Platform: HTC Vive
Role: Programmer
Developed using : Unity 3D, C#
Team: 5 members
Duration: 2 weeks
What's the world about?
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An interactive VR experience where the guests is rowing a boat around a very beautiful lake and collects the stars on their way which he can throw it onto the sky to decorate the sky.
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The guests are offered enough sense of freedom with a choice to row the boat the direction they wish to.
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There is a giant star that appears after the guests have certain amount of collectibles in his boat which serves as an indirect control. Once the guest collects the giant star there is a beautiful surprise element with a dolphin casually passing by.
Design Phase:
We created a consistent, highly interactive and engaging experience that lets the naive guest feel like they have a lot of freedom in the choices they make. We focused on the following factors while designing the experience:
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A good interest curve
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Meaningful choices
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Iterative Playtesting
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Surprises
We built an interaction map for our world describing the way the guest will be guided to interact with the world. The interaction map forced us to think through the way the guest will interact and the method of indirect control to use.
In order to help us with the play testing we made a template to document the guest experience which we extensively used to iterate and improvise.
Play-Testimonial
My name is: ___________ Today’s Date Is: _________
My favorite thing about the game was: ____________________
I wanted to more of these things: __________________________
I wanted less of these things: _____________________________
If I could wave a magic wand and change one thing, I would change: _____________________________________________________
If I had to describe this game to my family or friends, I would describe it as: __________________________________________________
I felt like I was making my own choices [ ]Yes [ ] NO
My Contributions:
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Developed the boat movements mechanism to make it feel organic with the Vive controllers.
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Participated in the brainstorming session actively in order to develop an easily understandable and simple story with minimum instructions given to the guest.
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One of the biggest challenges we faced was the movement of the boat and the rowing mechanism. The fine tuning of the speed was a challenge and we iterated the whole mechanism with every play test to understand how to tweak the boat physics to make it feel easy and organic for our guest.
COLLABORATE - BUILD - TEST - REPEAT
Building Virtual Worlds class taught at Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center is a
project-based course where interdisciplinary teams build virtual worlds with interactive content.
We work with different teams, platforms and present the world in a cycle of just 1 or 2 weeks.
I am extremely passionate about building cool experiences and exploring new technologies.
Check out my VR/AR worlds which I built collaborating with creative individuals in an overall span of 2 months !!
BUILDING VIRTUAL WORLDS
Platform: Makey Makey
Role: Programmer
Developed using : Unity 3D, C#
Team: 5 members
Duration: 1 week
What's the game about?
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This is a fun 2 player game.
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The guests are stuck in an alien land and the only way to reach the earth safely is by navigating an alien Spaceship.
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There are a bunch of symbols appearing on the screen and the 2 guests need to coordinate and press the right buttons to hit the right combination.
Design Phase:
We built a game in just a week where the key was just to have FUN. We gave great emphasis on playability factor of the game.
Some of the factors we highly considered were the following:
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Does the guest have fun while playing?
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Are we building an activity the guest wants to return to over and over again?
We kept the storyline simple and the mechanism fun. There was a fun sense of urgency while playing which served our goal.
Since we were dealing with repairing a broken spaceship, we hand - built 4 space consoles and used the Makey- Makey as an input for buttons. Only when both the guests finish pressing the buttons the circuit is complete which signifies success.
My Contributions:
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Built the props from scratch for the space consoles. Co- developed the visuals using Shaders.
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Our main difficulty was making sure the Makey-Makey works without breaking and the clues are placed intelligently far enough so that the guests move around. We solved this through playtesting and iterated the game play many times to understand the perfect design which the guests enjoyed the most.
Platform: Microsoft Hololens
Role: Programmer
Developed using : Unity 3D, C#
Team: 5 members
Duration: 2 weeks
What's the world about?
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This is an intense world where the guest plays the role of a guardian angel whose purpose is to rescue a good soul who wants to reach heaven safely but is held back by the lord of hell - Satan.
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This world has 3 levels portraying the complex game play involved to accentuate the intense environment.
Design Phase:
We concentrated on complex game play and mechanics and incorporated it perfectly with the story. The game has 3 levels with a progressive difficulty level.
The following factors were our priority during the design phase:
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Character A is afraid of Character B. Is the FEAR factor shown to the guest and audience in a visible way?
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The guest helps the character A achieve the goal through interactions.
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The "state change" of character A should be clear and thus give the guest a sense of satisfaction.
My Contributions:
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Very actively involved in getting the team together and make sure we all communicate ideas and work flow in an effective manner by taking meeting notes, implementing scrum meets and maintaining a task list.
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Developed the mechanisms related to the gestures of the Holohlens.
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Co- developed the level design and game play mechanics.
VR: DECORATE YOUR SKY
Programmer
VR: CAKE SKATE
3D Artist
GAME: SPACESHIP FRENZY
Programmer
AR: THE GUARDIAN
Programmer
DECORATE YOUR SKY!
SPACESHIP FRENZY
THE GUARDIAN
CAKE SKATE
Platform: Oculus Touch
Role: 3D Artist
Developed using : MAYA
Team: 5 members
Duration: 2 weeks
What's the world about?
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A funny, cute story where the guest belongs to a cake baking company and is facing a crisis situation where the delivery van leaves without picking up the wedding cake.
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The guest is skating and following the van in order to deliver the cake on time. Unexpected funny events occur on the way which spoil the look of the cake.
Design Phase
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Since we had the Omni with Oculus, we made sure that running mechanism is an important interaction to the plot and built the story to revolve around this mechanism.
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We as a team focused a lot on storytelling with VR in this project. We carefully designed the obstacles the guest would face on the way.
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We kept the emotion alive throughout and gave great emphasis to the interest curve.
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We iterated on maintaining the perfect balance of humor and not making it too silly.
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The art work design was of high importance. We designed the world to make complete sense with the story.
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We made storyboards that would fit the theme perfectly keeping in mind that we want the guest to have a fun experience.
My Contributions:
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This was a refreshing experience. I was responsible for modelling and Texturing. This exposure has been really fulfilling as it has made me understand the pipeline more efficiently.
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I contributed towards the design, the look and feel of the world in order to compliment the story.
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One of the main challenges we faced was designing the world to be cartoon - like and fit in the obstacles the guest has to face on the way to make sense with the climax of the story.
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Learning new skills has been very exciting and I love it !
GAME: BEATS ME!
Programmer
Platform: Jam-O-Drum
Role: Programmer
Developed using : Unity 3D
Team: 5 members
Duration: 2 weeks
What's the game about?
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Beats Me! is an acoustically appealing experience where four players collaboratively create music by collecting beats in a competitive manner.
Design Phase:
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We concentrated on simple game play yet an immersive experience which aims to be collaborative in nature.
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We designed the success and failure state accordingly. If a player missed a beat, there is appropriate feedback without breaking the rhythm of the game.
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Mapping each beat to the timing of the spawning of each symbol was a real big challenge. We iterated over and over again to make the timing impeccable.
My Contributions:
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I was involved in the coding for the scoring system which involved 2 main methods: 1. Collaborative score based on multipliers - The total score depends on the synchronous number of beats collected by each player. 2. An individual score which tells the player how many beats he / she has collected. This justifies the collaborative yet competitive game play.
BEATS ME!
