UPDATE #1
Brainstorming
Our team of 7 was tasked with creating a gaming experience for the Positron Voyager motion platform chair. The first order of business was to start brainstorming ideas for gaming experiences that would make the most of the chair. The major question that remains is how much runtime interaction we can have with the chair - this will play a major role in defining the extent and complexity of the experience. After having a chance to sit through one of the existing Voyager experiences ourselves, we are all very inspired by the landing effect in the "Take Flight" experience. We're very keen to incorporate such an effect into our own gaming experience. Here's a glimpse at some of our ideas for games:
UPDATE 3
Storyline
Feedback from the professors, TAs and our peers after our pitch had us rethinking our game this week. We realized that our game was perhaps too complex for us to be implement well, given that none of us have experience with Unity. Our week started with scaling down, finalizing the story line and building the design document. This involved fleshing out game play, building a flow chart, finalizing the hardware/software and listing the assets that seemed most appropriate. We have now decided to only keep the first phase, where the player has to navigate to a planet and dodge asteroids on the way. The second phase, where the player lands on the planet and performs some sort of search and rescue mission has been put on the backburner, and it will only be worked on if we are able to finish the first phase with sufficient time to spare. Here is our game design document as it stands right now.
UPDATE 2
Concept
After syncing with Professor V and Mehul, a representative from the Positron team, we have finalized on our game concept - we are creating a space-based game, that has our player sitting in a spaceship or pod and he/she has something of a rescue mission to complete which involves him/her navigating the vehicle through the depths of space to reach a target planet and then carry out their mission there. We are now in the process of preparing a pitch to present in class. Our focus is on outlining the story in as much detail as we can. Some key factors we are trying to keep in mind - the flow of the story should feel organic and logical; our story should be imaginative yet believable; the entire project should be feasible, especially considering that no one in the team has any experience using game engines. Part of our project pitch:
UPDATE 4
Prototyping
This week was a very productive one for our team. We have all been casually playing around with Unity to familiarize ourselves with it. This week, using whatever free assets we could find, we created a working prototype of Phase 1 - the asteroid-dodging phase. Making the prototype gave us all much-needed clarity on the smaller sub-tasks we will need to do in order to build the final game. It also gave us insight into the kind of assets and resources we will need to make this an immersive experience, and also a good introduction to writing control scripts. Here's a small glimpse of our prototype:
UPDATE 5
Assets
This week we took the time to find and explore assets in the asset store we can use for our game. Key assets we need are a good spaceship with decent interiors, good skyboxes for the space background, planets that we could place around the environment. The key challenge at this stage is to create a good immersive environment for gameplay. We were lucky enough to have found an entire asset package with a number of different spaceships, other vehicles, planets, skyboxes and even astronauts and mechs.
UPDATE 6
Feedback
After syncing with the professor, we now realize that a lot more care needs to be taken when selecting assets for our game. Things to consider include the look and feel of the assets in VR. We had never checked the aesthetics of the assets in VR, so we did not realize how what we see on a 2D screen does not simply translate to real immersion or sense of presence in a 3D environment. We are now going back to the drawing board and figuring out other assets that we can use. We also toyed around with the idea of designing assets ourselves - but quickly discarded that idea. We are a team of engineers, and unfortunately none of us has design experience. Creating assets and shaders from scratch will take too much time that can be better spent on things like control and chair integration.
UPDATE 7
Integration
We have found new assets for spaceships and after testing these in VR, we have concluded that combining the new and previous assets is the best possible option for our game. Our job now is to integrate the controls and scripts that we had written for our previous assets into the new assets and make them work together seamlessly. As we head closer to the midterm presentation, it is now crunch time for our team.
UPDATE 8
Midterm Presentation
After spending many sleepless nights (and days!) in the lab working tirelessly on putting the game together, we are now done with the development of Phase 1! This progress was much faster than we anticipated, and it was due to good project management and task delegation along with our scripting process having been very modular and easy top integrate. We presented our work to the professors and the rest of the class at the midterm.
UPDATE 9
Post-Midterm Week
We synced with the professors again after our presentation last week and received very positive feedback. One thing that Professor V pointed out was that we had taken great care into ensuring that the motion of the spaceship after collision with asteroids was very constrained, which will curb motion sickness and make for easier integration with the chair. More good news this week is that we will finally get access to the Voyager APIs to integrate chair motions with the game.
UPDATE 10
Moving Forward
Chair integration is high on our priority list this week. We are also working on the next scene and considering adding more scenes as per the initial goal we had in mind. Once we figure out how to actually get our chair to work with the complex mechanics of our game. We are also in the process of ideating the gamification of the subsequent scenes. These scenes include the landing on the planet, and planet exploration. The big question remains: what happens after we get to the planet?
UPDATE 11
Gearing Up
We are steadily chipping away at all of the work we set out to do. The landing gamification is ready. We are incorporating a gameplay sequence for landing involving going through a set of rings that replenish a time/oxygen supply. We are facing issues with chair integration such as gimbal lock issue, and issue of camera rotation separate from chair rotation. Working through these issues is proving challenging but we are determined to create a cohesive game with all the features included. We have not been unable to incorporate chair haptics yet, but are hoping to do so after syncing with Mehul once more.
UPDATE 12
Fine Tuning
The basic structures and mechanics of gamification are ready for all the scenes. Chair integration works pretty much perfectly. We have developed a modular chair wrapper that can be used to integrate with any game easily with minor modifications. We are working hard on selecting and spatializing audio for background music as well as all of the actions and events that occur. Such as engine sound, sound effect of messages and typing, voiceover messages during gameplay. We are still working on fine-tuning the chair motions to perfectly align the chair with the camera and spaceship to minimize any nausea.
UPDATE 13
Finals Week
We are now wrapping up the project after spending many sleepless nights working on it. It's finals week! Throughout the semester and our development process, we have been testing our game with outside players to get an idea of all the changes we need to do and all those have come to a head this week. Modifications to the UI to make the game more intuitive to follow, as well as finishing off final audio have been our focus this week, along with getting the rest of our deliverables ready, like the trailer and website as well as video demo for our final presentation. We are excited for our presentation tomorrow and can't wait to have people try out our gaming experience. All of us have learnt a lot through the course of this project and we are excited to show how far we've come from the first day of class, when none of us had ever even worked with Unity.