Blog Post # 4
This week went by really fast. I made some texture tweaks to
the hospital scene and added blinds to the windows. I also added a few more
objects, to make the space feel more alive/believable. All these objects have
been imported into Unity and I’ve setup the lighting for the scene. I’ve begun
texturing the human characters and should finish those next week. I’ve also
started working on the basement scene and will begin texturing next week. My
partner has been working on getting the title screen functionality working and has
setup the scene transitioning.
I wanted to get the experience tested in the Go headset this
week, but it looks like I’ll be doing that next week. I found an article on how
to do this and hopefully everything goes smoothly. I’m curious to see how it
works compared to deploying to the Gear VR, but it shouldn’t be too different. I will also tackle the pitch/budget documents
next week so that they are ready for the mid-point check in.
Everything is coming along nicely, and I have a nice and
lengthy to-do list to tackle for next week!
#Murder - 4th week- Budget, Design and writing -
Because I was sure the developer proposal was due at the 27th, this week was very productive on our end. I put both feet on the gas paddle and slowed down later the week.
BUDGET-
Cherryl and I met again to write the budget and are very happy with the numbers. We are below the 40k with marketing included. One of the reasons why this idea was so appealing to me was because the initial investment was very basic. Other than the location and other regular production expenses, we pay mainly for manpower, which is wonderful. Our strength shines through our writing and the quality of the performance. This is another quality I love so much about VR. VR brings back the power to the actor and the performance. Instead of delivering a dialogue line by line and build it in editing, you actually get to have a dialogue, live a flowing scene and record it all as one.
In addition, we are able to keep the rates to the minimum with revenue share, as the Counter-Strike team offered. Cherryl, Azra, Katherine, Brandon, and I are going to share the revenue based on the hours we invested in the project. This way we do the work and we can keep the rates for writing, production and technical around the $200 a day. I will do must of the production work, with assistance from the Making360 team. So we covered the majority of elements of the craft such as directing, editing, stitching, compositing and spatial sound design. I am also planning to do the Unity work but we put in the budget a few days for a developer to guide me through any potential rough spots.
We also agreed on a marketing strategy. We would like to put about $1500 for one billboard around LA and another $1500 for a marketing person to connect with blogs, magazines, and other web outlets. It is our belief that the billboard is a good idea because in LA you see so many billboards for all kinds of shows, film, and TV. But I have never seen any VR piece around town yet. Therefore, I think that an image that says VR, like a curved little planet or implementing someone with a headset in the design, along with “available on the Oculus store” is very powerful. Not only for our project, but also for VR as a whole. It says that we are here and VR content started happening. There is a new market in town.
DESIGN -
Designing amazing treatments is where I truly shine! Not to blow my own horn, but I’m good in designing decks. An exciting design that gives the viewer a taste of the world we are creating and the tone is almost more important than the written word.
Attached is the cover art for the written proposal, just to give you a taste of the direction. But I also designed a page for each room in the mystery, just like Clue, and the work is still not done.
WRITING -
I had a really great meeting with Azra this Friday and an awesome Skype call with Katherine. Although the writing process felt messy in the beginning, now we got into a good flow. By now we are all familiar with the story and able to get into the details. As I said before, it really helps to bounce ideas off of one another and see what sticks. We know who is the murderer, why he killed her and how. Now we are planting clues and structure in the game. Katherine will work on rabbit holes and ideas for clues this week and I’ll start writing the adventure web with Brandon (what do we see in every scene and what room leads to where). I have to say that I am proud of myself for insisting on working as a group. Although I had the feeling of “I can write it by myself” in the beginning, I knew it’s not gonna be fun. I love being surprised from the other’s work and creative mind. It gives me the security that I am not alone in this and I have whom to trust. Just like the Counter Strike team mentioned, we play together and enjoy the process. Only we play with storylines and not shooting anything 🙂
Next week we are wrapping the adventure web, treatment and all the rest that is required for the written proposal. We are meeting on Saturday morning to do a murder mystery Escape Room together and then we will continue to finish the writing together. I’m excited and I love my team. I’ll end with words from Abraham Hick (a speaker I admire). Co-creating is what we seek in life. More than success and self-achievement. To bring our talents and energy forward and create with others. Co-creating brings us together, build a supportive community and evokes the best out of us. That’s why we are here 🙂
Devblog #4
On this week I've done some part concept design. I’ve done research about a type of gameplay in VR and I came to the conclusion that I need to change genre of my game. This change led to the rewriting of the script, pitch deck, description of the game, which took a lot of time.
Goals for the following week:
Complete the pitch deck and send it.
Complete concept design for prototype
Continue work on Unicorn, 3d model and textures.
Thanks for the reading!
WEEK 4 (7/23-7/30)
Production
Textured Mil, Loxa, and Quama
Modeled Clock tower v03
Modeled buildings for Cubic Tunnels
Environment concept design for Rainy Lands
Swim Idle animation for Mil
Idle animation for Loxa
Rigged Quama
Engineering
Working on interactions
Hi everyone! This week, we focused on polishing the assets that we’ve made so far. I textured the modeled/rigged characters, Mil, Loxa, and Quama so I can start stylizing my experience within Unreal Engine 4. Our modelers are working on the clock tower and the buildings for Sc02: Cubic Tunnels. We will be able to start laying out our scene once we are done with these assets. Out concept designer worked on the environment concepts for Sc04: Rainy Lands. Our animator worked on the swim idle animation for Mil and an angry idle animation for Loxa. For engineering, we started working on the interaction mechanics. We’re trying to use the laser pointer as a way to pick up items and reel them in to obtain items.
These are some of our work from this week:
Quama texture by Kaley Cho
Building models by Laura Johnson
LA VR Time Machine - Is it week 4 already??
Where does the time go? I think it's a combination of the miserable heat wave in LA (where no one has air conditioning) and me trying to wrap up another project before getting lost in this one. But yeah, I didn't get to build out a new prototype like I hoped. I do have some updates, though.
I looked into using the google maps API. I think it could be useful? But the link to access it says Contact Sales, so I'm not sure if I'm gonna need to pay. I'm not trying to make a pokemon go game that's gonna make a ton of money! (At least, not right now) I also think some of this is designed for making AR games IRL??? I just want to borrow small section of the digital city to mess around with and save some time/have a reference model that I can more easily manipulate.
I think for my prototype this week (that I'm gonna try to do), I'm gonna use my Samsung Gear S6 phone to take a 360 panorama, and see if I can make something using that as a temp photo.
Other than that, I've been inspired to try and do a bunch of little scenes? There's just so many interesting location. I've been thinking about the LA river, and Bunker Hill, which was a neighborhood with a bunch of nice houses on a hill that got demolished and is now all high rise office buildings. They even took out some of the hill! Well, Angel's Flight, which was a trolley people used to get up and down the hill, has a lot of historical photographs, so I'm thinking it might be easy to go through various points of time, and riding the trolley could be a fun part of the experience. My only question since this is gonna be 360 VR, is I wonder what was in the other direction of all the photos!
Another week of asset development, mostly! We've also got a Perforce server set up to properly share work/operate source control for the project between myself and my unreal developer and photogrammetry expert!
I've updated this little promo scene (https://sketchfab.com/models/08ab28191c154e3f8160e763aa351e75) I made last week with the newest assets, including the completed abandoned car, and one of the most important pieces - the water jug! We also have some first passes at photogrammetry rocks sourced from the real locations of the game, by my team member in charge of that (https://sketchfab.com/models/86d879d16c3c4289a7b93bb5dd523a24 , https://sketchfab.com/models/b9da71288b2e46d6abd1bb5e88b80306)!
This whole process has been super awesome! I started with nothing and now things are coming together to form a proper little studio and get the work done 😄 ! We may not have any financial resources going into this at the moment, but my friends and I are passionate about making Stay Hydrated happen and we're starting to bring things together for Yucca Shark Studios to actually become a thing! Its all really exciting to have things starting to get in order. Thanks so much for inspiring me to do this, Launchpad!
This next week will be focused on blocking more of the prototype level out, making some new assets and starting to get the gameplay dynamics worked into the project. I'll also be working on getting whatever we have build wise submitted in to make sure we are eligible for Niko's music drawing and getting the pitchdeck and budget proposals set up!
I've updated this little promo scene (https://sketchfab.com/models/08ab28191c154e3f8160e763aa351e75) I made last week with the newest assets, including the completed abandoned car, and one of the most important pieces - the water jug! We also have some first passes at photogrammetry rocks sourced from the real locations of the game, by my team member in charge of that (https://sketchfab.com/models/86d879d16c3c4289a7b93bb5dd523a24 , https://sketchfab.com/models/b9da71288b2e46d6abd1bb5e88b80306)!
This whole process has been super awesome! I started with nothing and now things are coming together to form a proper little studio and get the work done 😄 ! We may not have any financial resources going into this at the moment, but my friends and I are passionate about making Stay Hydrated happen and we're starting to bring things together for Yucca Shark Studios to actually become a thing! Its all really exciting to have things starting to get in order. Thanks so much for inspiring me to do this, Launchpad!
This next week will be focused on blocking more of the prototype level out, making some new assets and starting to get the gameplay dynamics worked into the project. I'll also be working on getting whatever we have build wise submitted in to make sure we are eligible for Niko's music drawing and getting the pitchdeck and budget proposals set up!
This week we continued working on the prototype. I decided to implement VRTK to speed up the process. We added a dog with animations and a leash into the scene. We worked on he leash interactions (leash mode), decided to have 2 options of interactions with a dog – a joystick input as a more native experience for gamers, and a hand movement that is more natural. It’s planned to test this interaction to see in what way players would change the direction of the dog when it’s walking on a leash.
We also implemented a fetch event (throw event). I plan to test the types of characters (dogs for now) to see which style people would prefer. I made a research on avatars earlier and was digging into it this week to make a decision concerning the style.
We also implemented a fetch event (throw event). I plan to test the types of characters (dogs for now) to see which style people would prefer. I made a research on avatars earlier and was digging into it this week to make a decision concerning the style.
We tested the locomotion methods with few people and got feedback that will be used as a path to our next iterations. The player will be always in control of all the movements and will have options in which way to interact with objects, one option would be more gaming/console like and the other – a natural way of interaction.
