rift

May 13
0

VR DevLog 18: Gameplay Loop

By | Journal, Super Mega Mega, Videos, VR | No Comments

So once again it’s been far too long since I wrote a devlog… mainly because I haven’t had anything to say! But also because I’ve been very busy on other projects and going to GDC and moving house/office.

Now things have settled down, development can kick back into gear. Super Mega Mega is coming up to a cool point in development. The core of the coding is done and the majority of work now lies in content generation.

I’m currently working on getting a more complete, playable version of the game ready to demo and get feedback on. I might even release this one publicly.

The game has evolved to be an interesting blend of games like MegaMan, Zelda and The Binding of Isaac. I want a highly replay-able, short session experience that works both with and without VR.

Now comes the point where the real game design stuff needs to be sorted… I’m hoping to have a version working well for the upcoming Beer & Pixels event… but I’m not sure I’ll have the time. I really need to get some feedback on this soon! Game design is not my strong suit…..yet! I’m going to have to focus and knuckle down to pull something cool out here.  A challenge!

Cheers!

-Ryan

Jan 21
0

VR DevLog 17

By | Journal, Super Mega Mega, VR | No Comments

Revisiting randomness

My recent work on SuperMegaMega has revolved around figuring out a lot of the desired game play and story.

Part of that process has led me back to considering procedural generation again.

I want to have a game that won’t require massive play sessions but is still appealing each time it’s played. The sense of progression is also important.

For examples of this I have been playing a lot of the recent roguelike evolutions that have become popular.

Some of them use random content in a way that is still very controlled. For example “The Binding of Isaac” uses a large set of hand made rooms (over 1000) that are chosen from as building blocks for the larger level layouts. “Rogue Legacy” does a similar thing too whilst Spelunky uses a more fine-grained version but it’s essentially the same idea.

So now SMM is using this pattern with its own twist. Pre made rooms and structures give more control over the player experience.   The main restriction is all the rooms are based around a cylindrical structure. As long as there are a shit load of variants to select from it will seem very random. Just need to make sure the quality level is maintained over the entire  set of rooms.

The actual gaming loop is currently being experimented with. So far leaning towards using a permadeath system with unlockable weapons and events. Don’t really know what will work until I get some more play testing done!

Lots of enemies,weapons,items and levels to make!

Also, my new phone is awesome! Note3 ftw

-Ryan
 

Dec 30
0

VR DevLog 16

By | Journal, Super Mega Mega, VR | No Comments

One thing I’ve been thinking about recently is motion sickness and VR. My wife tried the ‘Titans Of Space’ demo and got really sick in record time.

This really surprised me! I figured this demo was one of the easiest for first timers. Perhaps my perceptions of what has the potential to make someone sick is a bit out of whack.

I think it’s important to try and minimise the barf inducing effects but I fear it’s (at least partially) unavoidable.

Super Mega Mega has a pretty small percentage of people who feel sick I think. The one part I’m worried about is the screen-shake effect.

There are lots of technical things I’ve read and acted upon and I don’t want to repeat them here but it’s certainly a potential wall between VR tech going mainstream. At least it seems the consumer version of the Rift will be targeting a much lower latency… which could fix most of the problems and make everyone happy. Games just need to keep up their end of the bargain.

Anyways I think I’ve decided to have an options menu to allow the potential chunder busters to be switched off. That should hopefully cater to most people.

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news

Back to work! Hoping to have a new playable demo available in the next 2-3 weeks. It all depends on how much time I get to work on it.

-Ryan

Dec 18
0

VR DevLog 15: Static Dynamic Vertices

By | Journal, Screenshots, Super Mega Mega, VR | No Comments

Now something a bit more technical and rambling… But not too bad 😉 … again this will help me more than anyone else 😛

With the initial prototype for Super Mega Mega, the world is completely dynamically rotating around the centre point of the world.

This was chosen to ensure the VR head tracking camera wouldn’t have any major issues with things like motion sickness.

Also, the player movement code becomes a lot simpler when the player isn’t actually moving and the level just rotates on a single axis.

The problem comes now with performance. I’ve been starting to push the detail levels of all the levels up a lot and that’s increased the draw call and vertex count significantly.

Deferred rendering is being used to get some nice lighting and post effects but it really hammers the draw call count.

To reduce this I have a few options:

– Reduce the vertex count of the individual blocks significantly (Unity dynamic batching doesn’t allow more than 900 vertex attributes which means about 200-300 vertices for me) which would make this look shitty.. potentially only an option if the detail is replaced with normal maps.  This would add a lot more work into my pipeline…. not cool but has potential.

– Leave it where it is and just decrease the level sizes. Not cool either! Seeing the tall tower stuff is one of the coolest bits.

– Switch all the mesh blocks to static objects and change the movement code to adapt. This is the first option I’m currently testing out. Draw calls are reduced significantly but now the camera has to be rotated to follow the player. This might screw with your head when wearing the VR headset…. must really test this ASAP. If it doesn’t cause any problems I’ll switch all the levels into this static mode. Re-writing the movement will be a pain but it’s a once off thing.

If anyone has any pearls of wisdom here.. feel free to drop them on me @bluntgames

Anyway it’s good to be back in the middle of it all. Hoping to be able to share some awesome new stuff early in the new year!
-Ryan

p.s.

After writing this I think I’ve decided to embrace the ‘all normal-mapped future’. This will make the vertex count of the blocks restricted but it should be nicely compensated with the normal detail I hope. My only concern is the lack of quality in the silhouettes. I’ve also solved the non-manifold mesh generation that was plaguing the tool used for current models. Perhaps the best solution is a happy mix of dynamically batches models and auto-combined models.

The attraction of having everything in the world dynamic (destructible and movable) is far too appealing to ignore.

test test test

 

Aug 03
0

VR DevLog 10

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I took a little development break this past couple of weeks, mainly to prepare for the birth of my new kid (it’s a boy yay)… but I’ve had some time to start getting back into some work…

– One of the problems I noticed when using ray casts for the “Is the player looking at something?” test seems to be it’s high accuracy. Most of the time the player is not actually looking directly at their desired target and it’s not obvious why the it isn’t being highlighted or it can be frustrating moving the head around to try get the exact positioning.

I’m trying to ditch the ray casting and use the Unity trigger system to filter out the objects that enter/exit/stay in players view. First tests say it will work well. The technical parts work fine this way (so did ray casting) … but now there’s more room for a fudge factor to play with. Previously I would have had to cast a bunch more rays to try and get a better indication of what the player could possibly be looking at. I won’t know for sure until I get some more play testing done.

– A quick improvement for the demo is to make the player character visible when behind blocks….. adding this will greatly improve the playability in a few of the parts of the game. It will also mean I don’t have to worry about hiding the player as much. Could also maybe use it for enemies and things.. dont know yet.

– The game still needs more VR specific game mechanics. I’m experimenting with a few different things still. I’ll have to add them in for the next play test for sure.

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out!

-Ryan

 

Jul 22
0

VR DevLog 9 : Post Prototype

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Prototype complete.

Now that’s done it’s time to start to flesh out more of the mechanics and level structures.

I’ll be avoiding anything theme/art related for a little while longer and just stick to adding a bunch of the platformer ‘tools’ (moving platforms, variable physics, enemy types, bosses etc) this should provide a good base to build the rest of the game upon.

I’ve created a few hacks during the prototype phase and I’ll need to throw a bunch of it away and re-make it in a nicer more user friendly way. For example, each unity scene stands on it’s own with no shared data or configuration files. That makes it nice and easy to load/reset a level but it also means all the levels need to be updated if any of the global configs change. This is first on the list!

The level editor will need to flow a lot better than it currently does. I’ve had to manually place a few pieces of the levels because I didn’t have time to create the editor support. Most of it is non-trivial it’s just a matter of getting in there. Manually placing tiles instead of painting them is some kind of hell.

During my short time at PAX AUS I managed to snag some time on the newer HD Oculus Rift. First thing noticeable is the massive improvement in clarity. Especially in the key portion directly at the effective viewing area in front of the eye. You have to look for the screen door effects and they are quickly forgotten about. Text is actually visible now, making it a bit easier to get some useful menu interfaces working.

I’ll be ordering the next dev kit whenever it’s ready. I don’t know what specs the consumer Rift will have but I don’t think it would be far off. I’d be happy just to include positional tracking with the HD screen. More improvements can come later!

So far I’d say any version of the Rift will have a limited session time for most people. The biggest factor here is related to the brains exhaustion levels with having everything in the scene in sharp focus all the time. We need some eye tracking support to allow dynamic depth of field calculations. Hopefully that’s not too far off.

Back to it!
-Ryan

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

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