Category Archives: Journal

Jul 16
0

VR DevLog 8

By | Journal, VR | 2 Comments

Managed to get in a quick play test at the Sydney IGDA Beer & Pixels event last night. It was an excellent chance to see some people playing the game and chatting about the experience. It’s helped make me feel a bit more confident about the whole idea. 🙂

So sometime over the next week I’ll make the current build available publicly and record some quick videos. I’m far to busy preparing for PAX AUS to be able to do it right away.

Other things I’ve been looking at:
– Changed the orientation of the world blocks to rotate towards the viewer. I like the look of the non-rotated blocks but it can make the platform edges harder to estimate. I’ll keep at least one level with the old orientations and see how it goes in a play test. Perhaps I’ll try adding in some more highlights to the edges and see of that helps, if it’s a problem to begin with.

– Started to work on a prototype boss encounter. Main limitation here is the artwork but it’s certainly playable. Inspiration comes from the multitude of mega man bosses as well as a few other games I’ve enjoyed in the past. World of Warcraft raid bosses have a lot of interesting mechanics that are burnt into my brain. After leading a raid group through most bosses from vanilla wow until the Cataclysm expansion. I can still remember most of the strats 🙂

An action platformer with big multi-phase boss fights is a game I’d like to play. Adding VR makes it interesting too 🙂

< damn I should have taken a photo of people playing the game and put it here >

wait on.. saved by someone more organised! … linky

-Ryan

Jul 13
0

VR DevLog 7

By | Journal, VR | No Comments

After the decisions mentioned in the last post, I took a bit of a break from dev work to replenish my batteries. Also managed to offload my 2 year old daughter to my parents for a couple of days! Man that was an awesome sleep in.

Now back to it!

My last push for this VR demo is to create a bit more polish and fix any major bugs. It’s not meant to be a long demo and with the nature of first-timers using the Oculus Rift, shorter is better.

It’s not at a level I’d really want it to be but the game now flows from a simple start to a final boss encounter. I’ll be culling most of the content for the final demo. It’s just good to have lots to choose from.

The ideas and direction for the gameplay have started to solidify. The game will be a cross between megaman style action platforming and roguelike randomised content / level structure. I really love games like The Binding Of Isaac, Spelunky and Rogue Legacy. It would be cool to have that sort of twist on the gameplay.
Key points include:
– Randomly generated levels and content.
– Lots and lots of crazy weapons and power ups.
– Short, hard levels with boss encounters.
– Multiple level ‘themes’ used to generate the random level. Each having a randomly chosen boss encounter. Mini bosses and secret levels should exist too.

This way the game will be content heavy and very scalable. A working version should be up and running quite early.

For this current demo I’ve chosen a random theme with no story but this is something that’s going to need to be decided to move forward anymore with this game. Some of the story/theme ideas need to mulled over a bit more to see if anything sprouts legs and walks off with the show.

Back to it. I think I’ll make some more videos tonight because why not?

-Ryan

Jul 09
0

Hard Decision

By | Journal | One Comment

Well this sucks! Everything is booked and paid for…. but we won’t be able to attend the majority of the PAX event.

For too long I’ve been in denial about how close my wife’s due date is for our second baby. It’s due to arrive any moment now! This is too close for comfort. I can’t be in Melbourne overnight, especially three nights.

So anyway I’m taking a return day flight for one or perhaps two of the days. Less risk and guaranteed to be able to return.

This especially sucks because it means Przemek can’t justify coming for just one day :'(

All this could change if the baby comes before PAX starts! So… who knows

That’s life I guess! Meh!

-Ryan

Jul 03
0

VR DevLog 6: Tech Demo to Game

By | Journal, Screenshots, VR | No Comments

Another bunch of time spent doing things…

– Focused on making this little tech demo into a working game demo. Progress made but lots left to do.

– Biggest push has been on the gameplay and game flow. Each weapon in the game will be designed to have an alternate mode that uses the head tracking in some way.

– Played with an interesting way to bring more depth into the game … Basically letting the player switch planes of movement to be further or closer to the view point. It also unlocks lots of gameplay options too.

– On a side note its been hard writing these logs more often. It seems I just need to start typing without any real plans and things just fall onto the page.

– Menus suck with VR! Just putting everything into 3D now and attaching it to the right eye transform.

– Music and sfx are looming large on the list that really need to be in there! I’m setting aside the next few nights for doing this. I’m pretty amateur at the music stuff!

soundcloud

Head tracked reticle

Jun 27
0

VR DevLog 5: Stumble and Bumble

By | Journal, Videos, VR | No Comments

So many things are being thrown at other things in attempt to make something that resembles fun and works well with VR.

Thought I needed to make a video of one of those things… shooty shoot and teleport platforming… this has good potential I think. Just need to properly design the levels and enemies and it could be cool! Also need art! >_>

Now to make sure it’s in the form of a playable demo with a few of the other mechanics available.

-Ryan

 

Jun 26
0

VR DevLog 4: Random Screens

By | Journal, Screenshots, VR | No Comments

Dumping these here.. some in-development screenies..

Jun 25
0

VR DevLog 3

By | Journal, VR | No Comments

Brick wall!

Very much hitting one with regards to motivation and inspiration related for this game. It’s probably related to RL issues more than anything else.

Despite this I’ve managed some decent progress.

– Managed to get a nice workflow going for the level building and art creation. Probably write more later.

– Still trying to fix the issues of aliasing that get exaggerated when using the low-res Oculus. At the moment I’m throwing a bunch of post process filters on there. Seems to reduce it enough. I don’t think it will be fully fixable on these dev kits though. Looking forward to the HD ones!

– The gameplay took a bit of a back seat in the past few weeks but it’s back up front now. I’m trying to create a focused, unique experience with the VR unit but am finding it difficult to bring together all the ideas into a coherent game.

– Will need to cull a bunch of mechanics/ ideas and focus on a couple of them.

– Game theme is still rolling around collections thoughts. Could influence chosen mechanics.

– Finding it hard to choose between platforming styles…. I.e. combat heavy vs jumping heavy. Can decide on this when there’s a richer array of combat tools using he head tracking.

– If this is going to be shown at PAX Aus then it will need a better demo ‘framework’ … Some kind of mini story and final goal. Need to get on that ASAP.

-Ryan

top down vr platformer

Jun 19
0

VR DevLog 2

By | Journal, VR | No Comments

So today…

– I pondered and experimented on a way to implement pixel art style graphics in 3d. I think Fez did it really well but I don’t want to copy it. I need to go back play it again and see how they handled camera angles and rotation.

– The idea is to have pixel art in a VR environment with freedom of head look. It may actually be impossible to get it to look good but it’s worth a try.

– Cube maps projected on 3d mesh for tiles? 2D camera facing sprites for everything else?

– Must experiment more. The low resolution in the current VR dev kit isn’t very nice to already pixelated images. There’s bound to be a sweet spot for the character to screen size ratio. It may end up being a non-problem considering the consumer release will have the higher resolution displays.

– Next job is to create a mock up of the current scene and replace all the visuals with the pixel art versions and see if it works at all. Otherwise a completely different style is required.

Simple voxel test

– After creating some simple voxels to test the visuals, there’s no visual win using them for any type of character sprites. Next I’ll need to test the 3d world tiles, there should be much more of an effect there considering they actually change camera angle more.

Dumping some test models into the scene to test a more enclosed feeling

– Without any kind of visual coherency, I tried adding a bit of clutter to the scene to see if it improves the feel. It does… and it’s certainly something that would work regardless of the final art style…. will revisit later.

– Now to build a more complete and simple level to test everything working together….tomorrow

-Ryan

 

Jun 19
0

VR DevLog 1

By | Journal, VR | No Comments

Today’s discoveries:

– making 2d pixel art look good in a 3d world with perspective is hard.

– small characters don’t work with VR 3rd person cameras. Bigger is better!

– most post processing effects work in stereoscopic 3d.

– colour correction for the headset is hard to tweak.

– need a “reset orientation” button for testing any VR stuff.

– need to emphasise the scale of the world and force the player to look around more. Could potentially lead to the player feeling motion sick sooner…. But it’s cooler so fuck it!

-Ryan

Jun 18
0

VR Considerations

By | Journal, VR | No Comments

So I’m making a VR game but what does this mean?

Primarily it means I will support the Oculus Rift Peripheral as the primary display for the game. But it also means I will be including gameplay that’s designed specifically with the VR unit in mind.
This approach is different from just ‘supporting’ a VR unit, there’s a lot more risk but the reward is also potentially higher.

The way I see it, taking an existing game and adding VR is relatively easy (ignoring UI and control issues) and low risk.
Designing and creating a game that requires VR has the potential to create a much more unique gaming experience. This seems like the most desirable path to follow, however..

Can I sell it? To make it worth investing my time and money, I would need(like) some way of recouping that cost (at the very least).

How big will the market be? This in entirely unknown. Being able to sell a game requires a market (duh) … pricing a game requires knowledge of that market size. Estimates can be made but it’s all guess work.

Should I just ditch the VR requirement? Including redundancies to allow playing without the headset and re-implementing VR specific gameplay elements for non-vr. Actually I think this is potentially the way to go. If a game can hold up on it’s own with the VR ‘gimmicks’ then it’s bound to be a better experience when actually using it’s VR.

When is the Oculus Rift releasing the consumer version? This is important for any financial estimations and release windows. I don’t see the point in releasing any VR only games until after the first Rift is released. Perhaps Oculus will even have their own market place solution for these games and it can become a platform unto itself? Or perhaps one of the major consoles will support it? PS4?

Do I really care about making any money? Well not really but it would be nice to be able to support myself from games without working other jobs!

How long should a play session be? The nature of an immersive 3D experience will limit the length of time someone can play a game. I think somewhere about 20-30 minutes is the ideal time. Maybe even smaller sessions would be desirable. This point would require a lot of testing I think.

If you build it they will come? Maybe it’s a chicken and egg situation, the size of the audience will grow as soon as there is something worth experiencing. One of the biggest advantages could also come from having limited games available in an emerging market. Get in early?

Building a VR game is super exciting, it can change games as we know them. Maybe it’s best to just embrace it and have a bit of a snuggle.

-Ryan

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