Warp! Game Development

ACHIEVEMENT GET: MAKE A GAME

If you have a Gear VR, feel free to download our .apk!

You can also check out our ChallengePost page here!

As of writing this, it is 11:11 PM, 5/10/2015. A mere 9 hours and 49 minutes before the VR jam deadline, and we’re still dev’ing away!

Fortunately, we’ve got the meat and potatoes of WARP! nailed down. We’re currently iterating through some last minute bugs, balance and speed tweaks, and tightening up level design. Oh, and we even threw in a menu.

It’s the Saturday before the deadline of the Oculus Mobile Game Jam, and we’re crunching it! Just working on some final things, like the game’s end and start menus:

When using the GearVR, you are actually looking at two images. Unity sets up two cameras in approximately the same place as your eye holes, and then applies some warping shaders to account for the optics. The result is a crisp, normal looking image in the GearVR... but if you’re not looking through lenses, things get a little weird:

You’ve got two images that are slightly distorted, and have some color-correction. Not so great for showing off!

After a bit of digging, we came upon a deceptively simple way of running our app in a Monitor Mode.

Step 1: Create a new Camera GameObject in your hierarchy by right clicking and selecting camera. Place this camera in the same location as your OVR rig.

Step 2: Select your “OVRCameraRig”, and, in the inspector, uncheck the OVR Manager script.

It took us way too long to figure this out... mainly because we thought that the OVR Manager script handled the tracking. After a quick facepalm, we were able to get this nice, unwarped image, perfect for Screenshot Saturday!

Stay tuned for an awesome little video! It’ll be done by Monday, at 9AM!

POWER. (Warning: If icons aren’t bobbing up and down, it means Tumblr isn’t very good at gifs. C’est la vie)

Here’s a few powerup icons that we’ve created. They don’t feel flashy enough right now, considering that they’re the only thing in this cruel universe that’s helping you.

(It does have a perfect loop in the game, I swear!)

Creating game assets is pretty difficult. At first glance, it appears pretty straightforward -- after all, you only need your main character, your enemies, and your environment. And this is true, up to a point. If you are just knocking out a quick prototype, a level made entirely out of flat planes and boxes works just fine. The hard part is moving from that “big picture” point of view, to a “details oriented” point of view. When you need to start fleshing out your environment, what do you do?

Since we are using Unity to create WARP!, we have access to the Unity Asset Store, and there are many models that we could purchase and use. So far, we haven’t picked up a single one. We plan to model the whole game from scratch.

We’re doing this for two main reasons:

We want full control over the amount of polys and draw calls

We want a consistent art direction

Number 1 really ends up driving number.2... We know that we need to have a low draw call and poly count, and there’s really no way to confirm that any models on the Asset store would work unless we purchased and tried them. Some models say that they are optimized for mobile, then talk about getting 30 fps on a latest gen phone! 

So we’ve settled on a nice lowpoly aesthetic, and have designed our game around the limitations of the system. Here’s our overall workflow for creating a model from scratch!

First step is sketching! Each iteration should be a quick, under-a-minute sketches. Keep going until you find a few that you like the look of.

Now make a few more sketches. Spend a bit more time on this section, but not too much. No more than five minutes. At this stage, we narrowed down our ship design to the one of the far left.

We skipped a step here, which was to draw a few different angles of the ship (Check out our recent posts to see a quick pic of that). After that, start modeling! We use Blender because of its power, price, and compatibility with Unity.

Texture your model! We bake some ambient occlusion onto the texture to give it some depth, then splash some color on in Photoshop

Lastly, load it into Unity, and apply some shaders. We are currently using the excellent UNO shaders, which gives our models a bit of visual “oomph”.

These are the four colors that we’re building WARP! around... you’ll see these colors in the warp tunnel, on the hologrid, on the menu, and even on this blog! 

There will be other colors, of course, but these four will dominate!

A quick sketch of our main character’s ship, at the last stage of the concept development (You can see the difference between the two ships clearly on the side views -- Flat top vs. slanted). 

We went with this simple design for a few reasons:

It clearly shows the direction the player is pointing

It has a simple and recognizable silhouette. This will help later on when we make icons and buttons for the game

It fits the “arcade-y” feel we are striving for

It’s quick to make and modify... a must for a game jam!

Sketches like this (Top, front, and side) really help the modelling process.

Stay tuned!

Welcome to the landing page/development blog/overall zone of “WARP!” -- Pronounced “WARP-BANG” (See here).

WARP! is our entry to Oculus’ Mobile VR Jam 2015. It’s a fast-paced, arcade-y game in which you are controlling a spaceship, flying throughout the stars. But the space is dark, and full of terrors... Namely, small geometric shapes hellbent on smashing into you. By way of your holo-control screen, you must dodge or destroy the enemies, explore the sector, and WARP! to the next zone.

No chance to relax yet -- WARP! is a dangerous place, and you must keep your ship on your carefully calculated path to make it out alive. Successfully exploring a sector and navigating the WARP! will allow you to upgrade your ship to better handle the unrelenting onslaught of alien ships.

Will you build up big guns, and smash your way through, or pick up a cloaking device and time manipulator to sneak past the waves of enemies? It’s up to you!

Keep following this blog for updates, screenshots, gifs, and more!