Synoptic Project -Ekipa-

Phase: 3

29/01/19

My idea of the game was horror-sc-fi in which you are an engineer which was put to sleep in to cryo-pod and have been waken up dude some unsolved problems with the technical thinks on the space-ship. After the waking up processes you find out that the staff of the ship is missing and you are trying to figure out what happened to them. Then, you have heard some weird noises and you are going to find out what is it. Therefore you can see that something attacked the ship which is the virus that the scientists were working on, have mutated with the crew and is hunting you down, so you are trying to escape the ship.

With my team I have manage to build/structure the best idea of the game/narrative for it which is.

We have chosen to made sci-fi/horror game in which you are going to start in med-bay inside cry-pod because of some technical problems your cry-pod got damaged and you woke up, you will need to find out what is going on and order to survive you will be needed to find a way to escape the space ship but there is something trying to get you. I have done some research in sci-fi corridors and med bay in order to have an idea of what I am suppose to do.

Our reaserches was based on few games which we have played before and the games are : Doom, StarCraft 2, Alien&Predator, XCOM2 etc…

After research and meeting/consulting with my team we have finally decided how the game will look and my job was to transform the idea of the game from the narrative/written side to create pictures or I should say basic idea of story board what is happening and how it will look.

I have made an not digital and digital story board of our game in PhotoShop.

After that me and my team have focused on objects and assets that we might need to use and create them for our game in the Unreal Engine.

I have focus on researching/making some asset pack, moodboard of assets and few concept arts for our game like: scalpel, tweezers, painkillers, tubes etc…

tweezers
Scalper Blade
scalpel
Painkillers
Moodboard

Therefore, with Pual we have created so far which we named Production Sprints Sheets and Asset Sheets so we would know what we have done and what needs to be done and I have created Trello page which will be updated during the work of the game.

Those the slides of Sprint Sheets, Assets Sheet, Trello and Google Drive which we have used to store our files and share with others.(UPDATED)

Then I have focus on helping my team with modeling/creating models and the models that I have created are: scalpel blade, painkillers bottle, cupboard and table with the fridge for the laboratory.

Cupboard was made of a single cube which I have scale up a bit to make it bigger then I have added extra edges by using multi-cut tool and started to deleted face that I don’t need. Then, I needed to make shelves and to make them I have used tool called bridge tool that allowed me to connect different ends together.

For Painkillers bottle I have used cylinder for my base and from there I have started to scale up the cylinder also I have used human hand rig to know how big the bottle needs to be. I used multi-tool to give extra edges to make more round, on the top of the painkillers I have used extrude tool couple of times to give the shape of open bottle (those spiral thinks that you have on top of the bottle of coke and on those spirals I have used bevel tool to make it more smooth).

However, one of the assets that I have made was having issues one of them was table-fridge which I have made of a simple cube and then I have uses tools like: extrude, bevel tool to smooth edges of the assets, bridge tool to connect side that were suppose to be together , scaling tool to make it bigger the object and also I have added to many edges (tool multi-cut), so my team couldn’t texture normally because there was simply to many faces made that were missing on UV’s and looked bad. Next, we need to create more simple one and we did. The other one was a scalpel blade which have made it to help Paul with his problem because he didn’t know how to start to make one, so I have simply made on out of the cube and extrude couple times and scale couple times to made it look like a scalpel.

This is simple table-fridge:

Then my job was to focus on Unreal Engine and create block-outs of our assets and rooms that we have planning to use/have.

This picture is an reference that Pual did in Maya and told me to do something similar in Unreal Engine. I have started to work in Unreal Engine and after first few months I have been learning Unreal Engine stuff by watching Youtube and asking for help a teacher (Gareth) and I have made progress in my original Unreal Project which for some reasons of technical problems in Unreal Engine my file (corrupted/error) was deleted and I had it to start again from the begging while there was two weeks left till the first presentation of our work, so I have just a little time to make work so for week and couple days I have mainly focus on Unreal, therefore i have no contribution in posters and game case. After, the week and 1/2 I have finished my Unreal project. However, I have came a cross new problem my team haven’t done Normal map in PhotoShop and some textures were not on Google Drive so, I needed to make another fix which took me a few days to create by using simply option in Filter>3D>Generate Normal Map> Done but when everything was going smooth another problem came over which was no space at my college PC. Next, the problem with PC space came because I have use psd files for assets textures in the Unreal Engine, when I should used tga files which none of my team created and I forgot completely about, so I have asked another teacher to help me with them and after that I just needed to replace the file textures and created couple texuters/materials for our game.

Those picture shows how our “map game” after all those problems and couple screen shots of think that I have done:

On the end I have made an fly through our game/room project which in order to create on I have needed to make new cinematic mat which allowed me to fly trough the game with my camera and every time that I wanted to stop or move camera to left and right i need to press space on the frame that I have choose.

How is the VR and AR working and progressing/improving in this era?

I have choose this title because I wanted to talk about VR and AR games and their technical side of it, what are the prices for it, how they are used, what are the prices at the moment, what kind of VR’s and AR’s we have in use right now and how can be used by futures companies. After that, I want to find out, if AR and VR is the child of “Full Dive” games. By “Full Dive” I mean a new piece of equipment that takes your cautions into the game where you can move around without any restrains, etc…. To do this I will be gathering a range of secondary resources from online and using video documentaries, as well as gathering primary research to get an idea of the popularity of AR/VR.

Virtual Reality (VR) is the use of computer technology to create a simulated environment. Instead of viewing a screen in of you, you are immersed and able to interact with the 3D worlds. Which was created to simulate as many senses as possible such as hearing, touch, vision, even smell, the computer is transformed bridge to this different world where the only restraints are the limits of VR gear and content that you can get for it. The first appearance of the VR set was demonstrated by Sony in March 2014 as a prototype for PlayStation 4 for the different perspective of playing it. For now, the prices for VR gear/set are from £200 to up to £600 and even more.

Augmented Reality (AR) is the same as VR like a two-sided coin. However, AR it’s not exactly as VR but it has the same conception of it which the AR is simulating real-world objects; VR creates an artificial environment to inhabit. In Augmented Reality, the computer uses sensors and algorithms to determine the position and orientation of the camera. AR technology then renders the 3D graphics as they would appear from the viewpoint of the camera, combining with the computer-generated images over a user’s view of the real world. Which the army had it first and the users of them were airplane pilots which allowed them to identify enemies/objects they were aiming to destroy or reckon key places and collect information faster.

The first Virtual Reality simulations were created in 1929 by a man called Edwin Link and it was created to increased flying skills of newbie pilots for the world war and the names of those inventions were “Link Trainer” or “Blue Box“. During WW II, over half of million airmen were trained by using Link’s inventions. After that, in the 1950s and 1960s, the VR devices started to take a step in improving them and the shapes started to look like those in these days.

Ivan Sutherland and his student Bob Sproull were the first creators of virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD)system which was created in 1968 and it was called The Sword of Damocles. From the 1970s the VR started to advance rapidly and people begin to apply the aspect of VR into the video games, and movies but if you have looked now you would say that it looks quite primitive by comparing nowadays technology and the one in the past. Then, in 1982 the Atari started a virtual reality research lab but it was forced to shut down 1983 because of video game market crash but some of the members from Atari team begin giving foundings to VPL Research, which created new pieces of equipment like Data Glove, EyePhone, and Audio Sphere. Jaron Lanier which was the co-founder of VPL licensed the Data Glove to Mattel which were used to create Power Glove accessory for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). Then in 21st, the VR aspect improved and it was used by Google company, the technology both on the hardware and software side which were used in creating higher-resolution maps of our globe and multi-direction tracking has been implemented into HMDs and that gave us Street Views was one of the first large-scale uses of 360 degree media, something that VR is becoming increasingly connected with the industry’s current landscape and games audio engines have been improved to create a more immersive world.

What other major advancements in VR were there after this or even before?

Image result for Ivan Sutherland and his student Bob Sproull.

Microsoft HoloLens is shaping up to be another formidable challenger in the Virtual Reality market. Not like the Oculus Rift, Microsoft’s ambitious research teams are basing their display on holographic technology. While this lends itself to Augmented Reality (or, as Microsoft prefers to call it, “mixed reality”) which is more than VR, it’s clear that the display technology alone is meant to be a jumping-off point for virtual experiences to come. For know, the price for the Microsoft HoloLens cost £2,719.00 which is still a development edition.

Therefore, as the VR and AR equipments are improving over the years the are also think that are coming out like: omnitreadmill or teslasuits.

Omnitreadmil is an moving floor that will allow us to move more freely in VR games. It works kinda like normal gym treadmill on which you are moving in one direction but omnitreadmil will allow you to move x and y axis.

The Teslasuit will allow us to feel what our character does in the game like every hit, cold/warm room that your character is entering etc.. However the suits are still in progress so we might be able to get them in couple of years may be more…

To find out/explore what people think about I will use my own survey.

The age of people that took time to answer this survey is from 10 to 27 and it looks like every single one briefly knows what is VR and AR but they can’t give a specific answer. On the other, hand it can be my fault that I didn’t specify what I meant by the question. By using a survey I found out that there is a lower percentage of people with VR sets than I have expected. When I have asked them” why?”, half of them said that is too expensive to buy one even some people don’t really want to buy it because it causes motion sickness when they have used before.
After that, I have asked them if in 10 years you will be able to send our contentious to the game and play freely and by a look at their answer, I can say that they believe that is possible but only if we advance our technology in those 10 years.

In my opinion the VR games have a big potential and we didn’t fully uncover every single think that we can to in these game but for now I can gladly say that the VR’s and AR’s games/technology is improving and it gave us a new way to enjoy our games favorite.

Link:
https://www.vrs.org.uk/virtual-reality/beginning.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_simulator#The_1920s_and_1930s https://medium.com/ossic/the-history-of-virtual-reality-e517983b1253

Project Concept Pitch

Today I have wrote down my 3 ideas of the project that I have might to choose to do.

Cure finder

Gender/Theme:

Sci-Fi
Infected
detective

Target Audience:

Story/Narrative:

Short story
Few characters

Audio/Visual Style:

sad
slow building up music

Required job rules:

Modeler
Concept artist
Coder

Project scalability:

Small project

2. Clear the world