized if needed afterwards utilizing 3D coat methodology or Meshlab, depending on the object.
I also researched games that have characters made in Medium for the inspiration and some technical info.

I am also willing to use Russian classical music, something from Glinka, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky who were writing music for operas and ballet based on Russian Fairy Tales and poems of Puschkin, currently researching the copyrights for that and if I can use such music.

Also worked on the storyboard based on the script. The prototype has a second scene now – the house of Baba Yaga with a dragon and a sword interactions, the storybook is coming along as well as more of the other interactions from script. A lot is supposed to happen there and many of the objects would be interactable but due to the time constraints and the fact that I pivoted we decided to put only few interactions there. Also, submitted the prototype for review on Thursday.

Scene in-progress below

[Kaley_Cho]

WEEK 12

Engineering

• Added dialogue for all scenes

• Completed long distance grabbing

Art

• Modeled SC02 puzzle lever

• Modeled final scene geometry

• Created the shader for the Entrance Gate

• Completed promo art

• Added Loxa and Quama animations

• Added animated objects in SC04: RainyLands

• Added fog to SC03 and SC04

This week, we finalized most of the visuals and started focusing on the game mechanics. I’ve replaced all the temporary scene geometries to final models and re-textured the models. I’ve also added a psychedelic shader to the Entrance Gate to further polish the visuals. All the character animations and dialogues for SC03 has been added and we just need the animations for SC02 now. The scenes are starting to look much more polished with the added fog effects and proper lighting. Megan modeled the puzzle lever for SC02 for this week, and Chana completed the promo art for the experience. We also finally finished the mechanics for long distance grabbing. It took us quite some time, but we managed to make grabbable objects to have an outline when the player is within a certain distance.

[QuixoticHero]

This has been crazy week. Still in crunch mode!

For Blue Yonder Falls, I've been more focused on a bit of polish on the gameplay. Adding a couple of functionalities, as well as sound effects. With the sound effects, I'm getting close the to the sounds I want, but I believe I can do better with them after October 7th.

Got some feedback from some people that don't typically play games to people that never even tried VR. Though they had problems getting through the first couple of waves, which I need to add a laser for guidance, it has been very positive. The best part is telling them what the goal is, and me sitting down and asking questions within the realm of what influenced them growing up.

With developments on story, I was able to record the narration and I'm currently getting feedback on that. I'll load the screenplay for the very beginning, and with that I've gotten the response I was going for, but I think the sample size is too small. Hopefully with the audio done it will be a bit easier to get that feedback. One of the big things I got done was changing some aspects of the story and some of it's characters. Though the overarching theme is grief, there is now a shift in what it is to belong, especially in time where individuals are feeling isolated.

More on that later...

This week, OC5 and moving the studio to another city for a year. We'll see how that goes. Hopefully we'll be able to get the mocap work finished to sync up with the audio. Fingers crossed.

For the two projects that's within OLP. Primarily I'll let the cohorts I'm assisting describe the details, in short from me, I'm in crunch mode for them to have a gameloop ready by the end of the week. I'm fitting those projects in after the paid projects that's outside OLP...

Imagine me sleep walking. That's the best way to interact with me until after October 7th. 

As always, stay awesome.