Devblog 1: VR Development Camera, Level Editor & Awesome looking games
Hi everyone!
We, at IronEqual, decided to document the different projects we are working on, to keep a track of what everyone is doing, and keep you updated regularly! Each of us will write a little bit about what they did during the previous week, mainly focusing on one or two projects every time.
We also hope these reports will be a way for you to get to know each of us better. We are very different in our way of approaching gamedev, even though we are working towards the same goals.
This week is about level editors, a new little game, VR tools, a music-based project and maneuvering a ship on sand!
We will try improving these devblogs as we go, give us your feedback here or on Twitter, Facebook, etc
FENO (@feno42)
Level Editor
Feno here,
Aside from saving the world from an alien invasion with my buddy Elon, I rewrote the code of my in-game level editor (that you may have seen on my twitter @Feno42 last week) in order to make it work in every rotation angle & fix most of the bugs.
Inverse Kinematics
Niels pushed me to mess around with inverse kinematics. So, I made some AAA-level walking IK.
WW releasing this week
This week, we’re going to drop a little platformer called ‘WW’ for free, stay tuned!
NATHAN (@grange_nathan)
Hi, it’s Nathan aka “Enol”.
This week I worked on two little VR thingies:
TiltBrush Viewer
The first one is a “TiltBrush Viewer” for Android (Cardboard). You basically put your .obj or .fbx file exported from TiltBrush and you can look at them in VR on your Phone with Cardboard (or something alike).
I’ve done the basic system, a basic UI and I’m working on how you’ll be able to move around.
I’m looking forward to try out the Daydream’s controller, inputs in Mobile VR are really not that great.
Here is a GIF of what’s it’s like right now:
VR Dev Camera
The second project may take longer. It’s not always great to show something in VR from the VR player point of view.
Some games have a great feature that makes the player in VR able to move a Camera around to show what they want to the people looking at a “Normal” screen.
I’m working on something like that to use in any VR project we make on Unity. I want to have something as easy as a Prefab to drag & drop into the scene. It’s going ok for now. I have some basics things I wanted done but most of the tool is still WiP.
A weird bug with the Vive’s controllers not showing up/tracking in Unity is blocking me to continue the “moving the camera” part of this project, but it’s a known issue and I hope to find a solution soon.
I can still show you myself moving my head around facing the “VRCamera setup”:
You can only imagine my hands moving but hey, that would be too cool! Maybe next week you’ll see me showing you stuff in VR like a Virtual Vlogger, the Neistat of virtual worlds is coming!
You can see it’s basically a camera, a panel to controls things on the Camera, and a live feedback of what is recording.
When I’m done, I’m thinking about trying to do the same type of tool for UE4. That would be awesome but nowhere near as easy as in Unity.
If I find a great way to do it, it would mean asymmetrical games with a VR & non-VR player are possible in UE4 too!
See you next week!
BENJAMIN (@Valgoun16)
Audio Detection
This week I focused on audio.
I worked on implementing a beat detection algorithm in Unity. Basically, the audio spectrum is extracted from the audio source on each frame. Then for each sub band of the spectrum defined, I calculate the instant sound energy and the average sound energy on the last x frames. If the instant sound energy is higher than C * the average sound energy (where C is the precision of the algorithm), then we have a beat in this sub band. C can be set by hand or can be dynamically determined by calculating the variance of the sound energy. The higher the variance is, the lower the precision has to be.
Then I used this beat detection algorithm on a little project based on a concept made by Niels. In this game you always walk forward and only can control your orientation, jump and strafe right or left. The goal is to collect as much white balls as you can while avoiding any obstacles. Each time you collect one, you speed up. The environment is synchronized with the music beats: isolines change color and orientation, walls move etc… To create the isolines I used Keijiro’s image effect that you can find here : https://github.com/keijiro/KinoIsoline
KERYANN (@KeryannM)
IJDI
This week on Ijdi, our Imagine Cup game, I designed and coded our 3Cs (Camera, Controller, Character) for the game’s “exploration phase”.
Ijdi is set in a desertic world full of dunes and small rocky islands, in which you navigate thanks to your “windship”, some kind of boat, part sand yacht, part windsurf.
This kind of movement based on sand gliding isn’t that easy, to convey at the same time a sense of realism as well as being easy to use and let you have a sense of control of your windship.
To convey at the same time a sense of realism and being easy to maneuver your windship through a sand gliding-based movement isn’t that simple.
This is why I’m iterating different ways of controlling the vehicle, but also the way physics react with the sand, and the camera to keep enjoying the landscape.
REPULSE
I also kept working on REPULSE, mainly around the way of managing menus in game. I want to create menus with stylish and dynamic transitions while still being ergonomic.
When we put out REPULSE’s demo (that you can download here), I had to hard code every transition because of a lack of time. It gave me a lot of control, but making each one was tedious, and every change made afterwards was becoming a nightmare.
This is why I did a full redo of the menu : it is now really easily to edit each transition speed, position, velocity, animation or even to add or delete a whole new category.
NIELS (@NielsTiercelin)
LABYRINTH
This week I continued working on a project called Labyrinth (for the moment). Basically, you are in a…. labyrinth! I tried to tweak as much as I could the “moving walls” effects, especially when you are standing still.
I then focused on adding progress, and changing the layout of the labyrinth every time the players catches a sphere:
I still have to tweak everything, add a “real ending” and other small interactions into the game before releasing it.
RIETVELD
I also wanted to make a game about a designer I like, Gerrit Rietveld, and spent some time working on how to convey my message.
For the moment, you can walk around an endless space filled with Rietvled’s “Red and Blue” chairs, and sit on the one you prefer. I’ll add another mechanic and finish the game hopefully in a week or two!
See you next week for a new update on our projects ! You can also follow us @IronEqual or on our personal twitters for more content about our creations!
