Because we were constantly testing the lastest builds on iPhone 6s and iPhone6 we decided to implement the Google Cardboard SDK so see how the mobile phones perform in VR-Mode.
The framerat was surprisingly stable, but the phones got way too hot. So theoretically it’s possible, but not very useful unless the game is not optimized for mobile-VR yet.
Here’s what our current Meantime Repository looks like visualized:
And this is what our custom built Puzzle-Overview looks like:
As you can see, most puzzles are pretty straight forward (resp. outward) without too many branches.
We haven’t posted an update for a while, so here’s what we’ve done in the meantime (…nice, uh? ;D).
Instead of building up a while city around the player, we decided to make single islands for every city-district. You start with only one island (harbour island) to then uncover all remaining Island. Currently we have 3-4 Islands planned.
• Harbour Island (Start)
• Entertainment Island (supposed to be the 2nd)
• Industry Island (supposed to be the 3rd)
• Pirate Ship (very big, therefore handled like an island)
This structure also makes it easier for us to plan ahead and to work on it. It’s also easier for the player, with only one focus point at the beginning, it should be clear where to look for triggers.
Here’s the asset-list for Island #1:
Models
• Musician, rigged and animated
• Boat’s-man, rigged and animated
• Birds, rigged and animated
• Island
• 3 different rocks
• 2 different trees
• 2 sets of gras
• Gearwheels
• House outer
⁃ House inner top
⁃ House inner basement
• Windmill
• Lighthouse
• Underwater-tunnel
• Hatch
• Boat
• Paddels
• Fishing-rod
• Boat-Dock
Sounds
• Musician Start (by Yukio)
• Musician Loop (by Yukio)
• Musician Stop (by Yukio)
• Door open
• Gears turning
• Windmill turning
• Lighthouse turning
• Island 2 emerging
• various bird sounds
• various confirmation/reward sounds
…and much more.
Last week we had a second meeting with our mentors and we were given the advise to play-test as early as possible. So we quickly arranged a few little quests and placed some coins as a reward-placeholder.
We then gave it to various people and told them to find 10 coins with doing nothing more than looking around.
The results were interesting but all pretty much the same: Most people liked the general idea of looking around and collecting something, but coins turned out to be a very lame reward. Almost everybody tried to trigger everything after they found out they can interact with the world, which is probably due to the fact that we removed visual feedback on interactables.
By now we also implemented touch-controls to look around on the smartphone/tablet, which really is a good help for debugging and it generally works pretty well, so we might keep the option in the final version.
There’s also a change in style, as you might have noticed. Not only the dev-blog changed but also the game. We still don’t know if this is the final style, but it certainly goes more into a direction we like.
We are currently working on the riddle-mechanics as well as on the meta-mechanics, you know, the stuff around the actual game. Menu screen, credits, settings etc.
Oh and have a look at our first custom written shader, giving fancy vertex-based sinus-animations to a mesh.
Thinking about how the whole meta-layer with settings and credits could be, we came up with the following:
Keep in mind, that this is just a first prototyped draft of the idea.
Read more to see a video of the status quo.
Unity 5 came with great new audio-tools but so far we didn’t have the chance to use them, since our last project was made for WebGL (not compatible with new audio-tools).
But now it comes in very handy. Because of the fact that the player won’t change his position in MEANTIME, we cannot just place “sound-probes”. It would have worked if we put our Audio Listener directly on our 3D-Cursor, but then the whole audio experience would be wrong since we want to provide real 3D Sound.
Some simple prefabs with triggers, clever layer management and a simple script handling the snapshot transitions brought up this here:
As you can see, the mixer adjusts the volume of the different groups accordingly to where the player’s looking at.
We still haven’t decided where to go with our story but we’re on a good way. Yesterday we claimed the nearby windows and transformed them into our creative wall (since all the pinwalls are full and not very handy to reach). Hopefully the view will not distract too much.
In addition we also have some technical upgrades. It is now possible to trigger worldEvents if you look at something for a defined duration. worldEvents can also have conditions, which basically are just references to other worldEvents. Events then are obviously only fired, when all conditions are met.
Watch the video below, to see how it works.
Excuse me for the cursor…