Author: Michael Wong

Lights, and Rain,
And Trees, and Clouds…

Alright, it’s been mentioned a few times, but for real this time – Soft Opening is next week.

Soft Opening, or “Softs” as it’s more commonly known is the second to last milestone of an ETC project. It’s essentially like Quarters, where the faculty come around one by one to try out projects, but at this point the advice is less “what do we think of your project direction”, and more “what can you do to polish this up in 2 more weeks?”

For Softs, what we really want to do is get that tutorial scene in, so we can get feedback on how that flows.

There’s another little snag on that though. This week is also CMU’s Spring Carnival! Which means we are off on Thursday and Friday. “No big deal, we’ll just get it done before then!” is what I said. But there was another issue as well. My previous semester project was going to France to showcase at Laval Virtual, so I wouldn’t even be in the country during the week!

Luckily, this team is amazing, and…

The tutorial scene is done!

In the scene, both players face opposite directions, with a big black border separating them. To start the main section of the game, both players must take a photograph of the marketplace floating in the air, and place it in a frame on the wall.

This gives both players a space to practice and figure out the CAVERN VR side of things, before we start throwing the multi-perspective duplicates at them. Time will tell if this works… But I have hope!

I also quickly threw together a peaceful guitar intro, to contrast the energetic main theme! Here’s a sample.

The Market scene itself has also been reworked, to match more with the actual market square we’re taking inspiration from.

Also, those fireworks for the ring ending I mentioned last week, here’s what they look like!

We’re really getting close to the end here, and I’m very excited with what we have!

I asked the Bird,
“What is it, about those seeds,
That you enjoy so much?”

We got a lot of information from playtest day, so now our goal is to somehow use that to refine our game before Soft Opening!

The main thing we need to solve is how different levels of experience affect a player’s ability to understand the multi-perspective rendering. For players with experience in VR, we are not asking for that big of a leap. We want them to play as if they are in normal VR, with the added complication of having to “ignore” one of the versions of an object. For people without VR experience, due to the fact that they don’t know how they are “allowed” to interact with the objects, end up getting stuck when we introduce too many new things at once. Essentially, we observe in players new to VR that while they are trying to figure out how to interact with floating objects, we then start showing them two of those objects, and asking them to ignore the reality of one of them. Those two things happening at once prevents them from figuring out either.

The second thing we need to solve is the overall progression of the game. Currently, it looks like this:

There are three “sets” of items, and when you use an item from one of these sets, the next one appears. When you use an item from Phase 3, the game ends. Currently, using the Ring triggers a music change and fireworks to start, but the other two have… less… or rather, nothing. So it is very clear why the game ends when you use the ring, but unclear when you choose anything else. And because all these tracks are independent, players have no way of knowing that there were even any other “game-ending” options! So we’re looking into combining these tracks.

Also this week, our resident K-12 guy Anthony brought in some elementary schoolers to try out our game!

Also during the week, Frank finished up the model and animations for the Bird! The Bird was originally intended to eat seeds directly out of the players’ hands, but that ended up being too difficult. So we also added a container of bird seed that the bird can eat out of!

How majestic!

Also new this week, Ice Cream!

This one is my favorite, because the “eating” effect is actually kind of fun, accompanied by this sound I made!

And of course by “made” I mean that I recorded me making a licking sound.

That’s all for now, I hope to have more news about the solutions to those problems I mentioned at the beginning for you next week!

From behind my walls and gates,
I heard the telltale rumble,
of our guests, our honored guests!
And so I ran…

Saturday this week was Playtest Day! On playtest day, people from outside of the ETC come to playtest all the projects happening during the semester! It’s a great chance for teams to get try out their projects with people who don’t already know what they’re working on!

That’s especially important for us, since the big question of our project is “can people look past the duplicate renderings of objects?” We can get some of that information from ETC internal playtesting, but pretty much everyone in this building already knows the CAVERN, and how VR works. Playtest day for us was an opportunity to try out the technique with some truly fresh guests!

We saw a lot of stuff that we were already kind of expecting. The frisbee was difficult (though had a surprisingly high success rate, everyone was able to catch it after a enough tries), the flower was a satisfying moment that was easy to understand, it took people about 3 items to sort out the multiperspective view.

There was one trend we noticed, that leads us to the next main thing we are adding to our game. The speed at which a set of players understood the multiperspective view depended mostly on their experience with VR in general. It seemed like if the players were already familiar with VR, they understood things like the fact that they were allowed to walk around the space, and they had an understanding of how close their hands had to be to an object to grab it. And for players who start the game understanding that, the only thing they have to learn is how the multiperspective view works. So it takes them 1 or 2 items.

For players who had no previous VR experience, we observed that they would be unsure what the game allowed them to do, and wouldn’t as quickly treat the 3D objects as if they were actually there. Then, while still in that confused state, they would see two versions of that object, and that would multiply their confusion.

So our idea for a solution to that is essentially a “tutorial” level. A little scene before the game starts where the two players are separate, with no multiperspective view. Both of them take a photo of the market and hang it on the wall, then we move on to the main game. This way, we ensure both players at the very least know how the game wants them to walk up to, grab, and move objects, before we start throwing the duplicated rendering at them!

Next week, we’re going to continue developing the game using these observations, because our next milestone is in 2 weeks: Soft Opening!

Where was I?

We’re back! GDC was great, and we’ve returned, ready to continue right where we left off, especially with the optimizations Jason made while we were gone!

So, back to our game, what exactly are we doing? Right now, we’re creating a game to essentially serve as a demo of MUPR. That game is called “Mérida“!

Mérida is a two-player narrative game where players find themselves touring the same city as strangers. They’ll walk around the environment, interacting with a variety of objects that all demonstrate the multiperspective technique in some way. We want it to feel like a romance movie.

The setting of the game, as the name may imply, is the south Mexican city Mérida, Pictured below:

Our market scene, which you saw in progress during Week 5, is coming along nicely!

As for our items, if you watched our halves presentation you may have seen some of them, but I’ll go over some examples here. For our items, we essentially wanted to cover some basic actions that are enabled by the multiperspective view. Things like handing an object to another player, or throwing and catching, were really what we wanted to show off.

So, for our first item, we created The Rose! It’s a simple interaction, one player takes the rose, and gifts it to the other. Upon receiving it, it blooms, and some music plays. But despite being simple, the ability to take an object and hand it to another player is unexplored territory for the CAVERN!

Next, what is shaping up to be our hardest interaction, The Frisbee! If you’re familiar, it should be pretty self-explanatory. One player grabs it, and throws it to the other. So far, this is possible, but requires a great deal of skill. You have to throw it pretty straight, otherwise it goes too high and disappears off the top of the CAVERN screen.

And for my final example today, The Bird! The bird’s item is a cup of seeds, that you hold out to attract it. It then flies over and starts eating the seeds, and both players can pet it. Careful though, if you are too quick with your motions, you’ll scare it away! It’s got no animations yet, so it looks pretty funny!

Well, that’s all for this week, see you next time for our next milestone, Playtest Day!

…

…

…

…

…

…

Is anyone there?

Oh wait, Jason is here, and as the one member of the team not in California for GDC this week, he managed to optimize our system further!

During the week of Halves, we made this system, where objects not in the player’s field of view would be culled, so as to not clutter the image when a player couldn’t even see it.

This week, Jason optimized this system by not rendering those objects, instead of just hiding them after rendering. This has improved our performance by about 40%!

But that’s all, since the rest of us were in California!

Pulling myself over the peak,
I beheld the summit…

In case you are unfamiliar, “Halves” is the first big presentation of a project semester at the ETC. Quarters is like a walkaround showcase, where your goal is mainly just to show an initial direction and get advice. Halves is a 15 minute presentation, where you show your progress formally, and is often the first time some members of faculty hear about your project since the initial pitch before the semester. By this point, it’s important to show that you know what direction you are going, and have begun to make progress towards the goal. So, if you’re interested in hearing a summary of the semester up to this point, give it a watch!

This week has mainly been preparing this presentation, rehearsing it, and then retuning it. Plus a bit of planning, because something ominous is on the horizon…

GDC
(The Game Developer’s Conference)

GDC is an annual conference for the game development industry held in San Francisco. Two things are true about GDC for the ETC: First, it is the most common conference for ETC students to use their “professional development fund” on, which is a fund that every student gets in order to go to conferences. Second, it’s in two weeks, which is the week after Spring Break.

This means Week 8 of the Spring semester is eaten by GDC for a lot of teams. In my first project, Onion Future, that looked like this. Two people gone for the week. This time though… 5 out of 6 of us are going to GDC.

So it’s safe to say that week will be almost entirely devoid of work. That’s fine though, since our timeline still looks good to hit the ground running as soon as we get back on Week 9! See you in… a few weeks!

“I do the work of four people!”
“Well have you tried… not?”

This week, three things happened. Let’s start with the first one!

We’ve started working on the design for our game, currently called “Cavern Love Story“. In the game, two players find themselves meeting as strangers in a South Mexican, romance-movie inspired city. They’ll explore the space, find items, and interact with them together. This way, we can try a bunch of different interactions, like tossing a frisbee back and forth, handing a flower to the other player, etc. We’ll show off more of what this looks like next week! (note from the future: the design is actually discussed in Week 9)

The second thing that happened this week is Jason optimized our rendering system! According to him, he’s reusing the cubemap that’s used to render the scene instead of recreating it multiple times, which essentially makes it so that increasing the number of players does not increase the amount of memory used. That means we could theoretically go from two to twelve players. We’d almost certainly run into clarity issues with all those duplicated objects floating around, but at least we’re not bounded by the system! The following video is Jason explaining this himself!

And finally, I’ve assembled the photos from that photoshoot last week into our team photo! As you can see, we are indeed exploring a cavern. Also, Frank and Ivy finished our Poster/Halfsheet design!

That’s all for this week, next week we’ll show you the first scene of our Love Story, the Market!

The cave echoes with the sound
of twelve explorers descending,
And the walls seem to pull away…

This week centers around two things. First, what are we even doing!? Second, who are we!?

You’ll get more details on that first question in future updates, but we’ve begun to develop our idea for our “final experience”, to serve a demonstration of this new multi-perspective rendering technique (hint: it involves love).

The second question is really just another way to say our “design production” is due next week. Design production, for the ETC, essentially means branding. It includes things like this very website, our poster, half-sheet (a small descriptive version of the poster), a team photo, and a logo!

On Wednesday we all dressed up and brought in some props, then went down to the greenscreen room on the first floor for a photoshoot! Our theme, as Torchbearers, is that we are “exploring” the CAVERN, blazing a trail for all who come after us. So our photo is cave explorer themed. It seems fitting, given that the CAVERN toolkit team was called “Spelunx”. I’m still editing our team photo to put us literally into a cave, so you’ll have to wait until next week to see the final result!

Exploring the CAVERN