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First of all, we now have an email newsletter! Be sure to subscribe via any email box on the site! But okay, back to the main content... So, in contemplating where to go next with Oh Captain VR--publishers, crowdfunding, etc--I realized something: In focusing on the bigger picture of the whole game, I've been overlooking my main priority at the moment, the demo. I've been trying to either work on the save system, the open world, modding, or other features that won't be in the demo, when I need to be making the demo the best it can be. No, this post isn't some grand announcement about some change I'm making, it's merely an insight into how I work. Now, technically speaking, the question is, what does this entail? I know there won't be a save system in the demo, I don't think that's necessary for something that is meant to be only a taste of the full game. However, all the mechanics will be the same. This means that when someone plays the demo, they know that the full game will be like this, but so much bigger and better in every way. Another thing that's been bugging me is profiling. Profiling in Unity3D, I mean. When playing other VR games, I'm realizing that my game doesn't run as smoothly. Everything works totally fine and is comfortable to play for long periods of time, but it seems like my VR tracking has a little more latency than other games. This is just an optimization issue that I have to work on. Just like any game, it's a balance between performance and visuals. While Oh Captain VR does have a low-poly aesthetic, because of the amount of stuff in the scene, there definitely can be better optimization on my part. Since I only have one main realtime light (the sun/moon), this shouldn't be a problem, but I will continue to work on it. Any thoughts? Leave a comment down below! Thanks for reading! - Judah Yes, it's another blog post!
Over the past few days I've been recording my screen while working and hope to soon publish a timelapse/voiceover video going over what I've been working on in a more visual way. But, just to summarize here: When the player presses the Left Grip Button, a map UI will appear (either as a held object, or a static object in front of you). This will have the player's stats (health, stamina, gold amount, etc), along with some options as to which object to be building (Walls, stairs, etc). I am also experimenting with making the game moddable via Json data. Then, the player can easily go into the files and alter the way the AI works, the players stats, and effectively use "Cheat Codes" (a rarity nowadays) to change the way the game plays. Hopefully this should extend the life of the game in ways that I didn't think possible previously. Any feedback is appreciated! Thanks for reading! - Judah So, I just got back from an awesome vacation in Costa Rica, but unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) I didn't get much work done...
But, I do have some new ideas that I will be implementing into Oh Captain VR asap! These include:
For the roguelite aspects of the game, your stats, levels, and the like will persist from game to game. However, when you die, the worlds you create will be lost, only saved in a snapshot, viewable from the "Captain's Logbook." Overall, there is a lot more to come, with exciting updates coming regularly. Thanks for reading! - Judah Short post today:
After messing around a ton with the lighting in the scene, I finally got things looking better, AND running better/smoother, so that's pretty great. I am experimenting with changing up the island design, but that's another post in the coming weeks. Additionally, I do intend on improving the enemy AI, so there's better combat physics, defense, etc. More info to come. Thanks for reading! - Judah Mantell This year I got a lot done, and with that time, I was able to hone the mechanics of Oh Captain VR into the playable demo I have now! Once again, it still has a ways to go before I release it for free through the Steam Page (Coming soon though!), but it will be well worth the wait. After fixing the building mechanics, the one challenge is to find a good way to save and load the player's creations and progress. (More on this in the "Techy Stuff" below.) I also plan on adding other shapes to build like stairs and things, to allow for multiple floors in your fortresses! I'm quite happy with the Enemy AI's movement, but not their combat. Yes, they will attack you, but sword combat can be much improved. I also want to have them attacking your fortress, weakening it and possibly even breaking it unless you kill them.
In terms of the enemies themselves: For the demo island, I made sure there is always ten enemies in the scene. After experimentation, I found that's the right number to not take a hit on performance, and still make the world feel alive. I also plan on adding wandering cattle just for effect. You can't kill them for anything like in Minecraft, but I think it will help with the ambiance. Techy Stuff: Saving and loading numbers and strings isn't too difficult (and is perfect for saving how much wood and gold you have), but with this game I have to save and load every instantiated object (built blocks) the player has spawned. It's not possible to serialize objects in the scene, so I have to save every instantiated item in a list, their transforms, then re-instantiate them in those positions. It's not too difficult, but just time consuming. Additionally, if I will be adding other types of blocks (like stairs, etc), I'll have to do the same with those--again, possible, but time consuming. Thanks for reading, happy new year! - Judah Woah! Two posts in two days?!? ...Somehow, yes. All kidding aside, I've been working hard on the game, perfecting the building system in every way I can. It's now ready enough that quickly and accurately building large structures is not only possible, but super fun! You can build fortresses, trap enemies, and more! Techy Stuff: While building was possible before yesterday, there was one major problem: You could only rotate blocks flat or facing away from you. (In other words like this: __ and like this: | -- Sorry if that doesn't make any sense! I currently don't have any visual aids at the moment.) On the player's left hand, if they touch the touchpad, a little radial menu shows up with three directions: Up, Left and Right. (The "Up" direction puts the block flat, making it useful for floors and ceilings.) For the left and right directions I just kept adding 90 degrees to the Y quaternion, in hopes of just having it turn 90 degrees each time, but this wasn't working. I ended up writing two methods, as shown below: This worked exactly as I had hoped. Now all I gotta do is add sound effects, stylize the cursor a bit more and it should look pretty great!
Thanks for reading! - Judah
Hey everyone!
Yes, yes, I know it's been a while, but it's not for nothing! I've been focusing on polishing what I have of the game as much as possible, to get ready for a free demo release. Aside from adding SFX, particle effects, and refining controls, I've been working on making the building system the best it can be. This means making sure it's intuitive to use, looks good, and just works the way it should. You can check it all out in the video below! (Watch on YouTube for full screen)
Techy stuff:
I'm working on valid/invalid states for the system to ensure that players don't build on top of existing blocks. The cursor will be transparent green when you can build, and transparent red when you can't. Simple enough. Additionally, I have to make sure every placed block carves out a small section of the AI Navmesh so the enemies know to either go around or try to break through the fort created. Say what you want about Fortnite, the building system it has is pretty great, and that's what I'm trying to replicate, but in VR. At the moment there's only one type of "block" you can use, a single wall panel, but it can be rotated any way you like, making it usable as walls, floors, roofs, or even simple barricades to ward away enemy skeletons! Thanks for reading! - Judah I should preface this by saying once more that the demo I'm working on now will be released for free via the upcoming Steam Page.
Since the last post, I mainly just added some sound and particle effects. Not too much technically, but wow do some added particle effects make the difference. Killing enemies feels so much more satisfying, and swinging the sword around and chopping down trees is so cool! The one "feature" I've added (or currently working on, rather) is treasure. To put it simply, when enemies die, they drop treasure, which you can then grab and add to your overall treasure amount. For the demo, the focus will be more on arcade-y gameplay (rather than a full open world like in the finished game), with all the same mechanics, where you try to last the longest, and collect the most treasure for high-scores. In terms of timing, because I'm very busy with college applications, development will slow down a bit for the next month or so, but after then, I plan on having so much more content! (*Ahem* Local Multiplayer *ahem*) Techy stuff: There's currently a bug that prevents the spawned treasure from being destroyed in the scene which is causing a bunch of trouble. It's trying to destroy the original asset, rather than the instance in the scene. In any case, this will be worked out eventually. Thanks for reading! - Judah As mentioned previously, I am working on perfecting a demo to release on Steam for free!
It has all the same mechanics and features of the full game, just in a more arcade-y, smaller, more enclosed environment with a focus on getting high scores. While the full game is much more expansive (literally ten times the size of the demo), this demo should give players a taste of what's to come. In terms of what exactly is in the demo, well, here's an informal list in no particular order!
As to when the full game will be released... well, it's still in active development as we speak! As stated on the game's page, I might go for an early access approach, releasing a full, albeit smaller, game, adding content regularly until it becomes what was originally planned. This would allow players to get their hands on more content faster, expecting updates frequently. As always, more to come! Thanks for reading! - Judah This past Thursday I had the pleasure of attending Playcrafting NYC's Demo & Play event at Verizon's Alley FiDi.
It was my first Playcrafting event, and I hope to attend more in the future! I got to show Oh Captain VR to a room of about 50 people, along with 9 other amazing developers showing off super cool games. (Shout out to Game Revenant's Where Shadows Slumber, an awesome puzzle game now on the App Store.) I showed the trailer, explained what I've been working on, and answered a few questions. The response was super positive, and I got some great feedback about both VR game design, and adventure/survival game design in general. After the presentations everyone split up into little stations for people to play the games. Because I needed some space for the VR game, I was lucky to get a whole office to myself! Most of the people there have never tried VR, so I had to explain what to do a little more than with a regular game. Because of this, I realized (and this really applies to any game) that, while the developer might know exactly what to do in a game, that doesn't necessarily mean the people playing the game will. After the event, I ended up rearranging the demo environment so the player starts out in the Tavern, where they can pick up weapons, teleport around, and get a general sense of what to do before venturing out into the island. Since then, along with those environment changes, I've made some more modifications to make the game easier to play. While the full game still has quite a ways to go in development, I hope to release the demo for free soon... More info about the demo to come! Thanks for reading, Judah 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 teaches game design to middle and high school students. He is also a professional magician and retro game enthusiast. Categories
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