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THE FUTURE IS NOW

Pavan Koneru

Full Sail University

THE FUTURE IS NOW

Video games have now been a part of people’s daily life for more than four decades. The techniques in the development of video games were updating day by day. One of the major update in the development of the video games is integrating the Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) into the game development. By integrating the AR and VR technologies the game looks more realistic and the game characters will be shown on the real world virtually by taking the advantage of the VR technology.

Virtual Reality takes the advantage of the GPS when integrated into the mobile gaming and takes the real time data and displays it in the game. This makes player feel as if he/she is playing in the area where he/she is located. Augmented Reality is always integrated with the Virtual Reality in order to take the advantage of the real time location and data. In the recent times Pokémon Go is one such game which took the total advantage of both Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality technology. Virtual Reality collects the players real time location and helps the Augmented Reality to overlay the computer generated elements on the real world.

AR and VR technology is on the emerging technologies in the present days. Google is also working hard at developing this technology and developed Google-Glass a few years ago. The idea was to use sensors, GPS, a camera and a small screen attached to a spectacle frame to overlay information onto the real world. As the technology is in its initial stage of development Google couldn’t push the sales of its Glasses because of privacy concerns and the difficulty of getting the technology to work properly.

Magic Leap is one be the next big thing. With Pokémon Go, a user still has to look at their phone screen to find a creature, whereas Magic Leap’s device allows users to see and interact with the creatures as if it were in the real world. At any rate, this is what the handful of people outside the company who have received permissions to use it have said.

The growing interest in the Augmented and Virtual reality is understandable given that they are expected to become “the next big computing platform”, according to the recent Virtual & Augmented Reality report published by Goldman Sachs. This means that these technologies may end up having as big an impact on humanity as personal computers and smartphones. Even the investors are also getting excited as the Goldman Sachs says apart from the $2bn Facebook spent on buying Oculus VR in 2014, venture capital firms have invested $3.5bn in 225 augmented and virtual reality companies over the past two years. This clearly shows the impact of AR and VR technologies on the gaming industry and how quickly it is growing.

References

Claasen, Larry. "THE FUTURE IS NOW." N.p., 18 Aug. 2016. EBSCOhost. Web. 4 Oct. 2016. <http://web.a.ebscohost.com.oclc.fullsail.edu:81/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=0e1268a7-b639-4144-8298-b0607c4a8656%40sessionmgr4008&vid=1&hid=4109>.

“The Unknown” - Individual Postmortem

As part of on Game Design Master’s degree I got to attend the Asset Management course where I was supposed to work with my classmates and develop a game which is bug free by the end of the course. On the first week we decided to develop a game which is top-down shooter where the player need to find the exit without getting killed by the enemies(Zombies, Vampires and Wolves) in order to complete the level. In this project I worked on the UI development for the game. I got to learn more about designing and developing the 3D-menus for the game. Designing the 3D-menus was one of the main challenge for me. I got to do a lot of research and reading for getting the 3D feel for the menus. Then the next challenge was creating the HUD which should show the Player’s health, Score and no.of kills. Which is one of the main feature in game, and aligning them properly is one of the biggest challenge as it is a top-down shooter game the HUD should not interrupt the player’s vision and it should be very clear for player to check his health and score. After designing and developing the UI the one main challenge is integrating the Menu and HUD into the game. During the testing the Score system didn’t update properly and it took a great effort to fix that bug. Later during the game testing the No.of Kills and Score was interchanged because of issues with merging the player’s Character script and the HUD script, where I need to work with my programmer to fix it by re-writing the scripts and adding an extra script to solve that over-looping of the score and no.of kills. After all these efforts by the final day of our class we got to submit our bug free game. And hey I never mentioned our Game Name right?! It’s The Unknown.

“The Unknown” - Team Postmortem Report

For our project this month, we created a game called The Unknown. It is a “Run and Gun” style game where the player must survive endless hordes of monsters, including zombies, werewolves, vampires, and demons. It is set in a dark forest, filled with traps for the player to lure these monsters into. We used the Unity engine to create a fun and challenging play experience, where the player needs to always be watching out for the hordes of monsters out to get them.

What Went Right

1. Our communication was great. We were always aware of what was happening for each team member over the course of the month. And if anyone needed to know something, they could easily get a hold of another team member, or the whole team to get the information they needed to complete their tasks.

2. No Source Control. Usually, not having source control for a game project can lead to a lot of issues and missing content. However, for the scale of our team and the size of our project, we felt that not having source control was a good idea. It turned out to work great for us and we didn’t have any integration and merging issues during the development.

3. Art Assets Created with Ease. We did not have to wait on art assets to be created. This was a huge plus for us because it meant that there were minimal issues in integrating art assets. Without having to use many placeholder models, final assets went in cleanly.

4. Coordination of Schedules. Since we did not work the same hours everyday, coordinating schedules seemed like it would be a challenge at the start. However, it was not a problem once we got into development. Everyone was willing to work with their schedules to make things go smoothly.

What Went Wrong

1. Time was Poorly Distributed. Even though we were able to work around and with everyone’s schedules, time was still missed out on in some places. During our second milestone, we had some members of the team unable to fulfill their work hours fully. Time missed is time that we could not get back. We did pull ourselves together and used our time effectively for the remainder of the month, but the missing time from that milestone is something that cannot be retrieved.

2. Only One Main Programmer. This was a drawback to the production because having only one person writing the majority of the code and implementing features slows down production tremendously. It was not the most ideal situation, and we definitely could have implemented more features if we had more programmers.

3. Estimation Times Were Off for Integration. Because we only had one programmer, we also had slow integration times. We originally estimated 2 hours of integration time for each milestone, but that was grossly underestimated. A 4 hour estimate would have been cutting it close some weeks as well.

4. Lack of Engine Proficiency. Not everyone was proficient with using the Unity game engine. This ultimately lead to various integration issues with some assets and features. File formats were sometime not correct and only added work to reformat certain assets so the engine could work with them properly.

If we were to work again, more in person meetings would be beneficial. With the differing schedules, most work and information was communicated electronically. Also, we should have integrated earlier and more often. This project had a few dependency issues that led to late integration of some features. This in turn, affected the thoroughness of testing. More build testing prior to presenting them would have helped tremendously. And the last thing we would change if we worked again would be to increase communication standards. Our communication was great, but communication could always be better as a team.

Overall, we had 280 hours of total capacity. At the end of it all, we ended up with 202.05 of those estimated hours. With a delta of 77.95 hours, we were actually more efficient than we originally estimated we would be. Most of this delta comes from the art assets, which were completed quicker than estimated. Some of that extra time was spent doing additional testing and integration issues with some features.

Prototyping and Content Creation

AS part of my Prototyping and Content Creation course I got a chance to learn about the effective way of game designing. I was also asked to design and develop a fully functional prototype game as part of this course by my professor Mr. Roy Papp. Which helped me in learning more about the game designing and its development cycle. Firstly, as a group we started working on a spy game for two weeks and then we lost two of our resources a programmer and a level designer. We thought we won’t be able to create a game without them and we said the same to our professor Mr. Roy Papp and he asked us to do the game with the resources which we had and he gave us the real time industry environment. This helped us a lot to learn about how does the gaming industry runs. After submitting the game, he was little disappointed with it, but understanding our situation he asked us to do the individual game based on the tutorials of the game engines.

Being an Android Application Developer I felt much comfortable with the Android Studio and I used it for developing the game. I designed and developed a 2D side scrolling Robot Game in which the player controlled robot character should kill the enemies and avoid the pits by jumping through them. It took around three days to complete this game. I used the unity assets store to get the art work, which I used for the background screen and the floor in the game. This helped me in understanding the work pressure in the game industry and the importance of completing the project on time.

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Methods and the User Experience

As part of my Methods and the User Experience course I got chance to do a game test as a group with my classmates and an Article critique individually on the topic which I wanted to do my final project on. As part of the testing as a group of four members we conducted the testing on the driving of the Batmobile in Batman Arkham Knight game. The test consisted of challenges and played on different control sensitivities, and the participant time of completion was recorded during gameplay. After the test, participants then filled out a survey asking them about their satisfaction with the sensitivities and their overall satisfaction with each. These surveys were analysed to and rejected our hypothesis that the controls need a sensitivity adjustment.

I did my Article Critique on the Augmented Reality (AR), which is one of the fastest growing technology. AR technology overlays the computer generated or mobile-generated information seamlessly o the real-world environment. AR technology utilizes mobile, context-aware devices like smartphones and tablets that enable information embedded within the physical environment. It is takes the real world data with the help of GPS or the vision-based and combines the real world objects with the virtual objects or superimposed information. By taking the advantage of AR technology we can develop mobile applications, games and can be used in the laboratories for conducting the experiments safely.

By attending this particular class, I learned how to conduct a play test, which helped me in understanding how to take the reviews from the participants and use them to solve the issues with the game before releasing into the market. It even helped me to learn more about how to get the user experience and what are the methods to be followed to get the best results for a game. This will help in creating the games with the best user experience.

Game Design

As part of my Game Design course I got a chance to research on the technology which I wanted to work on and to choose the capstone. I did my research on Augmented Reality as it seems very interesting and an exciting topic. Augmented reality is a technology which overlays the digital information into the real world. I would like to develop the games based on AR technology as it is more fun to play video games by turning the surrounding into the game location, and as part of capstone I choose Indie game track because here I can learn more about the game development. Indie game track works on the designing and development of the games. This capstone will help me to learn about the game development and can learn how to use my programming skills in game development. This experience will help me in fulfilling my dream of starting a mobile game development company after my masters. The game designing concepts which I learned during this month will help in designing games and the the capstone will help me in learning the game development which will help me designing and development of games.

Project and Team Management

This course made me realize how important it is to be in a team and to manage a team. The character studies are the best part of the program, we watched videos of many people and tried to understand their characteristics, figuring out what a person is like and how to deal with them, it is one of the important aspect of team building. It helped me in understanding the people in a better way.

At the start of this course we were all individual students attending the class as per our schedule, now we are a team and we have a better understanding of each other. This transformation was only possible by Nick, our Instructor for the course, one could say he is a team leader rather than an instructor. He always supported us and made us comfortable. We did all kinds of team building activities that helped us understand each other and made us comfortable to work with each other.

During the span of this course I learned to analyze myself with the help of DiSC traits. Now, I clearly understand what changes I need to make in myself for the betterment of the team. We also learned how to start a project and successfully accomplish it. We, now have a clear understanding of what are the activities that take place during the project and with the help of character studies, we know who is to be assigned to what job. We also brainstormed on all the possible risks involved in an event and came up two or three plans to tackle or prevent each of the risks from happening.

Overall this is a very fun and important course for any program, I fell very lucky to have met all the people over this month and learn some the important lessons of their lives.

Fun and Safety with the development of Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality is one of the fastest growing technology, where people can have fun while using the applications and products developed by using this technology. Augmented Reality can be used in developing mobile applications, games and can even be used in glasses. Sony was doing a lot of research on this technology and released a mobile applications called AR Effects. This is a camera based application where the user open application and can click the photos by keeping different themes like Summer, Valentine, Horror, and Comic etc., and click the photos with the specific theme which looks like this. Sony also developed a mobile application called AR Mask which comes as a default mobile application in Sony Xperia Z5 series mobile devices, in which we can click photos by interchanging the faces of the person.

There are also many cool researches going on the development of Augmented Reality. One of them is SmartEyeglass, which is developed on Augmented Reality technology. This glass is an eye wearable which brings the world in front of your eyes. It means that you can bring your imagination in front of your eyes, it also comes with a 3.0 Megapixel camera, by using this you can click the steady images which comes across you while you are going and get the information of that place and every thing going around you on the glass as a transparent note. You also get the live maps which can be used for navigation, and live tweets on the glass based on your location and can also control your smart phone with your voice by using the inbuilt microphone in the SmartEyeglass.

AR Technology is also used in helmets by the company Skully. It is a smart helmet which is connected to the mobile by using bluetooth for getting the navigation the front glass and also has a camera on the back of it which helps you to know which vehicle is coming back of you shows you everything around in a 180 degree angle. By which you can avoid accidents. AR technology development will increase the smartness of using the technology in the daily life, where we get everything in front of eyes.

#sony #areffects #xperia #armask

Timeline of Video Games

Research in Team Dynamics

As part of my Masters in Game Design Program from full sail university I attended Research in Team Dynamics course which was thought by the professor Robert Kennady. This course helped me in understanding more about the video gaming industry and how the industry works. During this course I got a chance to attend RoG Prototyping, RoG Postmortem Review, IGDA Meeting, and GDMS Expo. I learned some new things related to game designing and the importance of prototype model. This particular course thought me the importance of networking and the ways to get into an industry. Not only the importance, I also learned the techniques for networking and some of the effective ways of getting connected to the industry leaders, and later on using them for getting into the industry from this particular course.

During this course of study, I also got chance to learn more about the teams, organization teams, work groups, and individual members and the differences between them. Here I learned more about the importance of team contribution, communication between the team members, and professionalism. By attending the shadowing during this course I gained the knowledge about the how the games are developed and the different tests that a game should pass before releasing it into the market. So, this particular course gave me the knowledge about the industry and different stages involved in game designing from its concept to releasing date, which will help me to get into a industry and designing the game more effectively.

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#oneofthe best #timekiller #game #PacMan

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