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Upwards- Oculus Rift Platformer

NobleWoods
Honored Guest



Hey everyone,

I just started working with Unity and the Rift my last quarter of school, and for my capstone project created a short VR platforming game. The current version of the game, titled Upwards, represents the work that I did over 3 months, with a big thanks to Mixamo Animations, the Unity Asset Store Fantasy Megapack, GameTextures, and Stopsecret’s Peerer’s Edge parkour script (http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/peerers-ledge-parkour-system.237815/). My intention is to remake the game from scratch, possibly in Unreal Engine 4, so that I can work on developing a story, parkour based fighting and puzzles, and higher quality environments.

There are still a few bugs and some areas of the game that aren’t where I’d like them to be yet, but I felt that I should at least release what I’ve done so far before starting over. The primary inspirations for Upwards and this next project that I’m working on come from One Piece, Skies of Arcadia, Final Fantasy CC, and Skyward Sword/Wind Waker (I also used some music from those games). I’m looking to carry over some of the visual style and sense of exploration from those games along with some of the mechanics from games like Mirror’s Edge or Titanfall.

I hope that you can enjoy some of the VR experiments that I tried with Upwards. If you get stuck or encounter a bug, you can access the in-game menu to reset your position as well as fix your orientation if it’s not centered. The game is playable with a keyboard or an xbox controller using TattieBogle. The download links are listed below, and you can find me at http://www.noblewoods.me/ or send me a pm.

I’d appreciate any thoughts or feedback. If you have any cool ideas or encounter issues with the game please let me know so that I can try to include or fix them in the next version. There are a lot of thing that I’d like to do, so I’ll see what’s possible.

For those of you who easily get motion sick, there’s an option to reduce rotation sensitivity in the settings section of the in-game menu. You can adjust that to help reduce motion sickness; if you’re using an xbox controller I’d recommend increasing the sensitivity to 4 or 5. Changing the sensitivity should help a little, but if you're very sensitive to fast motion I'd suggest pacing yourself and taking in the sights versus running around as fast as you can.

Upwards was developed on a Mac, so there might be a few problems with the PC version (I was noticing issues with jumping while holding sprint and mesh flickering in the PC version).

Be sure to check out the game mechanics list in the starting menu area, you’ll want to know that you can double jump, wall jump, and more.

Download Links:

MAC- https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B657s3UNuSPiRkpkQVhteVU1Rkk/edit
WINDOWS 64bit- https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B657s3UNuSPiTFFMOXJ3Q1U2dHM/edit
WINDOWS 32bit- https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B657s3UNuSPieWI3ZFJFQk9jOHc/edit
**I'm currently waiting for approval before my game shows up on Oculus Share









Noble Woods Interaction Designer, Game Developer, and VR Enthusiast http://www.noblewoods.me/ noblewoods@gmail.com
14 REPLIES 14

hudcrab
Honored Guest

uswin
Explorer
oh man
this look very good and promising, please please kindly considered update this for dk2 man.
cant wait to try it on dk2

cybereality
Grand Champion
Awesome!
AMD Ryzen 7 1800X | MSI X370 Titanium | G.Skill 16GB DDR4 3200 | EVGA SuperNOVA 1000 | Corsair Hydro H110i Gigabyte RX Vega 64 x2 | Samsung 960 Evo M.2 500GB | Seagate FireCuda SSHD 2TB | Phanteks ENTHOO EVOLV

NobleWoods
Honored Guest
"uswin" wrote:
oh man
this look very good and promising, please please kindly considered update this for dk2 man.
cant wait to try it on dk2


Thanks! I'll try to update it for dk2. Unfortunately I ordered mine late so I might have to wait a while before I'm able to do the update effectively.
Noble Woods Interaction Designer, Game Developer, and VR Enthusiast http://www.noblewoods.me/ noblewoods@gmail.com

drash
Heroic Explorer
I like the premise of what you're doing here, and I rather enjoyed some of the game inspirations you listed. 🙂

I've posted a playthrough video for you below, just in case you glean any insight from seeing someone else play. I tried the tutorial and ran around the main world area a little bit before making the video so it's not a first-time-playthrough. When I did the tutorial, I didn't have any success with wall-running or wall-jumping there but I probably didn't try very hard. I did run into some issues where I was on the rising/falling rock platform in the back, missed my jump to the grassy area at the top and fell down onto some other big floating rocks... but I wasn't able to recover from that as I kept falling through those as soon as I tried to jump, and had to restart completely.

In the video I am using mouse+keyboard. When I tried using a controller, the controls seemed to be wonky and my character was constantly "running". In the beginning of the video, not sure if this is intentional but you can see that one of those cloud pieces just falls off completely and it doesn't look like I would ever be able to recover that one.




I just realized that the cloud bridge at the top is the bridge I'm supposed to fix, so I probably should have stuck some cloud pieces onto it or something. 🙂


Looking forward to playing with this a bit more later. Thanks for sharing your work!
  • Titans of Space PLUS for Quest is now available on DrashVR.com

NobleWoods
Honored Guest
Thanks for the video and bug reporting Drash! Sorry about the issues you encountered, I listed them on the Oculus Share that's awaiting approval, but I did not address them in this forum post. Some of them are being a little bit tricky to fix, but I'll get around to them eventually. For the xbox controller setup, I configured it for TattieBogle, which is used on OSX, and therefore maps differently then it might for Windows users. When you start the game, you will have to remap the buttons until I create a solution for that. As for the tutorial area, it's still unfinished, my goal is to add popup text that actually instructs the player and to put in more of an iterative learning process to the area. The cloud pieces that you were mentioning, that fall off the map, are intentional so as to not create too much clutter in the environment (you only need 3 pieces to fix the bridge, not 13, and there should only be 5 that you can actually collect). Here are all of the current issues I've encountered, but they do not occur every time that I play through the game thankfully:

Current Issues:

-If the player jumps onto the elevator platforms at the wrong time, they can teleport across the map or get parented to the platform in a bothersome way
-Sometimes when picking up different types of objects, the other types get in the way, so you must clear your inventory first
-Because some props were enlarged from their original size, the player might clip through their geometry
-The way the edge grab mechanic works, sometimes you grab an edge that you might not want to, and it can even result in glitching across the map
-There are some general issues with the platform building objects seen halfway through the game
-Even with slightly increased gravity, there is still some floatiness with the jump mechanics
-Some areas of the game are unfinished, so they remain optional for the player to explore (Tutorial Area, Platforming Tower Area)
-Player runs while in place on the elevator
-There are only 5 cloud pieces available to the player, not 13, and only 3 are actually needed to fix the cloud bridge
Noble Woods Interaction Designer, Game Developer, and VR Enthusiast http://www.noblewoods.me/ noblewoods@gmail.com

Jedi2016
Honored Guest
That looks amazing and terrifying all at the same time. I'll definitely make a note of this one for later (don't have a kit yet).

Swashbuckler
Honored Guest
I'm sure there are some bugs around (I didn't encounter any), but I think it's a polished an great concept! It looks great in the Rift and plays very smooth, good frame rate and overall a great enjoyable game.
Advice: keep it an exploration plat former and not a shooter.
I liked this more than any demo I played the last few months! Please continue working on it! 🙂

rswaims
Honored Guest
Enjoyed testing this out! It is a phenomenal piece of work and has a ton of potential for building upon and getting even better. I definitely didn't get any sort of motion sickness from playing - even though it has similar jumping/falling mechanics to other games I've played with the Rift. I can't wait to see what you make of this. Good luck.