#velocity squared

Welp, between me, two roommates, and a girlfriend, we all got sick for over a month with everything this winter season had. It started the day before the VR meetup, and echoed through the holidays. This was pretty disappointing. I gave myself a week to finish my project for the meeting, and though it took me a week and a half, I did get something together. I couldn't hang out with everyone, but I was proud of what I squeezed out. Luckily, we set up another meeting for January, and I decided to bring it. I've embedded a video above about what I decided to do in that week and a half. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I had that google cardboard thing, I had an old prototype, and given the color scheme of the cardboard thing, I decided to convert that old prototype to a pretend Virtual Boy game. According to my plan, this involved a couple of things: 1) I had to have two cameras, one for each eye. 2) I had to redo the art to match Virtual Boy's color palette. It ended up being a little more complicated than that, with problems in both areas requiring extra work. Adding a camera wasn't enough. Since the cameras were orthographic, there was no depth to the view. Using perspective cameras went against the Virtual Boy's visual style, because distant pixels would be higher resolution. I decided, maybe foolishly, to fake an orthographic view through a script. I put the background layers under control objects, and had the camera dynamically resize them when it moved on the z axis. I was a little concerned that this would cause problems with the physics, but it turns out it only has to do adjustments on the first frame, since past that, I could simply zoom in and out with a change in the FOV. Foolish to take that on in a week-long project, but I was proud of the result. The next problems showed up with the art. I realized that I didn't have enough visual markers to perceive 3D. I had to create a background, and a few background set pieces like stalactites. For the foreground, I needed to give the lava some texture for the eyes to focus on. I ended up making the following animation.

Finally, with testing on my cardboard, I had to shrink the view to make it fit within my visual range. This made the characters very small, and they looked distant. The whole thing looked static too. So I put in a zooming effect to bring things close while keeping all of the action in view. I wanted this in the original prototype anyway, so it was nice to have an excuse to put it in. Several bugs are left, like the highlight color making the blocks invisible, and the strange disappearance of the death effect. Oof.

I first tried to get into the games industry as an artist, but wrote up game designs on the side. Later I got hired as a designer, and started learning programming on the side. During that time, there was one thing I did that helped me grow tremendously. I foolishly, as an absolute beginner, attempted to participate in a 4 hour game jam.

We had to complete a full game in 4 hours. I'd learned a little Game Maker before that, but I never made what you'd consider a game. I failed to make a game in 4 hours, but did finish in 8 hours, and very much succeeded in many other ways. I was forced to plan as small as possible, and this allowed me to learn a whole lot in a short time. I had others participating, so I had a lot of motivation to finish. I learned a lot about cutting down to the simplest form of an idea, which has helped me in countless ways ever since. It also taught me significantly about how to approach/learn the valuable skill of prototyping. I called the resulting prototype "Velocity Squared".

In this prototype, as you can see above, you play against another player, picking up pieces of the floor and throwing it at each other to knock each other into the lava. The lava slowly rises as a loose time limit that you can partially avoid by stacking boxes. You both make the ground more precarious by trying to win, taking away your own stability and trading it for an offense.

Last April, I remade this prototype in Unity in a week out of nostalgia maybe, but also to learn Unity's relatively new 2D system. It was a fun diversion. I packed it away on Bitbucket, and moved on to other things.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I mentioned that I would be taking an older 2D project and making it 3D for a VR meetup. Well, this is that project. As I mentioned before, I want people to play works in progress, so here's the Unity version if you'd like to try it out. This is my first time sharing it with the public. The xbox controller setup may not work on Mac, as their axes are different, but whatever. You can throw in different directions by holding a direction when you throw. Throw downward to make yourself double jump. Give it a go and let me know what you think. It's far far far from polished, but it gives a general idea.