Expectations VS Reality: Game Dev Noobs
Playing a game is fun. Playing an interactive computer game is challenging, but still fun. Being a newbie in playing virtual reality games is quite hard. But being a student creating a Virtual Reality game with no prior engagement to interactive gaming and with no initial learning in game development is a real-time disaster!
Coming up for ideas to make a research is one of the most complicated phases. For us, it’s the stage where we get to relate what we really have an interest on, any hobbies we want to work on. There comes a time we had arguments on what we wanted to do. Like a lot. For us who get to fail in the first concept proposal, time was a great issue. We grabbed what’s available on hand and plan on doing it, like a pro. We know, it’s a big down but hey, cheering up and pretending is not a bad idea at all. Stay positive. Everything’s going to be fine.
Seriously though, being an IT student pressured by too many failed attempts in thesis proposals makes you think of too many ridiculously imaginative concepts in order to pass, right? That, exactly, is what we did.
First, we thought of a concept of a game that correlates with the movie “The Maze Runner”. Then, to make our proposed concept a lot more interesting, we added an E-learning feature to make our concept more unique. And then we thought, “why not make the game into virtual reality?” Finally, we came up with a kind of maze game combined with E-learning and virtual reality.
Sounds cool, isn't it? Yes, we believed so too. That is the one concept we proposed to our panel in which we got approved. We were so happy back then, really. And then the disaster started.
Two days prior to the next concept presentation, we went to gather more information and suggestions from our respective teachers and relevant people until such game development was the final option. At this point of time, it’s important to have a fixed plan and more conviction that you want to take it as the first step on doing your game. We could suggest you some tips on how it worked for us. Well, as we do believe it worked!
Select a head in your team. Well, not necessarily a leader but just someone you guys choose to take responsibility with your team. It’s more like a person you think is dependable and can handle your team well or rather can put you all together.
Individual ideas. Before coming up with a fixed decision, it’s a great idea if all of you in the team make a firsthand research on what would be the details and design of the game.
Set a meet-up. Sure it’s easier to make a group chat on messenger and share information but meeting up personally with your team works much better and is more conducive when making your final decision.
Brainstorm with the team. You get to do individual research. Meeting up with the team in one place, plus you’re all present. So what to do next? Do a presentation, individually, on what you and your team mates get to gather. Discuss it together then formulate an idea which the whole team would agree.
Wrap up. We could assume that at this moment, all is set! The concept is fixed. Details are up and you are ready for your presentation. It’s important to take your team’s commitment at this stage. You went to make decisions together so you have to stick to it and take responsibility on the upcoming activities.
When we first started our game, all was well. We slowly understood our concept and were breezing through our game engine, until we came to the virtual reality gear that we’ll use, the Oculus Rift. It was clear that we were noobs when we thought that Oculus Rift can be run in a laptop. But man, we’re utterly wrong. We have already passed 20% of our thesis defense and was close to 50% when our world suddenly crashed down after hearing that our VR gear cannot be accessed by a mere laptop. Only one thought came to our mind that faithful day, “Where will we get a PC that can access an Oculus Rift? T_T”. Fortunately, we have found a solution in the form of an Office PC. It has enough specifications that can cater the Oculus Rift. So we went ahead and tried it out. It worked! One of our problem was solved.
Our next problem was our algorithm. We were supposed to use Genetic algorithm for our artificial intelligence. But due to genetic algorithm being a laborious thing and took too much time to generate, we settled with another algorithm that can cater our game. It took a lot of explanation to our panel of judges in order for them to be convinced, luckily they have agreed, though a bit reluctantly.
Combining the concept of E — learning and virtual Reality is troublesome because it hasn’t been implemented yet. We had to undergo multiple trials and errors for our system to work. Some features in our game weren’t even fully furnished for it to be displayed in virtual reality. We settled for 2D sprites for our E-learning questions. Some features of our game include the time limit, mini map of our maze, Health bar, first person shooter and enemy spawns. All of these can be seen in virtual reality.
The hardest part of our game is implementing the use of the oculus rift in our system. Just installing the run time and SDK of the OR isn’t enough for the tool to work, especially if you are creating a game with the oculus rift as its main tool. We have to input codes and gaze pointers into our system in order for our game to work. Each input takes up too much time and laborious coding, especially if you have to implement each gaze pointer to react with the displays inside the game.
Game development is no joke! Words from our team! It’s like; we are babies learning how to walk properly. Mistakes and failing are inevitable. Those where given. But, as for our case, we strive and went to learn how we could do it. We are in the time where you can get anything from internet so we suggest you guys do it too. Research, research and more research! Plus, there are many experienced people around where you can get valuable information for your research, mainly the teachers in our college. For main source in getting ideas for our development it would be, you guys know, it’s the internet. Below are the sites that for us are very useful. Hope you’d find it good too!
Brackeys. Useful and amazing game development tutorials are up in this site. You could find different basis here from Photoshop to coding using C#. And Brackeys is really awesome.
Unity.This is a recommended game engine from us. We personally find it good and handy. Plus if you’re having a hard time in your game, just email Unity.
Stackoverflow. This one is an online community of various kinds of programmers. We get to loot and recycle codes here.
Github.It’s an online public project hosting where you can find packaged projects and source-codes. You can find almost everything here.
What does it take to get done with the game? After the planning then series of designing and coding, how it would be done to make sure it could be implemented already.
This torture has been in our last 2 years of college life. It even came to a point where we almost lost our will to graduate because we happen to encounter a terrible thing during game polishing, specifically, a broken AVR, a blacked out monitor, and a sizzled Video card. All these happened 5 hours before our final defense. We even went to school looking like we were chased by a mob of dogs. And to those who say, “Don’t make your friends your thesis mates”, that’s a very much absurd statement. We are friends and became best of friends after our amazing race survival in our research. Dear students who are surviving your research in this moment, YOU ARE AWESOME!
If you think what we did was a mistake, learn from it and if not, well you can read and ponder with this blog all over again.
