Animated Characters!

So, I know I haven’t posted in a while, but rest assured, I’ve actually gotten a lot done on Oh Captain VR. After some basic play testing of the main mechanics of the game, players have shown to hate the parrot… so yeah.After much trial and error, I’ve landed on an idea that actually works perfectly:  Make the captain… a captain!  I know, right?!

I did some basic modeling and actually came up with a character that works pretty well.  He’s a short, stubby little pirate captain (think Reginald Van Winslow from Telltale’s Tales of Monkey Island) that kinda just does his own thing while you do all the hard work.
This turned out to be much funnier than the parrot (who was just plain annoying).
Having another human figure in VR is not so easy to get right.  If it’s too realistic, you get into uncanny valley territory. But, because we’re going for a low-poly aesthetic, this isn’t an issue, and the captain fits right into the world

Sadly, bringing animated meshes into Unity was pretty taxing on my laptop (GTX 1050),  causing it to overheat and shut down randomly more than once.  This wasn’t fun.  I do save after almost any change I make (a little crazy about it), so I didn’t lose that much at all.
Hopefully in the coming weeks (months?) I’ll be getting a more powerful machine that can handle VR much better.

Thanks for reading!
- Judah Mantell,
  President, MidnightCoffee, inc.