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So, it's been about a month since my last post...
But, that's only because I've been working hard on Oh Captain VR! The biggest change right now is the building system. I mentioned the idea briefly in the last post, but now it's almost finished! By pressing the left touchpad, a new cursor will appear showing the log and your amount of wood. Then, by pressing the grip button, you build a new log in that position. This allows for quick building for when you are trying to ward off enemies and deliberate, meticulous building for creating large structures! The combat is another thing that I worked hard on this month. While there is a lot of fine tuning to do, it is a ton of fun with a good difficulty level. It's more hack and slash than realistic melee combat, which I think is perfect for the tone of the game. Also, there is now a demo! It's being shown for the first time at PlayCrafting's Demo & Play event in NYC this Thursday night! (If you're in the area, come check it out!) Then, by the end of the week, It will hopefully be released online for anyone to download! But, it still is in Beta, so there might be bugs! More to come soon! Thanks for reading! - Judah So, hm...
What's new? Almost everything. You can now teleport wherever you want, as opposed to only fixed points. After much playtesting, I see now how annoying it is to not be able to walk that extra inch to get somewhere that looks cool. So now there's that. Also, instead of multiple mini islands that I used for testing, everything is now in one giant island. This means that you can easily go from place to place, but also poses challenges for the player: surviving in the jungle, for example... There also now is swimming! Yes, you can actually swim in VR! Trust me, its cool. It's essentially climbing horizontally. You grab anywhere in the water and pull yourself forward. It works well, feels great, and is a ton of fun. I'm considering adding in a building mechanic so you can upgrade your fortress/ship, etc. Techy Stuff: To make the larger island perform better in VR, I used Unity's built-in occlusion culling. This actually works really well, speeds the game up, and is not noticeable when in VR. But, because of the size of the island, I have to merge some meshes together to get around having ten thousand (literally, 10,686) grass meshes. For that many it takes a while... Along with that, there are three new screenshots on the webpage! Check it out! Thanks for reading! - Judah This week I mainly focused on combat, creating a fully working grappling hook system for going from ship to ship, and making the teleporting enemy AI, along with the basics of what will become the naval combat system.
My biggest challenge this week was working on the inventory system, but it seems like, because of the way the game is structured that I was overthinking it. The game is level based (though not explicitly called so), with each location being a level. Going from level to level follows a story that makes up Oh Captain VR's campaign. In addition to this, there will be a free play mode where the player can explore the islands and fight baddies, loot shops, hijack other ships, and more! Thanks for reading, Judah Yes, I haven't posted in a while...
No, this post isn't about how to annoy your animated characters, (though if people want it, I can post my methods) it's about how frustrating they can sometimes be in Unity!
Because the characters in the world are specifically supposed to be robots (more details to come soon!), using traditional animated FBX models didn't give the effect I wanted. So, instead what I did was export the characters' bodies separately from their limbs, eyes, and mouth, and animated them using Unity's built-in timeline. This actually worked much better than I had hoped, and allows for that robotic, R2-D2 movement. Thanks for reading! Judah Mantell, President, MidnightCoffee, Inc. 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. After much deliberation and hours of playtesting, I finally got the helm (the ship's steering wheel, for lack of a better phrase) just right!
I originally thought the helm would control the ship, like the driving mechanic in LA Noir VR, but from what I've seen, it causes motion sickness, and the player will just get lost in the open sea. Now, instead of moving the ship directly, when the player grabs the wheel, a little menu pops up above it, and an arrow appears at the top of the wheel. The menu consists of miniatures of the different islands you can go to, and turning the wheel highlights the one the arrow is pointing at. If you hold the wheel pointing to a place for a certain amount of time, you, along with the ship, will "teleport" to that island. Thanks for reading! - Judah Mantell, President, MidnightCoffee, inc. Short, mini-update for you guys: 1) Oh, Captain VR now has its own page! Yes, yes, this is only a coming soon page, but it does have our new logo! 2) ...Oh Captain VR has a new logo! 2 new logos to be exact, but they're both variations on the same one. Check it out! (Click to enlarge.)
Thanks for reading,
-- Judah Mantell President, MidnightCoffee, Inc. Originally the boat the player is on had only one main deck (floor) along with a climbable mast with a crows nest. This worked fine because the ship seemed to float in the water, with the lower part of the boat resting below the water for a convincing illusion of displacement and buoyancy.
I recently modeled a below-deck area (also called a Hull) that the player can climb down to and it adds a ton to the level. On a real pirate ship, anything below the main deck is effectively underwater, with the water displacing around it (a basic property of water). In game engines this isn't so simple. Unless there's a complex liquid simulation, there is no displacement. The water is just a flat plane (a flat piece of 3D geometry) that will show up inside an object when it's collided with. This means that the hatch to get to the Hull looks like its submerged in water. Not what we want. My solution: Add water tiles as child objects of the boat placed carefully around the boat so that A) it doesn't interfere with the Hull, and B) that it gives an illusion of the the boat being surrounded by water. This means that when the boat moves, the water around it moves too. Additionally, this means I don't have to manually place water down throughout the world because the water will always follow the boat. There is enough water around the boat to convincingly make it look like there is water as far as the eye can see. Enough techy Rambling, what does this mean for players?! It simply means that there will be more parts of the ship to explore! Nuff said. Thanks for reading! - Judah Mantell, President, MidnightCoffee, Inc. After much deliberation, I have solved the cannon issue!
Now, the player can aim the cannon, pick up a cannonball from a basket and put the cannonball on the cannon. Once the player does this, the ball will shoot out the barrel, and a new cannonball will spawn in the basket. I was overthinking the way it should work and found that this was A) the simplest solution and B) the most intuitive way to do this. Techy Stuff: For attaching the cannonball to the cannon, I used a Snap Drop Zone with parenting (so the ball will move with the cannon, as opposed to joints or kinematics) from the wonderful VRTK Unity Package. I made the zone smaller than the actual ball, so it will shrink to nothing then fire, for an added visual effect. (I plan on adding particle effects soon). On snapping the object (cannonball) to the zone, it calls a function from the script on the ball that both shoots a prefab out of the barrel, destroying after 2 seconds, (or collision with an enemy ship) and repositions the ball to the basket, making it look like one shoots, and another one spawns. This allows for really easy management of the scene because I only have to use one script on one cannonball object. Thanks for reading! - Judah Mantell President, MidnightCoffee, Inc. So lately I've been extremely focused on one element/mechanic of #OhCaptainVR : The Cannon.
In the game, the player can grab onto a cannon on the side of the boat and aim and shoot it at oncoming enemy ships. The problem is finding a good way to trigger the cannon. On one hand, I can have it shoot automatically every 1.2-2 seconds as long as it's being grabbed (like the laser gun in Rick and Morty VR), but that seems too easy. I tried adding a button to the cannon, but it seems clunky. I'm thinking of adding a lever next to the cannon, so the player can aim/turn it with one hand, and pull the lever with the other. Techy Stuff: Rather than adding a hinge joint in the center of the cannon to make it rotatable, I just used a rigidbody and locked it in position and rotation so it only rotates around the center. Then I used a VRTK rotator track grab attach on it and it worked perfectly. The one challenge is finding a good way to make it fire (mechanics wise, not script wise) Thanks for reading! - Judah Mantell President, MidnightCoffee, Inc. So a few people were messaging me asking what hardware (and software) I use for development, so I figured I'd write a little about it.
Because I originally used the Windows Mixed Reality program, I didn't need that great of a GPU. This meant that I was totally fine using a laptop, rather than a larger desktop. Despite the fact that it was below the recommended specs for SteamVR, after switching to SteamVR, it still runs fine (well, even!) It even runs great in games such as Batman Arkham VR, Rick and Morty VR, and The Lab! So, without further ado, here's what I use! (Everything linked to Amazon) Hardware:
So yeah, thats about it! That's all the hardware and software I use regularly for development of Oh, Captain! Thanks for reading! -- Judah Mantell President, MidnightCoffee, Inc. (Really short update :P )
After a long while of making change after change, I've finally finished the new site and logo! Check them out! Thanks for reading! -- Judah Mantell President, MidnightCoffee, Inc. So the mechanics have all been prototyped and everything's working perfectly!
I discovered the hard way that VRTK will add Rigid Bodies to any interactable object, automatically making anything climbable fall to the ground. After unchecking respond to gravity (a stupid mistake, I know), I started flying around the world while holding onto this ring-thing (that fits into a part of a different model). This was wrong. I just removed the Rigid Body component entirely and that fixed the problem. Shows that it's usually the simplest things that will completely screw you over. Thanks for reading! - Judah President, MidnightCoffee, Inc. I started using VRTK in my Unity Project and it's amazing. For some reason, it gave me all sorts of errors when I tried to use it with NewtonVR, but I'm working around it.
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About MeAside from being a game developer and CEO of MidnightCoffee, Inc, Judah is a professional magician and retro game enthusiast. Categories
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