Hey everyone! Today we finished development for our first week as studio 7 in EECS 440, and are excited to talk about our project, our current vision for it, and our progress towards making that vision a reality.
Firstly our project. We believe that the biggest asset of VR as a medium is its plethora of options for users. We are seeking to capitalize on this through a sandbox based game, with CAD like features in a way similar to the game Gmod that is available on PCs. More details on exactly what this looks like will become more clear as we talk through our features, and show you our progress at the end.
Now on to our features, our vision for what they will be, and their current status of implementation.
Object Spawning
The quintessential part of any sandbox and CAD esq programs is the ability to spawn in and combine objects. Our goal is to have simple polygons and shapes that the user can spawn in, grab, move around, throw, all the good stuff. Using these simple polygons the user will be able to construct more complex shapes and geometries that they can use in game, for throwing, grabbing, moving around, hitting each other, hitting other objects, and whatever else they can dream up in a sandbox setting.
Currently this feature is part way complete. We have object spawning implemented in a great, easy to use hand menu utilizing the controllers. The shapes currently available are cube, circle, square, ramp, and of course, rocket launcher. For the zombies. Object connection is not currently implemented but is an immediate next step in our development cycle, and plans are well underway into how to make this work. Hopefully we even get chairs to sit in and wheels that turn in order to construct our own automata!
Rocket Launchers and the Zombies
No sandbox would be complete without rocket launchers and zombies. The rocket launcher we have implemented is fully functional, and available at a moments notice in large amounts at the press of about 3 buttons (pulling out the menu, clicking rocket launcher, and spawning as many as your heart desires). These rocket launchers are grabbable and do in fact shoot rockets that can send whatever other objects you spawned in during your sandbox adventure flying away, and making structures rapidly disassemble.
The zombies are currently only 2 in number, but thats how all apocalypses start. George and Layla currently do not do much but run and place and look pretty, but they are a prototype and omen of what is to come. In future versions of this project they will be full fledged zombies, running at you, being scary, and of course they will also be able to be rapidly disassembled, with a hit point system just like any other enemy that needs to be defeated.
The Setting
Finally we boxed out a basic manufacturing hanger for all the crazy contraptions that will get built in the future. While it may look simple now its designed to hold big things. This includes a console with buttons to switch between the hanger and sandbox area, a platform to hold contraptions during construction before deployment, and whatever other features we dream up during the development process. The sky is very much the limit, especially since there is no roof.
Our Thoughts
This week was very productive especially considering it was our first meeting as a group. We have set up our division of labor, worked out scheduling, developed version control, brainstormed our dream project, and began significant progress in implementing it all in one week. This was not without its challenges of course, a lot of what we wanted to do we had no idea how to implement before getting started, and no doubt this will continue to be the case given our high ambitions, but we still managed to implement most of the fundamental functionality that will set our game apart. Overall we viewed this week as setting the groundwork for future success and we believe we have done that, both as a team and in the core fundamental functionalities implemented which we will build on to complete our vision. In the long term we aim to monetize this through software sales aimed at people looking for a communal sandbox style game, along with people needing a quick interface for crude CAD design.
Without further to do, our milestone demonstration.
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