Ye Olde VR Dev Blog #1

This week we have started on our longest and probably most intense project thus far, a virtual reality experience. This project is on a much larger scale, involving all members of our class as well as individuals from other disciplines. We also get slightly longer to work on this project.

Together as a group we had to come up with a cohesive theme that we could all work around and come up with three different minigames that we could include in it. Later we ended up creating groups so that we could all work on the minigame that we wanted to. We all ended up agreeing on creating a fantasy/ medieval type of VR experience. We ended up having a list of numerous minigames and we had to narrow it down to three, we took a tally to see which were the three most popular choices and they ended up being; a catapult beer pong, a throwing knives dart kind of game and a sword arena battle.

We ended up deciding that there should be four groups, three of which are technical and the other being the design group. The technical groups are all the groups for the individual games; spinning wheel, swords and catapult. The last team is the art team and they are in charge of making sure all of the art assets are aesthetically similar so that the game will have a cohesive look to it. There is also a HUB team which is in charge of putting the entire game HUB together.

The spinning wheel game team is lead by Aeisha and has Hayden and Roman in it.

The swords game team is lead by Shien and has Eric, Brandan and myself in it.

The catapult beer pong team is lead by Shawn and has Phil, Jermaine and Matt in it.

The art team is lead by myself and has Aeisha, Shien and Roman.

The final team which is the HUB team is lead by our project lead Hayden and has Aeisha, Shien, Eric and myself in it.

As well as sorting out all of the teams this week we also worked on trying to figure out how to set up the HUB and the experience itself. We had two different ideas for how to make it. We could either have the player teleport to each individual minigame or have all the minigames in the central HUB. While doing the teleporting would of probably been a bit easier we thought that it might break the immersion of the experience a little bit however with the second idea we were having a lot of issues involving how to implement the swords minigame into the tavern HUB area. So with this discussion we ended up having the idea of implementing both of the ideas. We will still have the HUB with the spinning wheel and catapult minigames in it however we will have a non player character that will teleport the player to the swords minigame which will be held in a seperate space.

The rest of the week was spent allocating everyone to sections of the game design document and starting working on it.