I have avoided the detail of the name for some time. Although Brian came with some ideas using this classic name generator tools I was never completely satisfied. It harder than it seems to choose a proper name. Recess somehow reflect Matt's original idea but it was obviously changed along the development. I liked the words: void, dream, and nexus but we couldn't find the right order. We kept for some time "Just Dream" but I knew it was provisional. In the end, Andy (and the name generator tool) help me to decide for "Distant Dream" which I believe somehow reflect the current idea of building your own virtual space. So I guess this would be it.
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I was reluctant to show anything from our project in Demo Day. Since Seth told me that we couldn't display actual gameplay I was frustrated about it. I never saw a way to show a Virtual Reality experience without actual gameplay. I even read that this is a real problem to adverting VR games. They are experiences that need to be lived. In the last minute, however, I decided to go just to join Nuhi. So I just made a quick presentation with our main features, tried to pick key images to show the basic idea. It was also kind of hard to me because I didn't feel prepared to defend our game in public. Not because I didn't know what we were making but because I still don't have enough reliability in my English skills. So I explained the bullet points to Jeremy (some parts in Spanish) and let him take care of the rest. I also felt he was a good speaker.
Finally, Chris had all the pieces he needed to make the first playable. Andy offered himself for the playtesting sessions. I was glad he did because I realized in that moment that cannot stand Virtual Reality. I feel sick in a matter of seconds don't know exactly why. Emil told me that it is natural that our brain has a problem to "believe" the virtual space and when our movement doesn't match what we are seeing people starting to feel dizzy. Other classmates told me that it was framerate issues, anyways, I wasn't able to play and several people got also dizzy. I had no idea how to solve that problem, it's beyond me.
At least Andy helped us a lot regarding polishing details such a resizing or adjusting stuff to floor or walls, changing the dimensions of the space, making sure the music works and finding an invisible object that ended up floating in the middle of the room for some reason. It was actually quite productive. Seth asked us to put more stuff into the build. He didn't seem satisfied with the current state of it. He wants more minigames mostly. I considered the option but ended up I discarding it because traditional games weren't the main feature I wanted to implement. To recreate the idea of "experience" I decided to focus on other environmental ideas. So we finally implemented the radio in which the player would be able to change the background music just interacting with it. After having it functional I wanted to add more songs. I searched a lot but it was very hard to find free songs that actually match with the aesthetic I had in mind. Same for the landscapes I increase their number from 7 to 20 but took me hours to find the right ones. Because the furniture had a cartoonish style I decided we need to put only pixel art landscape, I don't know, it was just a hunch.
Chris was having some problems setting up the card game on the room table. After trying several possible solutions he realized that the proportion and dimensions of the room may be off. So I had to re-seized and relocated all the furniture. It was a long and annoying task but at least solve the previous problem. Which as always led to another problem: the scale of the furniture was completely off in relation to the player view. So I re-scaled every single piece of furniture to make sure the proportions were right. It was mostly a matter of increasing the size of everything although the dark side was that the room feels now way smaller. Oh well, I guess that is not a big deal if the instance seems credible.
(ADD A ENGINE IMAGE!) I realized I wanted to evoke a "home sweet home" sensation in the players. In order to do that I looked back to review one of my favorites ever: Gone Home. The way this game makes you feel "save" was stunning and using only audiovisual techniques without NPC. So I took their idea of falling rain sound effect in the background and decrease the brightness of the assets to give the environment the mysterious aura that it's characteristic. I also re-organized the furniture to make it credible because the way Deneka had it before seems... odd. In general, I tried to rearrange the assets to make it the room feels more natural and less artificial. That was quite challenging, try to evoke life from cold numbers.
An unexpected popped out in my mind. What if in one of the walls of the room a giant mirror will be reflecting every object inside but the player? I was sure that this situation would evoke in the player the surrealist sensation that I was looking for. The contradiction between being there through the interaction without being able to see your own reflection was somehow appealing to me. But in the end, I wasn't able to do it. The free mirror I found was in a beta phase which means it was still experimental. I couldn't make it work and I also refused to ask for help because Chris was already too busy with the arcade game integration. On the other hand, I asked Tyler to expand the room adding a bathroom and a closet. He showed me a few planes and even when I liked them I decided to send the idea to icebox tasks for now. I needed him scripting the radio and exit door functionality. Although we already had enough models to build a prototypical room. I felt we really need a couple more which were relatively important to accomplishing my vision. The most important one was without doubts the window which supposes to open and close letting the player watch a variety of landscapes (which I will later decide that they need to be pixel art). Navigating in a website called cgtrader following Nuhi advice I found an old but functional window that Daneka should be able to edit. We just needed to get rid of the internal division and add opening/closing animations before its actual implementation. It wasn't exactly what I had in mind but I can definitely live with this.
Eric did a good job looking for the sounds effect we need for all the components of the game. Today I spent most of the class time going through each one to make sure they would make sense in my vision of the game. As always there were a few that sound pretty similar to what I had in mind, but there were others that.. we will have a find a creative way to use them. There was also a short group that I am not sure if we will be able to actually find. For this ones, I guess I will have to delete them or just exchange them with something similar. But overall I have to say I am happy with Eric work.
For this week I was concerned about what images show through the window, which, for me at least, represents a pretty important part of the aesthetic of the game. So I spent mos of the class looking for appropriate animated landscapes. I didn't know exactly what I was looking for. I would love some pixel art, a raining landscape, a waterfall, a sunrise or sunset and something weird or psychedelic. I found most of them in a site called Ghipy which was actually pretty useful for this task. I had no idea that finding animated landscapes would be that hard.
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AuthorI want to study Video Games in a theoretical way. Archivos
May 2018
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