Holy crap, how is it October already? As a religious listener of “Wake me up when September Ends”, it does quite feel unreal every time when October hits. It’s quite weird. I literally feel that 2019 has started, yet it is ending, and so many things have happened in the span of 3/4 of a year. Well, here I am still at it in the ETC. It’s been a lot trying to write out what have happened, so I am going to cap what has happened till Round 2 has ended (around Oct 2nd).
My classes are going well, definitely having a lot fun. As of my last blog, we headed over to the Adventure Module, in which we did lots of group activities such as building a boat out of cardboard and plastic tarps (and having to fit two of your teammates in it!), building a mini golf course and having your classmate play it, and also a scavenger hunt around the town of Bedford, PA. We lived in a really huge resort and swam some in their humongous swimming pool as well. There was also a karaoke night in which I didn’t hide my love towards Taylor Swift. ETC offers life drawing classes and I have started from hideously drawing this lady to somehow being able to draw a human figurine like posture in 5 minutes, and really starting to enjoy it.
Since my last post, I have wrapped up with Round 1, 2, and 3. It is quite crazy!
In my first round, the guest (player) is gifted with the quest to help a little robot find all of its body part through driving an RC car similar to what we saw in Toy Story. Not really understanding the policy of using free assets in BVW then (I thought it would be easier to just compose everything myself – and it turned out that I was extremely wrong), it was a round that I really composed everything. I was told to compose quirky cartoon-ish running music. I have heard plenty of those music before but I didn’t really pay close attention to how to compose the music, so I struggled a lot trying to strike a balance between established written music versus the music that I have composed. I was really stuck trying to develop enough musical materials so the audience wouldn’t be tired of listening to the same background music over and over again, and it wasn’t till later that the idea of layering ideas on top of each other happened to me through a workshop (thanks amazing Sound TAs). I also didn’t know how I could go about creating good drum beats, and also got help from them learning that there is a drummer tool in Logic Pro X that was an AMAZING tool for me to use and to base my music onto, and lay out my music.
So I had the Background music and some sound effects including a car starting sound that I have actually recorded, used a pitch shifter so it actually sounded like a car that is really friggin loud going into Monday the day before the project is due. Then, we decided to do a robot voice over using a girl’s voice (contradicting the original idea of the robot being a primitive robot and the 10 Sound Effects I already made using my own ridiculous sounds), added in all the music without using the audio mixer in Unity, no EQ and the whole thing sounded like a hot mess for a while and it was what our professor kept talking about during the critique! But overall it was a really nice project, our programmer really worked hard and so did our artists. We stuck really well together – so well that we decided to do a pitch project for our fundamental class when we had the choice to make our own team. Here’s a video of a demo of Robo’s little adventure, our round 1 world!
Well I went around telling my professors that I had a really good round 1, and they said that I got lucky, that things with teamwork will not always be as smooth as they think. And oh god they are right! For round 2, we did not come up with an idea the day of and go with it. After some struggle trying to balance an interest curve and the need of straightforwardness of the particular project (we needed to bring in a guest that doesn’t know anything about the world we have created, and we are only allowed to “indirectly control” them so they feel “complete freedom”, which is ironically similar to political affairs today). For our interim, we decided to make the guest guess what the customer wanted. We had eight food ingredients and we made the guest guess which three ingredients the guest wanted based on the indirect control (in this case, it was a girl wearing a broccoli shirt). I thought it had potential to become an interesting, but the implementation simply didn’t work. It was unfortunate how little work we got done for interim since we disagreed so much over lots of game play mechanics even though we had a general direction to go into.
It was quite a funny and epic fail actually. Anthony Daniels, the actor that voiced C-3PO in Star Wars sometimes come over the ETC because of an appointment CMU has with their Robot Hall of Fame. So C-3PO guy puts on the AR headset and comes into our world, only to fail at our way too subtle hints. He was very confused but seemed to enjoy our art work and music (shameless plug). I even printed out an image of Anthony Daniels looks thoroughly helpless, confused about what he needs to and stares out at the audience with an awkward yet still symbolically British polite smile. Below is a video of his commentary if you want to see!
After we realized that doing a guessing game, having a player choice history with text all over AR (which doesn’t make any sense since our platform, Magic Leap, already has such a small viewer window to begin with) does not make any sense. That’s when we decided to go back to doing a cooking game, and the guest will score the dish accordingly. Our artists made some really cool food models (as you could see from the previous video) and some really awesome visual effects. We didn’t make the mistake of adding on too much stuff to the project the night of, and even managed to get a Korean dinner together at 8 PM without having to stick around ETC longer while other people are still busily debugging! On the Monday before the project was due, I finally brought in my boyfriend to play test our project as a naive guest. It was really hard to keep what the game is about since I talk about everything that happens to him basically, but I managed to and I’m really proud of myself lol! Here’s a look of our video with our naive guest for our final demo.
Making music for this game felt much easier. I laid down a jazzy beat, because I knew we didn’t intend for our game to have any sort of time limits. I started to improvise on the piano, and as long as I found a melody that kind of sound good, I hit that recording button and it sounded good. Then I started looping it adding some pizzicato strings in the bottom, and there we had our background music. I didn’t have much else to do except I made a grabbing food music really quickly using something we already had in our huge sound library. After we had visual effects, I layered some sound effects that include an atomic bomb exploding when the guest completely fail to get what the customer wants, an angelic choir sound appearing when the guest completely get what the customer wants, etc. It was much easier this time around after I started utilizing our sound library again and knowing I don’t have to compose absolutely everything myself. But I am going to try to go back and figure out how to do some of the drummer tracks again before I get too comfortable.
I had pretty cool teammates on this team as well. Aiden, one of our programmers, is always bopping out with ideas, which is definitely a good thing, but sometimes he gets a bit carried away thinking so much. Maybe it’ll benefit him a lot if he decides to become a game designer one day because he definitely has a lot of ideas! JD is super hard working and did all the “customer” sketches in the video despite being our other super amazing programmer. Grace did some really cool texturing that made the food look super realistic. Ryan did lots of modeling, all the particle effects when the dish is ready, helped with debugging, and even helped me figure out a realistic sound of a lid closing on a pot. And aside from composing music, I helped JD a little bit with finding some positions of arrangements of the final dish presentation in Unity. So yes, I do have a little bit more experience in Unity now. It’s a shame I haven’t gotten around to coding so much yet, but I guess that’s one of the reasons that I get to get more sleep than others.
I’ll be back with updates on Round 3, and my week without BVW!