Project Blog
Below is the team blog for the project containing videos, images and info about what we've been up to.
Below is a sneak peak at the latest goings on in the Vive game. The player is now risen up into the arena surrounded by stands that will be filled with cheering fans. Check it out below!
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This past weekend the entire team took part in Global Game Jam 2017. The themes this year was 'waves'. Based on this we created a game using the Air Console platform where each player controlled a character in a rubber ring from their phone and could push them around a swimming pool into other players. It follows a similar idea to bumper cars, with the last player in the pool being the winner. You can see some gameplay below: Here's the latest look at our environment, we've added sections for the crowd and made it feel larger to step into in the Vive. Soon there will also be a cheering crowd populating the scene.
We're happy to announce that the team are entering the 2017 Microsoft Imagine Cup competition. We'll be posting regular updates here and on our Twitter page @obviouslygames in the coming weeks and months. More gameplay videos are coming soon!
After the break for the holidays we're now back and looking forward to the semester ahead. We've got lots planned for the upcoming months and you can also follow our progress at our new Twitter page @obviouslygames
Today we finally managed to test out playing both the HoloLens and Vive together in the same game. A video if this is shown below: Today was one of our last meetings as a group before our final presentation for this semester. We spent about 5 hours putting the final assets in, testing the build and fixing any bugs. On Tuesday we'll be rehearsing our final presentation. We hope to have a video of the latest build up in the next few days.
After adding in some new assets we managed to break our collision detection. We've made some fixes to get it back to running as normal and only needs one more slight change to fix this. Below are some screenshots of the latest projectiles in the game.
Today we met as a team and updated the assets in the Vive build. We added a textured stadium model that embraces the 80s visual style. We also added new projectile types. An image of the new stadium is below.
An unusual title but a summary of our networking progress today. After spending a full day exploring how to develop for the HoloLens and integrating Azure within the application we managed to have a picture of Spongebob on the HoloLens that when clicked would spawn a tree in the Vive game. Now we can demonstrate networking working, we can implement features working across both the Vive game and companion app.
Today we got access to the HoloLens and spent several hours trying out various games and having fun getting used to the technology. On Thursday we'll be spending the day developing a prototype for it.
Today we had our second playtest with some others from within the university. The purpose of this test was to get feedback on the new collision detection as well as the new in-game assets in the build. We also adjusted the speed of the projectiles slightly. Today we further discussed the prototype for the HoloLens that we want to test next Thursday. We also discussed how the prototype should look at the end of this semester. Next Thursday the code team are having a mini game jam 9-5 to focus on getting things up and running on the HoloLens itself. From there we can experience how certain things can be played and what design steps need to be taken.
Whilst we always test the build every Friday and often also on a Tuesday, today we recorded a video to show some of the changes that have been made recently. These are:
Thanks to a contact in Dundee, we have been offered the chance to work with a HoloLens for our companion app. For the next 4 weeks we are now looking at getting a build to test on the equipment an have a prototype up and running. This will change the twin-stick aspect of the companion app game but as the app will be a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app we can also look at having the game still on Surface if necessary.
Today we carried out our first playtest to people outside of the team. Several people and teams from throughout the university tried out our latest build and through this we gained some valuable feedback. The key points we took from this are:
Today Jack and Harry made some basic paper prototypes in order to test out the scale of objects in the companion app and visualise what the game could be projected like in the AR environment. After several weeks of investigating how to tackle the networking aspects of the game we now have the ability to send data to Microsoft's Azure service. This progress massively helps us for going forward.
After many design alterations over the past few weeks we finally settled on our new concept for the companion app. Inspired by Smash TV the following takes place:
Today we imported the stadium model into the Vive scene to see what it looked like. Whilst the model is still incomplete, we were impressed by the immersive feeling of being surrounded by it. Today we pitched to our client and discussed our concept. Based on the feedback given we will now progress onward with the project.
Harry's brother provided us with a track today that he created for us to use within the game. It can be listened to below:
Up until now the idea for the companion app player was to point their device's camera at the Vive player and be able to alert them when objects were approaching. The problem we quickly realised was: none of us thought this was very fun for the companion app. Therefore we knew a change had to be made. We had an idea for the app player to carry out some sort of sub-task that could reward the Vive player with power ups in game. To do this we had to add another feature to the companion app. The game went from looking like this: To something like this: Harry's suggestion was inspired by how computer hacking was portrayed in the 80s. The new suggestion was the player could hack into the game by performing a side task (the example used was based on Star fox) and by doing so grant the VR player power ups.
After testing our first build of launching projectiles at the player we added the functionality of objects curving towards the player. The test can be seen below: |
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