Welp, between me, two roommates, and a girlfriend, we all got sick for over a month with everything this winter season had. It started the day before the VR meetup, and echoed through the holidays. This was pretty disappointing. I gave myself a week to finish my project for the meeting, and though it took me a week and a half, I did get something together. I couldn’t hang out with everyone, but I was proud of what I squeezed out. Luckily, we set up another meeting for January, and I decided to bring it.
I’ve embedded a video above about what I decided to do in that week and a half. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I had that google cardboard thing, I had an old prototype, and given the color scheme of the cardboard thing, I decided to convert that old prototype to a pretend Virtual Boy game. According to my plan, this involved a couple of things: 1) I had to have two cameras, one for each eye. 2) I had to redo the art to match Virtual Boy’s color palette. It ended up being a little more complicated than that, with problems in both areas requiring extra work.
Adding a camera wasn’t enough. Since the cameras were orthographic, there was no depth to the view. Using perspective cameras went against the Virtual Boy’s visual style, because distant pixels would be higher resolution. I decided, maybe foolishly, to fake an orthographic view through a script. I put the background layers under control objects, and had the camera dynamically resize them when it moved on the z axis. I was a little concerned that this would cause problems with the physics, but it turns out it only has to do adjustments on the first frame, since past that, I could simply zoom in and out with a change in the FOV. Foolish to take that on in a week-long project, but I was proud of the result.
The next problems showed up with the art. I realized that I didn’t have enough visual markers to perceive 3D. I had to create a background, and a few background set pieces like stalactites. For the foreground, I needed to give the lava some texture for the eyes to focus on. I ended up making the following animation.
Finally, with testing on my cardboard, I had to shrink the view to make it fit within my visual range. This made the characters very small, and they looked distant. The whole thing looked static too. So I put in a zooming effect to bring things close while keeping all of the action in view. I wanted this in the original prototype anyway, so it was nice to have an excuse to put it in.
Well, that was that. There are a million more things I could do, and the lack of polish is embarrassing, but I gave myself a week limit and went over a few days, so I called it done. I’m determined to finish something with the tree project, so I’ve been back on that. After the month and a half break from being sick that is. I have some thoughts on that, but I’ll save them for another time.
