Welp, GDEX is right around the corner and I’m hammering out the last details, so instead of prose, I’m opting for the screengrab dump. Hopefully I’ll have some feedback, photos, sketches and otherwise good news about it next week!

Its the 1st day of preschool for my youngest – I will have 3, count them, THREE glorious hours of no-kids. No, “daddy, daddy, daddy”, no spills, no sounds of destruction while I try and use the bathroom as quickly as I can – and I can FOCUS.

First up: getting my project to work with the Rift. Since GDEX is in 2 weeks, I’d like to be able to bring a HMD that I didn’t pay for, and has a built in audio solution, since Keith, the organizer of our shared space, has advised it will be noisy.

I also need to start getting promo materials together and find a way of handling signups – even if it is just a clipboard to take email addresses.

Fast forward a few hours later: just picked up kiddo as he excitedly told me about his morning – circle time, singing songs, making a paper cut out apple; all very fun and interesting. He asks about my day – so I tell him:

A) got Oculus support running – thanks to the ever useful VRTK, and a few of the associated tutorials, I was able to get a version working. Its separate from my Vive project, but after my recent adventures with computer problems, I don’t want a single thing going wrong with my projects. (Side note: as of a few weeks ago I am now a strict back-er upper) but being able to play-in-editor on my Rift gives me hope that I can have my build running before GDEX.

B) Massive amounts of house cleaning – my folks are visiting Sunday and getting both the house AND the office shipshape are of utmost importance. I want to show off my toys, the game and an old project: my childhood home, recreated in VR. I want to see their reactions so bad – if I’m lucky they’ll let me film it.

C) Getting my signage ready – I found a local printer that’ll make me a 20×30 poster on foamcore, plus another that will make some buttons. As I’m designing these, I realize I don’t have a legit website for the game – just this dev blog. So, in addition to everything else, I have to look into subdomains and how to set one up – as well as make a simple webpage.

As I’m telling kiddo all this, he’s starting to yawn and drift off to sleep – too much excitement and, frankly – to him, my day was pretty boring in comparison to his…

Since getting back to almost fully operational status, I’ve been playing with an alpha of some mo-cap software, Mindshow. It is a lot of fun, and the ‘Mad-Libs’ aspect of it could be a great party game. I did a short recording of myself explaining how I got my dev PC back on track:

So, yes – having Oculus software installed with my odd combination of hardware & software (plus aRadeon driver update that bluescreened every time I tried to install it) made for a unhappy system. Unity slowed to a crawl – it reminded me of early dial-up internet: click on something, go make coffee, come back, click; go do something else. It made dev work impossible, and since Unity refused to build – impossible to show off a demo.

Bitching about it on the VRTK Slack channel did yield some steps in the right direction; comments about the new USB 3 card I added got me looking in the direction of the Rift I recently was gifted by Oculus, and after I uninstalled Oculus home, my problems vanished. The downside is, I truly love working with Oculus Medium, the program could easily be the Photoshop of VR sculpting and until I find a viable way of getting everything to play nicely (basically waiting for Oculus / Unity / AMD to update their $#!+) I’m outta luck with the Rift. Shame, cause I also enjoy Lucky’s Tale, too.

So: BACK TO FREAKIN’ WORK.

https://youtu.be/dpc0sgpUrj8

So, the video show some of the newest work – I got the very cute bee modeled, animated and I had a moving version that used the components and Playmaker scripts copied off my roaming monsters – until the bee started killing the player – oops.

I’m also getting into Timeline, Unity’s new editor, built like non-linear editors like Premiere and Hitfilm. Since I’ve used software like this for decades, taking to it should be fairly easy. After watching a tutorial and downloading DumbGameDev’s awesome Playmaker plugins, I was animating my fish in the pond in under an hour. Curious about how else I can use this new feature.

I’ve also been exploring using Substance Painter 2 as a way of texturing my level – trying to use Blender has gotten too clunky to try and paint in, especially since my level has to be broken up into chunks to avoid Unity’s 65K poly limit. I hate having to dive into learning new software while on a project, but Blender’s limitations are slowing me down – and I feel like I’ve lost a lot of time already and GDEX is coming up sooner than I’d like. Planning my first public display will soon take precedent over dev work.

Part of the problem with being a gameDevDad is the constant pressure from the ‘Dad’ part of this gig. Whatever I’m doing, whether its wrangling a upgrade, working on level design, or baking a nav mesh – as soon as I hear ‘daddy??’ – I’m instantly putting on a different hat. Certainly, I’m not the only stay-at-home dad who has faced the problems of being a man, at home. with k i d s. While the rest of the world trucks merrily along, without us. I’ve gotten more than one “I thought you quit!” comment from the gang at the VR dev Slack channel after I’d been away for a while. It doubles when something I’ve been meaning to work on gets delayed, like if I decide to grit my teeth and update to the latest and greatest version of software because I feel like I need a new feature (in this case, Unity’s new Timeline) – most of the people who can devote several hours a day, each and every day – they’re already on to problems I’m not even aware are coming down the pipeline. And the problems I’m dealing with are met with, “oh, um… let me dig back in the archives – I think we came up with a solution…”

Coupled with the urge to tinker with new ideas, like this itch to try and use Oculus Medium to sculpt game levels – which I feel truly breaks me out of the ‘fla’t feeling I’ve gotten when trying to use Sculptris or Blender to create levels. I feel like they are truly more organic and I can easily do things like put caves and mountains in the same level with zero difficulty.  The biggest challenges are cutting them up into less than 64k polys and cutting up the UVs to get textures on them.

Some days it feels like I’m barely slogging along – and every time I try and sit down at my workstation the entire house is ganging up to sabotage my efforts. Which can lead to thoughts of: “Am I wasting my time trying to make a game?” or: “Am I taking on too much?” or even, “Can I get hi-speed internet on a remote mountaintop cave?”

This is the part I’ve been working on – it has caves, springy platforms, and all kinds of hiding places for neat little interactions. I’m hoping to use it as a demo level for the GDEX expo at the end of Sept. Keep your fingers crossed that I can get it to a workable place before then!

Its been a bit of a back and forth struggle: stick to platformer conventions and allow player ‘death’ or allow for other setback mechanics, such as knockback, or having the player be sent back to the beginning.

The missus feels death is out, other testers think its a needed part of gameplay – I’m still on the fence. I do believe that in order to be open to all option, I ought to at least try and add the functionality – in case it will be added in the future. Or if I decide to make it an option to choose at startup. So, here is my 1st iteration: done in Spriter Pro as an animation…

Its crude, in its current state – but it does demonstrate the viability of the concept. I’d like to add headset fade and have the player reset to a previous point. I’m not certain about how feasible it is, but one of the fellas over at the VRTK Slack suggested having him fall apart physics style. Just not sure how to implement it – my one attempt simply added rigidbody to each of the pieces, but it did nothing to affect the character when the ‘death’ trigger was activated.

Oh well – let me decide IF it will be added before getting all into the details…

Another game element I added was attaching a spot light to the Camera Rig for the dark castle interiors. Since its parented to the HMD, its dependent on the player looking around to illuminate the way – will try and make it so dark that the player will have to divide attention from where the player is, to where the player will need to be:

Into The Medium

Since I got the Oculus Rift as a developer, I’ve been trying to get it to work – a big issues was my mobo and its USB 3 ports – seems others have had the same issues and I ended up purchasing a Inateck add on card from Amazon that did the trick. I now have 2 HMDs, 4 controllers, 2 lighthouses mounted on the walls and 2 Rift sensors all cluttering my desk. Combined with my ’86 IBM Model M keyboard, it looks very cyberpunkish.

A bonus with the Rift was the freebies, and an even bigger bonus was the free software with the Touch controllers. Medium drew my attention first, since I’ve been struggling with Tilt Brush and adding my creations to Unity. As soon as I fired it up – I fell in love. I have been dreaming of a Sculptris styled sculpting program (I’ve been aching for the update to export .obj for Masterpiece VR) and seeing that Medium can export .fbx or .obj had me drooling at the prospect of sculpting game levels in VR (or even better, having my 6 year old muse create them) so after tinkering around for about 20 minutes, I had something I thought I would try to export to Unity:

I had zero problems exporting or importing and can honestly say it took less than 5 minutes of resizing and rotating to get the level in, put into place and colored and added a mesh collider so I wouldn’t fall through it – and took a walk around my new creation:

(I did also discover that some of my tinkering with the animations now has his face flying off when he jumps)

Truth be told – I’m in love with Oculus Medium – its well polished, handles like a dream and I’m looking to import kiddo drawings and see if I can take them and sculpt them out as more 3D objects.