BVW Round 4 – The Moon
Platform: Valve Index
Development team: 2 programmers, 2 artists, 1 sound designer.
My role: programmer
It’s an Interactive Storytelling game. The platform is Valve Index.
Where are people’s souls after they die? The game starts by Charon (protagonist) sailing a boat toward the moon. On the way to the moon, Charon keeps collecting stars as dead souls on his boat. Then Charon pushes the door of the moon and get inside the moon. He collects lanterns on his boat, and combines stars and lanterns to let them fly up to the sky. This is the job that Charon needs to do every day. That’s where souls go after death.
What I learned
Situation: storytelling interactive game about where death souls go afterlife. A programmer wants to do a sound designer’s job, a sound designer wants to do a programmer’s job.
Task: Sound designer’s jobs: background music, sound effects, ambience. Programmer’s jobs: Grab stars and lantern. Combine lanterns and stars then fly. Animation of lanterns flying around. Collision when main character push the door.
Action: Give tutorial at the beginning about higher level concepts. communicate with programmers frequently by going to his desk whenever stuck to keep efficiency.
Result: Successfully produce most viable products in two weeks.
I learned ownership. That means I should be responsible to myself. I need to take care of my work as a sound designer, and also help others when they need help. In this situation, communication with teammates matter a lot because I need to make sure that what I’m doing is helping the team push forward to the completion of the project. If I made some mistakes, I could also ask my teammates for helpful advice to get things done.
BVW Round 5 – Heaviest Angel
Platform: 1 Kinect + 4 HTC Vive Trackers
Development team: 2 programmers, 2 artists, 1 sound designer.
My role: Sound designer
Our team created an interactive immersive experience for guests. This game is about feeding food to each other to make the other angel fall.
The platform is 1 Kinect combined with 4 HTC Vive Trackers. Kinect is to detect body motion, and Vive Trackers are used to track forks’ position and extension of forks’ length.
What I learned
I learned to do iterations to make the game experience better. On the first week I tried to use voice-over when angels (guests) were fed with food. However the sounds were creepy at that time. So I used a scoring sound effects to replace voice-over. That really improved the game experience.
Another example is on the second week, we created a story to explain why the two angels are feeding each other. But we found out that the most important thing was that guests understand the rules of the game, instead of knowing the background reasons behind them. That is to say, our game itself is interesting enough. So we got rid of the storytelling part of our game, and then built a tutorial to demonstrate how to play this game.
I learned to respect other teammates’ time. Because our team were going to show our masterpiece on the ETC festival, we need to make props to decorate our room. We made a heaven gates, two angel cut-out, a fence, and numerous clouds. It’s a really heavy workload for us to make so many props at a very short period of time. Not everyone is interested in theme entertainment, and not everyone has extra time to do extra efforts on this. So we distributed the work based on interests and availability to make sure that each team member can contribute as much as they can without pushing them too hard.
BVW Round 3 – Goal in the Wall
Platform: Kinect
Development team: 2 programmers, 2 artists, 1 sound designer.
My role: Sound designer
This assignment is to create a world that has something fun for guests to do. We made a soccer-like game in which 2-4 players trying to goal to the other side of the goal. Every few seconds the touchable body parts will change to make the game interesting.
We use the Kinect to detect the movement of our body parts. The style of the game is punk, so players would feel cool to move their bodies hitting the ball.
What I learned
Though this round was only 1 week, this one week was really a good lesson for me. I learned how to do fast prototyping on a project. There was not enough time for us to try many iterations many times. All we need is to implement an idea as soon as possible, and pivot a little bit to make the game work. I learned that good enough is good enough, and making priority depending on the level of importance relative to the game. I focused too much on background music. But the most important part of the game is when the guests score. Everyone only has 24 hours, so ranking priority to every task is really important thing not only in BVW rounds, but also in the next semester’s project, and also in my life.
BVW Round 2 – Three Piece
Platform: Magic Leap AR Headset
Development team: 2 programmers, 2 artists, 1 sound designer.
My role: Sound designer
Our team uses indirect control to make the guest(player) visit three islands in a preset order.How to make it happen? We make the boat and other creatures, including mermaids and pirates boats, more colorful and shining than the terrain. So the guest would notice the change happening on the map one at a time. The guest would be led by the signal from the appearance of events in different island.
At the beginning of the game, the only things that are shining are treasures floating on the surface of the ocean. Therefore, the guest would try to collect all of the treasures because of human greed. After collecting all the treasures, mermaid UI comes out, which leads the plot in the first scene.After finishing the first scene and carry mermaid on the boat, a huge treasure comes out near the second island. The guest is trying to get the large treasure. When the guest is trying to get it, the guest notices that a man is drowning in the sea. There are two options for the guest to choose, and the choices that the guest makes would affect the final score of the game. After saving the man or picking up the treasure, a red pirate boat appears to attack the guest. Then another bigger ship shows up, and the guest encounters the final fight.If the guest save the man drowning into water, the man would help the guest get more treasure in the end because he has a key to open treasure boxes which come from defeated pirates.
This game demonstrates how to utilize indirect control to lead guests to wherever game designers want guests to go to.
What I learned
I learned to work in an efficient way. It’s really important to think through the process of the game, and then decide which direction to work on. For example, after the first meeting, we finished discussing the main theme of our game. Every team members started to work on the project unanimously. We have a clear and common imagination of the game. So this round went smooth.
BVW Round 1 – Screaming Sofa
Platform: HTC Vive Headset + Tracker
Development team: 2 programmers, 2 artists, 1 sound designer.
My role: Sound designer
A VR colorful world with HTC Vive headset and a tracker. The tracker is attached on a shelf representing a ringing bell.
Our team created a VR colorful world with HTC Vive headset and a tracker. The tracker is attached on a shelf representing a ringing bell. The aim of this game is to protect furniture from dog biting. The only way is to grab the food, put the food down, and ring the bell.This game tries to tell children that every piece of furniture in the house, or everything has its own spirit and life. Do not break or treat your furniture in a terrible way. Otherwise furniture is going to be sad and screaming all the time.
What I learned
I learned to make iterations to make our project better. The first interim week was terrible to our team because we did not do much in our project. We could not figure out how to make our game reasonable and interesting to the guests. After several brainstorming meetings, private discussions, and countless iterations, we finally built a concrete game.