Introduction: Seize the Sky was built during Building Virtual Worlds at Carnegie Mellons Entertainment Technology Center. The world was constructed using Oculus Rift, and Leap Motion. Using these technologies we put our guest into a virtual reality space with an ability to use a natural interface in our world.
Story: A mighty giant heads towards a town with murderous intent. A country side boy notices, and cries to Zeus for help to defeat the giant to save the city. You are Zeus, save them all!
Platform: Oculus Rift + Leap Motion in Unity 3D | Time: 2 weeks | Roles: Programmer – Game Designer
Design Goal: Our design goal with Seize The Sky was help character A (the boy) who is afraid of character B (the giant).
Design Challenges:
- Incorporating a satisfactory use of Leap motion.
- Achieving our a sense of character A is afraid of character B.
- Level design.
- Game-play design.
My Contributions: As the lead programmer on Seize The Sky I made large contributions to the code base for this project. I also took an active part in the design process with working with the team to develop various aspects including game play, and level design.
Development
Iteration 1
During brainstorming we tried using several appropriate methods, such as gesture centered brainstorming (due to our use of Leap Motion). Finally we had five initial ideas:
- Help mend relationship between characters.
- Play piano to make baby sleep.
- Use light to guide a character home.
- Keep animal safe growing to adulthood.
- Hold characters hand to guide them.
With our initial ideas we further boiled them down to three concepts with the following reasoning:
- Concept one was hard to conceptualize compared to our other ideas which seemed simpler and more clear.
- Concept five could be incorporated into concept three.
Creating sketches of each concept we then sought out the advice of our professor Jesse Schell.
With Jesse Schells feedback we went with concept C, because we wanted to explore squeezing in Leap Motion.
We then began further conceptualizing the idea with sketches, and research into the capabilities of Leap motion and Oculus.
With this in mind we began assigning tasks to complete, considering game play, and used a scrum board to assist us in tracking tasks.
On the technical side we used a NavMesh, and simple A.I. to run the behavior of the Hunter and Deer. The behaviors of the two agents were essentially:
- The deer always moved to nearest tree that has an apple.
- The Hunter patrolled around fixed points, and if it came close enough to the deer it began chasing it.
The result of our hard work was the following.
We then received feedback at interim, which sadly wasn’t good…
Iteration 2
Continue reading Seize the Sky – Building Virtual Worlds, Round 1