#honorsproject

This week was set aside originally to respond to usability testing, however due to the coronavirus crisis It has been really difficult to get any feedback. If you’re interested in helping (whether you have VR or not!) please register here.

Instead, I’ve been focusing this week on all of the small little changes that improve the overall style of the game. These are little tasks that I have been pushing back due to their low priority, and the fact this week was a bit quiet meant it was a perfect time to do them!

New Assets

Up until this point, the Gem and Enemy Spawns have been just coloured cubes on the game board. It was about time this changed, so that It was clearer which was which. I’ve replaced the gem with, well, a gem. The enemy spawn is a floating sphere, which, as you’ll see in the next section, has some really cool animations. The hex has also had a bit of a revamp, it’s been textured to have dirt on the bottom, and a faint hexagonal texture on the top.

Enemy Spawn Animations

The animations of the enemy spawn make it really obvious that they’re active parts of the game board with a purpose. They float ominously whilst idle, and when they spawn an enemy, they frantically spin. This helps the player notice when an enemy is spawned, as they can see it spinning from above.

Main Menu Updates

Last week I added a point-and-click main menu to the game, so this week I decided to make some additions! The player can now mute music and spot effects, and also added a toggle on the info screens!

Usability Testing

As a result of the current pandemic, I’m really struggling to get feedback on my project due to the lack of VR headsets available to fellow students. If you have an interest in being involved in Usability Testing/BETA testing for High Ground VR, please fill in the following form and I will get in contact with you! (You do not need a headset to help!)

https://forms.gle/xtt7dzYg75s1Tyzx7

Thanks for Reading!

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Twitter Moment

This week has been preparing the project itself for usability testing, including adding new menus and various other UX fixes! I’ve also made a start on my application to the Viveport store, by creating some graphics!

New Main Menu

My previous main menu consisted of pillars that rose out of the floor with buttons on to replay/quit the game. Since then, I realized that the design doesn’t allow for too much in the way of extra data/scores to be clearly visible. Since then, I’ve replaced the menu with a billboard in front of the player, on which they can interact with the buttons by using the laser pointer. 

UX Fixes

These fixes wouldn’t be too obvious to show by video, so here’s a list of every small fix added this week to improve the user experience of the game : 

Rumble on the controllers

Selected Spells Preview

Improvements to the Tank Enemy

Feedback on shooting a spell into the floor

Changes to building placement rules

Viveport Store Listing

Sadly, I can’t provide a link or image of the current progress of the viveport listing until I’ve submitted a build. I can however show some of the finalized graphics that are going to be visible on the page!

Usability Testing

As a result of the current pandemic, I’m really struggling to get feedback on my project due to the lack of VR headsets available to fellow students. If you have an interest in being involved in Usability Testing/BETA testing for High Ground VR, please fill in the following form and I will get in contact with you!

https://forms.gle/xtt7dzYg75s1Tyzx7

Thanks for Reading!

Twitter

Twitter Moment

So this week has been thrown a bit up in the air since I’ve had to move home from University about 2 months early. Luckily, I’ve managed to setup a decent work-space and continue developing High Ground VR!

Defensive Walls

Up until this point, the defensive walls have very much just been a cube in the ground. This week, I spent some time creating a model in MagicaVoxel that I could use for the walls. This took the form of a small tower, and then a connector that I spawn in between each of the towers to create the wall! 

Improved User Interface

The User Interface has also had a massive upgrade this week. I’ve improved the functionality of the buttons, and made it much clearer which button the player has selected as they can only choose one at a time. Below the video is a comparison of the layout before and after this week, which definitely shows a big improvement.

Improved Sound Effects

The sound effects in the game were relatively unbalanced, and the AudioManager I had written to play the sounds wasn’t functioning as I wanted it to. Therefore, this week I had a complete overhaul of the audio in the project. Many of the effects remained the same, but I’ve added quite a few for things like User Interface buttons and a little “WOO” when the units win a battle.

Next week I’m going to be looking into setting up some sort of BETA list of people interested in testing my project. This will be ran through the testing functionality available through the viveport store.

I’ll make sure to tweet any updates I have regarding this, so make sure to follow me if you’re interested in taking part in the BETA! https://twitter.com/JackDotGriff

Thanks for Reading!

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Twitter Moment

A LOT of progress has been made this week, and High Ground VR is really starting to look like a playable product! Most of the core gameplay elements are now prototyped, ready for refinement and balancing. 

Move On Up

The first step on getting enemies built into the project, movement. This uses the previously implemented pathfinding, and uses a little fleshy-looking cylinder to represent an enemy moving from their spawn towards the central gem. There are some really nice moments in this demo where you can see fleshy-cylinder-enemies queuing to get onto a hex, and politely letting other fleshy-cylinder-enemies go infront of them.

Go Your Own Way

Further developing on the previous mechanic, this video shows the pathfinding at work. It shows an enemy heading towards the center, being blocked off by a wall, and then navigating around it. Intelligent enemies is the core focus of this project, so this is a really good start! The plan is eventually to have enemies that are more aggressive than others (based on a variety of gameplay factors), and those aggressive enemies are more likely to destroy your defenses than navigate around them.

I Couldn’t Think Of A Punny Title For This One

COMBAT! I’ve been pondering on how the combat in High Ground would work for quite a while, and I finally decided on the system you can see in the demo below. Enemies approach your units, and a ‘battle’ is initiated. After a few swings of their weapons they pathetically fall over, and then your barracks will respawn more. It’s going to take quite a long time to get some balanced gameplay out of this system, however I’m really pleased with how it’s currently working! The blue lines show the intended paths of the enemies, and then the red lines show enemies in combat : 

Thank you for reading! I’m really happy with how High Ground VR is coming together, and it’s looking more and more hopeful that I will be able to properly release it towards the end of development! I mainly have visual-based tasks planned for next week, so prepare for lots of nice screenshots! Make sure to checkout the links below for updates on the project!

Twitter

Twitter Moment

This has been a very technical week, as I’ve been building a lot of the systems behind pathfinding and placing buildings. These systems will come into their own next sprint as I further develop the project!

Send Me On My Way

This was possibly the biggest task of this week, as It involved indexing all of the hexagons within the grid, and developing an A* pathfinding algorithm that worked efficiently across a hexagon grid. As you can see in the images below, the pathfinding was originally really bad at finding the optimal route from point A to B, often diverging really far from the path before getting back on track:

This video displays the Pathfinding working as intended, with the red blocks representing blocked nodes, and the blue line representing the chosen path:

Build Me Up Buttercup

Possibly the biggest element of the final gameplay is working! Players can choose buildings from a UI placed in their offhand, and place them on the board! This will later be updated with fancier models and animations, but the base layer of functionality is there ready for me to start developing gameplay! 

Rich Girl

Placed mines generate Gold! Placed barracks spawn units! Now that buildings actually do things, it’s actually starting to become clearer what the game will become. The barracks automatically space the units they spawn, so it would be easy enough to add upgrades later on down the line. Gold will eventually be used to buy buildings, and counted towards a players score at the end of a round! 

Thank you for reading! This project is really starting to come together, and it hopefully won’t be too long before I actually have some gameplay working. Make sure to checkout the links below for updates on the project!

Twitter

Twitter Moment

This week has been great, I’ve really managed to refine the base controls of the game, and i’ve really started to get an idea of the final gameplay. Let’s get into it!

Taking Control

I started this week by revisiting all of the previously implemented controls, and playing around with various button arrangements and gestures. I’ve decided the ability to scale the board up and down didn’t really play well with the controllers, and became more of a nuisance. The new controller layout features a HEAVY rotatable game board (for ease of placing buildings), and the ability to teleport down onto the board and move around it. I’ve also had a refactor of this code to ensure it’s as efficient as possible for VR!

Three’s a Cloud

A great tutorial, available here, taught me to use the Lightweight Render Pipeline and Shader Graph in Unity to make some really nice looking clouds! The video below show the diversity of the shader, where I can adapt the clouds to look like water, sand dunes or even an alien terrain! These clouds surround the player, really adding to the ‘god-like’ feel of playing High Ground.

Pocket Size

The next logical step was to add some models to my project, and attempt to get a scale on everything! This went much better than expected, with the desired effect being recreated very quickly, as visible in the video below. The height of the buildings is exactly what I wanted it to be, and the units are slightly smaller than the player, still giving that feel of power over them. When in ‘large’ mode, the little pieces look great! It is really starting to look like a little game board.

Get on my level!

Alongside with the creation of the map and prototype assets, I really wanted to get an idea of how a level of High Ground would play out. For that reason, I created this template on photoshop, filling it in with an example of how a level will play out. It’s quite obvious from the template below that there is a lot of room for board customization, and if desired, a player could really get into the tactics of creating efficient paths to trap enemies. 

That’s all folks!

It’s time to properly start development on my honors project! I’ve got a lot of development ahead of me, so I thought I’d start off easy with learning the basics behind VR development in unity.

The basic interactions with my project consisted of 3 elements:

- Scale the game board up and down, and turn it around

- Teleport onto the game board to become tiny and join the action

- Pointing and clicking different sections of a game board to teleport around them

I’ve managed to prototype all of these interactions, they’re still a bit buggy but it’s good enough for now! Next step is getting the hex terrain generator into the project!