VR Jam Begins

(US East Coast)

Good luck, everyone!

The Lawnmower Man

[MM] Plan for Direct Body Placement in VR

I'm Michael Mara, graduate student at Stanford University under the advisement of Pat Hanrahan and researcher at NVIDIA. For the past week I had been waffling back and forth between a large amount of possible projects for the VR Jam. This is a partial list of what I seriously considered:

• AR by scanning room with kinect beforehand and importing model into VR scene.
• Music Visualization
• Big screen TV in VR
• Full virtual machine desktop in VR
• Godzilla stomping buildings (using kinect to track legs and a VR headset for display)
• Video Conferencing in VR (use a kinect or stereo camera to get color+depth, render a 3D floating head/full body with only moving head)
• VR Remote Control car/drone
• RTS game where you are explicitly a commander using VR to control troops (this plays into the limitations of current VR, but would require many jams worth of prereqs (screens in VR, gesture control))
• Soccer Header Game
• Short 3D film in VR movie theatre, with something completely coming out of the screen
• Getting a barbershop haircut
• VR Cards
• VR Ping Pong
• Cast magic spells
• Dodge bullets in the Matrix (Obviously would be better with bodytracking…)

[MMc] Design for an in-HMD GUI

I'm Morgan McGuire, professor at Williams College and researcher at NVIDIA. For the game jam, I'm designing an adapter class that will allow using the G3D Innovation Engine GUI inside of the HMD view. I'll work on the G3D::VRApp class directly using Oculus DK2.

Avatar depicts world-space 3D UIs

Machinis Ludo VII: VR Jam

2015-08-03 9:00 am EDT - 2015-08-04 5:00 pm EDT. 
Open to everyone with prior registration. E-mail mmcguire@williams.edu to join the jam!

Make a VR experience that is this much fun

The seventh Machinis Ludo game jam theme is: virtual reality. Given 32 hours, create a virtual reality experience. Keep your target modest--you aren't trying to make an immersive 3D game but instead a small and intense vignette of an alternative reality.

The jam will be run on the Internet, through this blog. We also have physical sites at Williams College and Stanford University where many people will gather to work together.

[MF] My Battlecode Report

Hi guys. If you were following the last game jam post you might have noticed that I had promised a grand description of a game that I wanted to make, but then I disappeared and never posted again! Well, I'm back, but not with that game. The reason is that I was hard at work on another side project: my submission to the 2015 Battlecode AI project.

[CW] Caves of Mars on github

I put the code for Caves of Mars on github: https://github.com/cwarren/cavesofmars

I've added several more things since the end of the jam, and expect to continue working on this for a while. The experience curve of the game has been seriously tweaked, and you can do a lot more with fungus (fungus like corpses). I also fixed a bug where throwing things wasn't possible when using the laptop key bindings.

Play time of a winning run is about 60-90 minutes.

[SAD] Game is up on Google Play

My game is "finished" and is up on Google Play:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.diggyground.game.android

[Nigel] Starting Late. Presenting "Bulletin (Working Title)".

Due to "chaos" and other commitments, I haven't been able to start my jam until today. This time around, I decided to make a mobile application rather than a game.

I'll be building it as a webapp using the usual JS/CSS/HTML, but will be porting it to mobile using PhoneGap. 

In short, the application is a public, location-dependent, ephemeral, bulletin board. A user can anonymously post a text snippet, photo, or 10s video. When a post occurs, all users will be able to view the current post until a new one is posted. Old posts are deleted as soon as a new post occurs. Further, users can only see posts made within a particular radius around them.

Progress: Since starting, I've implemented live snippet posting. I will be aiming to port to PhoneGap before implementing images and video. 

Current Build: https://jamapp.herokuapp.com/

[MMc] Solar Golfing - polish pass

[SAD] Victory, but not done

I know have a game which has basically all of the features I wanted to have, and a reasonable amount of polish. There are additional features I am considering adding, though at this point the only things I may do soon are polishing up the "menu" and "game over" screens.

The most important thing that I want to do before the end of the jam is deploying the app as a package, signing it, and putting it on the Play Store: all things that will hopefully happen after dinner.

Current gameplay shot:

Hello All!

So Kyle and I finally finished up last night but had some trouble getting it online. Thanks to Tony those problems are behind us! Tony's the best. The game can be found here: http://yitongtseo.github.io/Build  I hope everyone has fun playing it! Level design proved an interesting challenge. The core game play mechanism is largely unlike other platformers and building levels that played to its strengths were a challenge. Hopefully we created some levels that work well. There may very well be further versions of this game so any feed back is very appreciated!

Kyle and Yitong

[SAD} Delayed track - Game??

So, I am working on a bit of a delay on this jam, but things are still moving along. At the end of today, I think it is safe to say I have a game, but it is lacking polish in a number of ways: one is that it could look better, the other is that I have some very hard to track down bugs (things that happen sometimes, but not others, yay!). Anyway, I have a score (depth of your traversal), an end condition (air) and at least 3 types of blocks (standard blocks with 1 to 5 durability (shades of yellow), air filled blocks (blue), and bomb blocks that kill you (red)).

Goal for tomorrow: Fix bugs, make game prettier (Start/End screens). Maybe make less silly assets, maybe test it on a different phone to find out what doesn't scale correctly (a 6-inch phone with a 1440p screen might not be the average use case) and hopefully get around to packaging it and dealing with technicalities of actually getting it on the Play Store.

 

[CW] Caves of Mars - Victory!

While my starting point technically support win and lose conditions, there wasn't really much of a game there. After putting in about 12 hours over the last 4 days I have actual winning and losing, as well as a much richer set of mechanics and improved UI. I didn't get done everything I'd hoped (though my goal list was unrealistic for the timeframe), but I accomplished more than enough to feel comfortable calling this a victory! The enjoyment of playing it is now one of the things that slows my development :)

http://christopherswarren.com/caves_of_mars_v03/

[DF] So Many Doors - Victory

I think that's it for me. It has been super fun to work in this game jam and it's been awesome to see the games popping up all over this blog. As for myself, there are piles of things to improve about this game, but none on the TODO list tonight.

So Many Doors

Final Build
Build 6
Build 5
Build 4
Build 3
Build 2
Build 1

The source code can be found on Github.

I'm not really sure what problem rxjs is solving anymore. I understand the value of reactive programming and being able to construct pipes of relationships, but a part of me also feels like any sufficiently complicated dependent asynchronous relationships should either be (a) moved to a server for processing or (b) storing some easily serializable state which is updating constantly (like a video game). It was fun to use it at the start, but it is clearly not the correct solution for a game system. Mind you, no one designed it for that purpose in the first place, so I can be blamed for spending too much time hammering a round peg with a square hammer.

I'm happy with the art style and the super simple isometric rendering. It was fun to work on, and I'm psyched to give it another shot some time in the future.

[MMc] Solar Golfing final jam build

I added the aliens (it is ok to shoot into space now), added penalty strokes, tweaked some graphics, fixed a number of bugs that were exposed in playtesting, tuned a bunch of constants, and significantly increased the complexity of the planet generator based on your feedback. It seems to be pretty fun, even with just the one solar system--I'm now wasting too much time playing my game and not spending enough time writing it!

All planets still have ALL features turned on from the new procedural generator, so they are very rocky. The next step of post-game polish will be to vary feature probability distributions between planets, like the mountainous planet or the crater planet. There's probably only two hours of work until that bears fruit so I'd like to push through tonight, but have work tomorrow morning. I hope I'll be able to add those features early in the week so that I don't lose momentum.

Play the current build.

[DF] How to open up a door

I had a super fun moment where I made my girlfriend try out the build; she died instantly.
Then I added an intro level that explains the door opening mechanic a little better (I hope).

Current build

[TL] Game is Live!

After a very brief coding session late last night and work this afternoon, my game is now a game! I couldn't get my beat detection algorithm as precise as I wanted it to be (sound processing is hard) but it does an ok job picking up downbeats. The general idea of beat detection goes something like this:

• keep a threshold volume level, with a beat occurring whenever the volume exceeds the threshold
• set the new threshold to be the last beat; this prevents a cluster of beats detected
• let the threshold level decay over time
• keep track of the time when the last beat was detected to ensure false positives are reduced

I made the gameplay a little more challenging by giving the player obstacles to avoid: columns of "fire" that represent the frequencies of the song. Here's what gameplay looks like now:

Your score is constantly increasing, but when you touch the red/yellow portions of the screen your score decreases. I wanted this game to be a more casual experience focused on the music, so falling off the platforms only results in the player losing half of their points; in a sense you can't really "lose" the game. The beat detection algorithm seems to work best when there is a strong underlying pulse to the song; songs with too much "noise" across the frequency spectrum cause the beat detection algorithm some trouble.

The game can be played here, and you can even play with songs you have locally! The preloaded song takes a little while to get loaded, but local files should be up and running relatively quickly. The preloaded song "Point of Departure," is done by the awesome VeraIcon. People who were in Computational Graphics this past fall may recognize a portion of the song from the procedural cities midterm :)

I think my jam is more or less complete; I may tinker with the beat detection algorithm to see if I can get it to be more precise or try implementing tempo detection (shown here) if I have more time. I worked approximately 10 hours during this jam, with most of it spent reading up on and experimenting with beat detection.

I'd love to get some feedback on the game, as I feel the gameplay can be polished up much more (plus I'm sure there are some bugs). Thanks, and good luck to everyone who's still working!

[DF] Death State

Current Build

Added a death state, the snake monster, and some very basic balancing.
Next on the list is a victory state, to improve the random door generation, and add random coffee generation.

Does the UI make sense?
Do you die instantly?

[SAD] Diggy Ground - Progress and no progress

Yesterday I ended up being incredibly busy in such a way that I never reached a computer, let alone getting any game jam work done: So, I am going to be taking some extra time for the game jam, finishing up tonight if not tomorrow morning. It has been about 36 hours since I last worked on my game, so if we factor in an additional 36 hours, my game jam would end tuesday morning. By Friday night, I had finished implementing the basic mechanics: digging downwards and to the sides, smooth animations for all motions, infinitude of motion, and keeping track of distance. Now I just need to add a time/air limit, and it becomes a game, then I have to add varying blocks, so that it can be a somewhat interesting game, then I will play around with polish features like making things look better, a start screen, etc.

A current Screenshot of the game: (yes, the small red thing in the corner is distance/score, I will need to make that a bit bigger):

[DF] Running, etc?

Current build

RxJS continues to cause me pain in my codebase. I think it is much better at normal internet tasks of streaming data from APIs then it is at streaming a massive amount of state changes in a game.

In the mean time... there are levels, a dude who runs, some interaction with doors, but no Win State, no Loss State, and no Deferred Actions. I don't think I'm going to do the deferred actions, I don't think there will be much benefit to it from a game mechanics perspective.

I'll be adding the victory and loss conditions, some additional obstacles, and some more animations tomorrow.