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[APK download] Crashland Reborn

sfaok
Protege
Hi my name is Llŷr. In this thread I'm going to document the development of my VR gamejam entry.



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ChallengePost : http://vrjam.challengepost.com/submissi ... and-reborn
Download : Crashland Reborn APK
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In Crashland Reborn, you will find yourself marooned on a hostile alien planet. Armed with only a smart pistol and motion scanner, your will need to fend off waves of increasingly ferocious aliens and survive until rescue arrives.

While the odds are stacked against you, killing aliens yields credits which can be spent on various power-ups for your gun. These will (probably) come in two forms:

• Firing modes (single shot, three round burst, full auto, rockets).
• Upgrades – stackable stat boosts (damage, reload, accuracy, rate of fire, capacity).

Power-ups will be purchased via a HUD that appears when you tap the Gear VR’s touchpad. The HUD will also display information such as credits and time left.

The power-ups will be delivered in the most metal way imaginable - via mortars launched from orbit! These will land in your general vicinity to encourage movement.

The game’s theme and visuals will be a pastiche of films such as Aliens, Predator, Robocop, Dredd and Starship Troopers. Very blocky, 1980’s design with Paul Verhoeven levels of blood squibs.


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There are four salient aspects to my entry:

1. The aim is to develop a fast and action packed FPS that adheres to VR best practices. Of paramount importance is how comfortable the game is to control. All rotational movement will come from the player’s own body, balanced around using a swivel chair. There will be no analogue rotation. I will attempt to create an intuitive control scheme that combines head tracking with decoupled aiming.

2. The game will be wholly designed around a short 10-15 minute experience, which I believe is the perfect length for mobile VR.

3. The gameplay is designed to invoke a constant arms race between the player and the attacking aliens. It will be completely up to the player how they upgrade their pistol, yielding many permutations, strategies and meta gameplay for the community to discover.

4. The aliens will hopefully be driven by a procedural animation system. This means that every encounter will be unique and should result in a very visceral minute-to-minute experience.

I'll leave you with a work in progress render of the alien species you will face in Crashland Reborn, 6 legged terrors I'm calling Frog Demons!



Note: As mentioned I released a DK1 demo called Crashland in Summer 2013 and I will be reusing the name, premise and some assets from that demo here. However I want to stress that the experience I am developing for this gamejam is completely new and will be designed and coded entirely from scratch for the competition.
Developer of Ocean Rift. Follow me on Twitter @sfaok
72 REPLIES 72

spinaljack
Protege

SweetJV
Honored Guest
Your aiming mechanics looks tight. Nice job!

sfaok
Protege
Thanks for the nice comments! Very happy with progress so far.

Working on motion scanner at the moment. This device is basically your lifeline as it not only tells you visually and audibly where aliens are approaching, but also helps you locate power-up drops. You have to be vigilant every time you order a power-up drop though as the electrical storm will temporarily disable the scanner!



The main development consideration I've had is where to put the scanner and how the user interacts with it.

My first idea was to have it be something you hold in your left hand. As you have a gun in your right hand at all times this seemed like the most immersive option. However the problem was that the scanner was constantly on display in the bottom left, which just felt a bit unnatural. I experimented with making it so that the scanner would drop out of view when not in use, but it still felt a bit off to have to glance to the bottom left all the time, especially as this is the same motion you do when turning leftwards. As the body turns, the scanner should turn too and so looking at the scanner would also cause the body to rotate etc. I even experimented with dampening leftwards rotation if you're looking directly at the scanner, but it felt a bit awkward to use.

The next idea I had was to have it be toggle-able, appearing in the center of view like in the screenshot above. This works pretty well but it's quite a binary thing and obviously a transparent interface that covers such a large area of forward vision isn't exactly great for mobile rendering! There's also the danger that people would play the game with the motion scanner on screen at all times, which would take away from the visuals. I tried making it so that you can either use the motion scanner or use the gun but again I think this will feel a bit awkward.

The solution I think I've settled on is to have the motion scanner directly in front of you at chest height. The idea is that it's completely faded out of view when you are looking forward but if you look down it fades in. A similar thing happens with the audio - you can hear the beeps at all times but if you look at the scanner it is much more pronounced. I like this approach because you can be completely immersed in the environment but if you want to check the scanner you look down and it's always there as a half-circle. It also introduces the gameplay element of looking down at the scanner, reorientating and looking up at the horizon to check for enemies etc. which feels quite natural.

There's a lot of tweaking to be done (what angle to fade in, how big the scanner is perceptually etc.) but this is the most elegant solution I've come across so far.


Developer of Ocean Rift. Follow me on Twitter @sfaok

RAMcGregor
Honored Guest
You are doing a great job with the updates! Things are coming along very nicely!

g4c
Explorer
"sfaok" wrote:
...I am toying with the idea of giving them serpentine tongues - left a little gap for it as you can see. It would mean an extra draw call for each creature though....


Yes drawcall budget is twice as tight in stereo and we should keep them low.

If you have room on the atlas for the tongue texture (you should have, can smear one dimension if needed). Then you can put a tongue in the main mesh and rig a new bone to control it. Dont put control in the animation track, but rather control the bone directly from script. This will give you a runtime animated tongue without an extra drawcall.

Nice work and that creature does look super awesome!
Android VR Developer. https://twitter.com/SiliconDroid

sfaok
Protege
The aliens are in!




Poor things only have walk and strafe behaviours at the moment so it's a bit one sided. I'm thinking the first couple of minutes will just have scrub aliens like this but after a while their big brothers will start turning up...

"g4c" wrote:
If you have room on the atlas for the tongue texture (you should have, can smear one dimension if needed). Then you can put a tongue in the main mesh and rig a new bone to control it. Dont put control in the animation track, but rather control the bone directly from script. This will give you a runtime animated tongue without an extra drawcall.
That sounds like a really clean solution, cheers. I'll try it out if time permits!
Developer of Ocean Rift. Follow me on Twitter @sfaok

Jaycee900
Explorer
Great video! I really like the detail of it all, blood, gun etc good stuff!
Mini Gear VR Reviews Blog --> http://gearvrreviews.blogspot.co.uk

sfaok
Protege
I've started sketching out the landscape, which in terms of play area is roughly 1Km square. My ambition is to make you feel you are on the surface of an alien planet from a classic sci-fi novel cover.

The main colour scheme will probably be teal + orange, like in the first screenshot. However I would also like to have alternative color schemes - perhaps one could slowly fade into the other, or different difficulty modes could have different hues.



Developer of Ocean Rift. Follow me on Twitter @sfaok

sfaok
Protege
After further experimentation I've decided that the atmosphere will change as the game progresses. Currently starts out blue, fades into green and then red for the last few minutes before rescue. This will compliment the changing alien tactics pretty well I think.


Developer of Ocean Rift. Follow me on Twitter @sfaok

Dima
Explorer
"sfaok" wrote:
Currently starts out blue, fades into green and then red for the last few minutes before rescue. This will compliment the changing alien tactics pretty well I think.


Whoa, that is beautiful!
Dmitry Kurilchenko [VR Jam 2015] Wendy