Oculus Rift: Weekend Puttering Part 2

I borrrowed the Oculus from work again this weekend and put just a few hours in…  This time I experimented with setting up targets and creating a mechanic where the player can move slowly to new locations by pointing and right-clicking.  Overall it seemed like a worthwhile experiment…  Actually the motion was some of the best part.  I think perhaps just a constantly orbiting viewpoint could work all right, with maybe a few choices as to where to move next.

The goal is to create motion and control that won’t make my wife sick…  Have yet to put her in it, but it might just work.

Oculus Rift: Weekend Puttering Part 1

My company (Hidden Path) was kind enough to let me borrow one of their Oculus Rift DK2s over the weekend to do some experimentation.

I got it working in Unity pretty quickly, and proceeded to experiment with a stationary camera position with a mouse-aim cursor.  After a couple of experiments, I ended up with a model where the cursor points at a single point in 3D space, manipulated by the mouse.  If the player’s view moves away from the cursor, the cursor gets “dragged” with it.  It felt pretty good and snappy in the end.

I also did a simple dumb character using WASD controls, with motion relative to the viewer (ala Mario). That part was easy and I can see the appeal (although with my test sprite character it’s a bit lacking of course).  It was fun to mess around with!

7DRL Epilogue: Herp Derp

Huge High QualSo it turns out that the Web Build I’ve had out for the last couple weeks of Huge was actually set to Unity’s default low quality, which meant that none of the bump-mapped sprites I labored on over the 7DRL week were lighting the way I saw them in the editor…  This bugged me enough that I put out a new build.  I also upgraded from Unity 4.6 to Unity 5 (although there isn’t a difference between the results) and I wrapped a quick five-cent title screen around the experience (using an oh-so-simple stub scene in Unity) so that the player can die and respawn gracefully rather than the ghetto reload I required before.

The extra work was an hour or two, but just in case it bothers the 7DRL people, I’ll leave the original version playable as well.

7DRL: Success!

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Click here to play HUGE

I wasn’t sure I was going to make it when I went to bed last night without a functioning  boss fight, but this morning I got a ton of work done and managed to get it all together at the wire!  My only regret is not having a reload loop at the end…  you gotta do what you can in the time you’ve got.

7 days of frantic craft…  Click the image to check it out!

7DRL Day 6-7: The Soundening

In a marathon session last night, my friend and comrade Mark Shoemaker did me a solid by whipping up some badass audio that I’m working on hooking up in a way that will do it justice.   He even got me music for my fledgling title screen.

I got the boss wandering around properly, and am finally using sound to build his presence when he is near.  Sound hookup is ongoing, but it’s already quite a difference.  I also got the maps populating a bit better to boot.

The home stretch is here, so I’ve got to do the boss attacks and give the player the ability to turn crystals into bombs…  oh, and a win state would be nice.  Wish me luck!

7DRL Day 2 plus a couple hours

I kicked off Day 3 with a couple hours before work.  Yesterday and today I got in:

  • Improved dungeon generation
  • Breakable objects
  • Rough monster pathfinding (Doom-style, I didn’t tackle anything like A* given my 7-day time limit)
  • Monster factions and aggro (they currently love attacking each other a bit much)
  • …and Fog of War in LOS!  BAM!  (Okay, I used a library to shoehorn it in quick, don’t judge me)

Coming along well.  I still need an item system to drive gameplay, a UI to support it, and a lot more interesting world.

Huge2