After eight days of work, here’s my VR Google Cardboard game! Check out the release page here. The .apk build will be uploaded within a few hours.
I also added a VR section to the blog where I can in the future collect all my tutorials, projects, and other articles.
The last day is finally here! I spent most of it optimizing and polishing. All of the buildings were lovingly trimmed away in Blender so that only faces facing towards the player were preserved. I also tweaked the lighting a lot and added music. It’s still compiling the lightmap on my lightmap. As soon as it’s done, I’ll upload a build.
Speaking of music, the music I ended up choosing was on of 70 tracks released by Mark Sparling under CC-BY. Check out his website or his soundcloud.
Screenshots!
Beauty shot of the office
Beauty shot of the buildings
Final geometry
Lots more polishing. After doing some “hallway testing” (by grabbing random victims in the hall and asking them to test the game), I tweaked the targets to make them both more obvious and slightly cooler looking. I also added ambient sounds, although they seem to be buggy–the first time the player enters the level, they play full volume even outside their range. Odd! Anyway, have some screenshots.
New transparent targets.
New office sign!
There are some bugs still, but I think the game is playable enough as is to release after tomorrow. I’m hoping to find some music to go along with it, but if not, that can come for Version 2.0.
Lots of behind-the-scene progress. The story is now complete and the game can be played beginning to end (which only takes about 2-5 minutes…hey, I only had 8 days here…).
End target. Click this to make a winner is you!
Kitchenette in the apartment.
Finally! A dialog system!
It speaks! IT LIVES.
Also finished most of the main external geometry:
So many wasteful polygons
However, the buildings are very inefficient. I might remake them in Blender to reduce polycount.
Also, the main “puzzle”:
Hmm, what is the password?
Future work is mostly focused on making the apartment prettier and adding an endgame trigger. Then sounds and optimizations, etc. I also want to add spaceships out past the balcony, and if possible, some nice ambient music.
Late update–I completed the work last night but had to go to bed.
I spent most of the day doing modeling and 3D animation. I have a fully-rigged Robot that animates a typing loop at its desk. This robot is an NPC that can be interacted with!
A robot, sitting at a desk!
Same robot, fully rigged.
Trees!
The dialog system is still in progress. Check out the Day 5 post–which will be up in a few hours–to see what it looks like!
More progress, although not in the direction I was anticipating!
The “blink” script continued to be problematic, so I removed the fancy one I grabbed from the Unity wiki and wrote my own very simple one. It works. I will release it CC-BY when I upload the source and build.
I did some “hallway testing” with family members. One of them had trouble getting out of the starting room because the door closed too fast after it opened. Instead of bumping up the delay, I did some hacking and came up with a context-sensitive “polite” door that refuses to close as long as you’re looking at it. Unrealistic? Maybe. Convenient for the game? Very much so! Like the “blink” script, I will release the door controller CC-BY later.
Last, the targets did not fully disable their collider when you teleported to them. I added some code that fixes this.
Got lots more lighting done. I figured out my workflow…
Adding a UV map in Blender
Telling Unity to create lightmap UVs.
It’s wasteful to use 6 huge images, but I did make a skybox using Unity’s skybox shader. I used Ingar’s space sky textures from Unvanquished for now. These are available CC-BY-SA 3.0 and I will make these files available when I realize a build and the source.
A table, a chair, a couch, a bed, a bedside table, two lamps, a computer monitor, a keyboard, a small desk, and a refined version of the curvy desk, all handcrafted with the finest non-GMO free range organic vertices by yours truly.
Here’s the fun bits!
In game screenshot. Office!
In game screenshot. Polite door won’t close until you look away. Just like Wheatley!
In game screenshot. Bedroom lighting.
In game screenshot. You have to find the password!
New version of the office, with fancy chairs.
Computer monitor.
General mesh outline. I don’t see me adding new areas in the time I have left in the challenge.
Adding computer monitors.
Second take on the appartment. New furniture!
Early take on some lighting.
Early build with bed.
Lots of progress today.
Every so often, my “blink” mechanic was leading to a black screen with no “unblink”. I made some changes that I think have solved the issue. My script removed the targeted cube from the scene when teleporting to it, re-enabling it whenever the user teleported somewhere else. (So the user wouldn’t be standing on a cube.) I think that using setActive(false) on the cube was causing issues. So instead, I enabled/disabled the mesh renderer for that cube. Time will tell if this was the issue. It happened much more on my phone than it did on the PC.
I improved my door controller, adding a checkbox that allowed the door to switch between “toggle” mode and timed-wait mode, the latter of which causes the door to close again after a few seconds.
I added sound effects for the door using the Google VR SDK tools. Many thinks to Pempi from the Freesound project for his awesome elevator sound. He says he actually broke into snuck into the mechanical penthouse of a building to record it! Whatever the source, I often use it for both elevators and (with some pitch/length alterations) doors.
I blocked in all the major areas where I want gameplay. There are three areas. The first is the long balcony. To the left is a small apartment complex (with one apartment that the player can enter). To the right is the main office for the apartment complex. The idea is that the player will first have to go to the apartment office to get the key to get into the apartment itself, after which point they can look for clues.
Early morning shot of the game environment.
Apartment hallway
Apartment Office
I made a few small detail models, including a desk and a light fixture. I’m planning on creating some couches, tables, bed, lamp, etc for the apartment.
Light Fixture
The desk. I’m super happy with the way it turned out!
Ugh. Just, ugh. I was originally going to use Blender to bake lightmaps. However, the indirect lighting feature only supports “approximate” gathering, which makes for some interesting lighting bugs, like this one, where the light is going through the fixture itself:
The light from the bulbs is going through the light fixture to shine on the ceiling.
Strangely, there was a patch that enabled true raytracing for indirect lighting for Blender 2.6. I’m not sure why this was removed for Blender 2.7. I think it’d be very useful!
So, I decided to use Unity instead. I’m not exactly enthused with Unity’s lighting system either–I gather I’m not the only one–but it’s workable.
Here’s some screenshots.
Early take on the lighting on the balcony.
Actual lighting in Unity. Ignore the half-columns. I’m fixing those!
Early version of balcony, no lights.
Early version of office, no lights.
Balcony with pre-baked lightmaps in Unity.
Office with pre-baked lightmaps in Unity.
Tomorrow I plan to get a basic on-screen dialog system working, as well as creating some computer and switch props. I haven’t decided if I’m going to put people in the game. Maybe robots! Robots would be easier.
I also need to decide if I want to fight with Unity’s lightmapper more or try to pull off vertex lighting. I don’t think vertex lighting will work very well, but I might give it a shot.
Until tomorrow!
Now that it’s winter break, I am going to sit down and do something I’ve been wanting to do for quite awhile: create my own VR game using Unity 3D and Google Cardboard. Thus, I am challenging myself to make a playable game (a short one) in eight days.
The game is going to be a take on a “point and click” game, a-la the old 90s Lucas Arts adventures (like Beneath a Steel Sky). Except set in VR. Movement will be accomplished by “teleporting” (with a blink effect) to reduce VR nausea. The goal of the game is for you, a detective in a futuristic city, to gain access to a missing person’s apartment and find clues on their disappearance. This game is primarily a learning project, but I really want to produce something that people can actually play at the end.
I spent most of the first day brushing up on Unity tutorials and updating my Android environment and Unity setup. At the end of the day, here’s what I accomplished:
Movement was the first hurdle. Some time ago, I had a simple game that used the Google Unity SDK’s IGVRGazeResponder interface to give certain GameObjects actions when the user looked at them and clicked the Cardboard’s button. Since then, Google seems to have made that interface defunct. The new way to do things is to hook into the event system. Here’s how I set up my project:
A little more involved, but also relatively flexible. My movement script uses the FadeInOut script by KentyMan at the Unity Wiki. Whenever the user clicks on a valid target for teleportation, the game fades quickly to black, repositions the camera, and then fades back in.
Very excite. Such game.
I’ve had this idea in my head for awhile: a long balcony that overlooks a vibrant cityscape. Well, okay, right now the cityscape isn’t very vibrant. Okay, fine, I don’t have a cityscape at all. But I have a balcony, and that’s progress, so whatever.
I designed the balcony in Blender and imported it into Unity. I am using no textures at the moment; right now, the emphasis is on geometry and sketching out the main areas for the gameplay. (It’s going to be really small.) If I have time, I will probably bake lighting in Blender and then either import as lightmaps or (if I can swing the low-poly aesthetic), bake the lightmaps to vertex colors and not use any textures at all. My phone will probably thank me for the latter. We’ll see!
Last, I really wanted to get something moving, so I added sliding doors. I did this by calculating the target positions of each half of the door and then Lerp-ing between the start and end as a function of progress, calculated as (end movement time – start movement time) / duration. For extra fun, the Lerp-ing is nonlinear by using a smoothing function in place of a straight time parameter, so the door speeds up and slows down nicely.
The green objects are teleportation targets.
Here’s the results of my labors running on my phone:
It looks much cooler with a headset.
At the end of the project, I will make some or all of the project available for others to study.
Freeway, the city map I’ve been working on for Unvanquished, had its first alpha release today. This is a very rough release intended primarily for gameplay testing. Once the level design flow has been finalized, I can go in and add details, sound, scenery, etc.
