four person fast-five
CIS568 Project 2 Work Plan
Santiago Buenahora, Edward Cai, Alexander Chan, Davin Hazard, Anosha Minai
- Arrow Shooting:
- Hold bow: Change the starter gun to a bow ~ 2 hours
- Shoot arrow (with button): change projectile to bow object ~ 2 hours
- Shoot arrow (with motion): detect when the arrow is pulled back on the Vive controller and then shoot when it is let go ~ 10 hours
- Make VR ready: test with Vive headset to make sure it “feels right” for VR ~4 hours
- Teleportation:
- Change arrows: add option to change arrows that teleport instead of damaging the opponent ~ 4 hours
- Teleportation arrow: implement something similar to the class demo with option of confirmation ~ 2 hours.
- Condition Testing: Set conditions for valid teleportation areas ~ 3 hours.
- Make VR ready: add camera effects to make sure it doesn’t cause motion sickness ~ 3 hours
- Game Mechanics:
- Random power-ups: Create power-ups (possibly large arrow, explosives, slow) ~ 12 hours
- Additional arrow types: bundled with above task
- Radar and scatter arrow (like Hanzo’s) ~ 4 hours
- Arrow disabling “special” arrows ~ 4 hours
- Implementing win conditions: keep track of health and lives. End game when conditions are met ~ 4 hours
- Time-based (most kills wins)
- VR UX:
- Haptic feedback: vibrate controller when shoot arrow, vibrate controller when hit ~ 2 - 4 hours (no idea how to do this)
- Visual feedback when hit ~ 2 - 4 hours
- Arrow color switch: Change colors of arrows ~ 2 hours.
- Scoreboard
- Multiplayer:
- TOTAL: ~40 hours
- Santiago Buenahora: game environment, teleportation
- Edward Cai: bow, shoot arrows, game environment
- Alexander Chan: game mechanics, level design, bow/arrows, UI/UX
- Anosha Minai: game mechanics, level design
- Win conditions: 3 lives, 100 health or time-based
- Location based damage (headshots are OHKO, etc)
- World appearance: cartoonish, with buildings (like Team Fortress: https://usercontent2.hubstatic.com/12810491_f520.jpg)
- Alpha Mechanic Demo (2/16/17 @ 1:30PM):
Basic arrow shooting with controllerTeleportationwith VR ready camera effects- Some additional arrow types
Arrow switching- Basic “shooting gallery” level
- Visual/haptic feedback
- Beta Mechanic Demo (2/21/17 @ 1:30PM):
- Polished arrow shooting
- Polished teleportation
- Win conditions
- Basic multiplayer
- Preliminary full level
- UI
- Final Demo 2/28/17 @ 1:30PM: Everything should work!
La Va Land
A link to a demo of your game on YouTube (you will be expected to make a good video - this is important for both resume purposes and in general for visual applications)
- Lava: Animated material creating a more realistic look and feel.
- Lobby with spheres: Use the same game mechanic (shooting an arrow) to host / join games, creating continuity.
- Transporting through teleportation with fade: done to allow the player to navigate the game with minimal motion sickness.
- Lava rising: create urgency and incentivizes players to move / win quickly
- The player starts in a Game Lobby, where they can either host a game by shooting the "Host Games" sphere or look for an existing one by shooting the "Find Servers" sphere. If they opt to find an existing session, the lobby populates with smaller "Session" spheres which can be shot to join a session. In order for both players to join the same game via different computers they need to write ""
- Once in the Lava Level, the player needs to shoot a team sphere to join either the red or blue teams.
- Players compete to reach the top of the towers in order to capture them. Capturing a tower earns players points for the longer that the tower belongs to them. Players compete to be the first to reach 20 points!
- As a twist, Players are also racing against time - the lava is slowly rising and if it hits either player before one has won, then they will die!
The main motion sickness issue is when players fall off teleport tabs, which can happen sometimes if the arrow hits the pads in a particular way.
Among the difficulties:
- Configuring multiplayer (both lobby and replication)
- Modeling the towers / teleport tabs in a navigatable way - The goal of the level design is to make sure that players are never stuck in a postion where they can't move. However, there are many possible combinations of ways that a player can navigate. Through extensive playtesting, we were able to capture and hopefully guard against most scenarios, but there is always the possibility that there are scenarios that weren't caught.
When we orginally came up with the tower-capturing idea, we decided that the best way to reach the top of the tower would be by shooting a "teleport cube" that, upon hitting, would transport the player to the position underneath the cube. As we increased the complexity of our towers, we kept the same paradigm. However, when we made the switch to having the lava rise (and therefore created a game in which the players are climbing much more) then the game became much more complex and navigation became more of an issue. If there are too many objects near a player, it limits their field of view and makes it more difficult for them to navigate. We think it would have been better to reduce the number of objects around the towers, perhaps controlling the player's teleport location more. This issue definitely highlighted the challenges of movement in VR.
It would have been nice to have more introduction to Blueprints and Materials, the basics of Unreal, because it took a long time to understand even how to get help. There is so much that is possible with Unreal that it makes sense that we just have to dive in to learn, but a litte more guidance would have been great.