Explosive Power

     The fireballs definitely needed a bit more kick so I added an explosion on collision. This makes the fireballs feel much more powerful and is a minor visual upgrade while I wait for christian to finish the fireball particles. In addition to this I added a melee enemy type. This guy simply walks up to you and starts punching you until you kill him. It can be quite startling to turn around and see one of these up in your face. To make aiming projectiles a little easier I added an aim assist system that helps guide your projectiles towards a target to some degree. I may include an option to turn this off if you want a greater challenge. I also got the fireballs to launch faster based on the speed of your palm which also feels very cool. And finally, you can punch enemies to kill them now, because why not?

Wave Magic is Shaping Up

This prototype has come a long way since last week. I've added a load of placeholder art assets which is a step above the cubes and capsules from before. I have a rudimentary menu that allows you to customize you're spell load-out now. In addition to this I added a rock wall spell, 1 enemy type, and a basic enemy spawning algorithm. Playable demo should be up this weekend. Just need to do some more testing.

Spell Casting in VR Update

I've gone a bit further with my spell casting Leap Motion concept and added an enemy that fire projectiles at you and a flamethrower spell. Spells are easily inter-changeable for each hand so you can choose to have flamethrower on your right, fire ball on your left, two fire balls, or whatever you like. The enemy projectiles can be knocked away with your hands, dodged or destroyed with flames. Check out the video.

Playing With Fire

       I recently got my Oculus Rift in the mail and had to start playing around with some ideas. Here's a short demo of a spell casting concept. I used the leap motion from hand tracking and used opening and closing my hands to fire spells. You can also affect the speed of the missile with the velocity of your hand. When my palm opens to about 60% a spell is fired. It's a pretty fun little concept I may expand on.

Mobile Infinite Downhill Derby VR

I recently started working on an infinite arcade style racing game which uses nothing but head tilt to control the vehicle. The turning is controlled by rolling your head slightly left and right. This allows you to also look around without steering out of control as well as not requiring the use of a controller with the Gear VR to play, check it out.

This video may be down and the old file is missing, here's a link to it on facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/anthony.graceffa/videos/10203659919217039/

I modeled the car and road pieces by myself. Currently working on a track generation algorithm.

Next on my list to script is:

• Suspension updating the axles correctly.
• Random traffic
• Scoring system

As usual, staying under 50k triangles has been difficult, I'm experimenting with new inexpensive ways to add detail, luckily my draw calls are still in check.

New Fauxtography Video

Before milestone 4 I wanted to do another video including the short tutorial stage. Graphics are a bit prettier than the Gear VR version but the mobile version will still look pretty enough.

Once again, challenge post page here:
http://vrjam.challengepost.com/submissions/36226-fauxtography

Fauxtography Progress

The Game has come a long way since my last post. In a about a week I have done most of the main menu, finished taking photos, saving them to disk, finding out what subjects were captured, reading the quality of the photo and serializing the relevant game info. I have also start constructing the first world "Bidwell Park". Everything is being done with mobile hardware in mind which is the biggest challenge for me. It's hard not to place the nice looking reflective water but in the end its all about performance. I've uploaded a video of my progress so far. Please note that the light maps are not baked in this demo so the lighting is very off.

I've started a repository for my scripts if you want to see them, I'll be uploading everything with a delay of a  few days:

https://github.com/AnthonyGraceffa/Fauxtography-VR

My favorite part of this project so far was choosing how to grade photos. I first started fiddling with some way to judge the photo based on where the subject was in the picture by doing a bunch of vector math. I originally wanted to get the user to try to use good composition and the rule of thirds with their photos but I ended up going with something simpler. Photos are awarded more points if the subject is centered ( 20 degrees or so away from the center) and how close the subject is to the camera (judged by the magnitude of a vector shot towards the target. For now this is all I'll do to grade the photo but I may change my mind in the future.

A "SnapShot" taken from the game

Finding if a "Target" was in the photo was also interesting. I originally just used Renderer.isVisible() but this does not take into account something being behind another object even if its in a camera's view port. What I ended up doing was looking at each subject that was visible, and then fired a raycast at it. If it hits, it counts as being captured. The result is if the target is obscured enough the ray may not hit it, but I'm going to play this off as "You need a clear shot" to get points for capturing a subject. Once again this is also subject to change later.

So far so good, the next things on my list to implement are the photo album, the ability to delete snaps from the game, animal AI, and finish building "Bidwell Park". Some people have requested the ability to "zoom" but since I'm building this for mobile I want it to work with only one button, maybe I could use voice commands or something, I guess we'll see.