castawaysvr-blog

[castawaysvr-blog]

Have you experienced the adventure?

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How is the game doing?

Castaways VR was released on the 14th of December 2016 in the Ocolus store.

Since that we sold a total of 581 units.  Purchases reached their peak around Christmas having a day when 67 were purchased.

The overall rating of the game is 4,5 this is given by 22 ratings. 

Also we managed to be on the front page of the Gallery Apps category which is huge!

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The Last Level of The Episode

We have arrived to the last level of the first episode. This level needed a good ending, something with a cliff hanger that would leave the player wanting more and more… So naturally we decided a cliff would be a pretty good scene for this purpose.

When you get on top of the mountain, you can glaze your eyes upon a view of the beach and sky. After you cycle through the day a new mini game is up for you to solve. You need to use your previously found telescope to complete the constellation game. In this game you’ll connect the stars to complete and show signs.

When you’re done a meteor zooms by, almost hitting you and strikes the ground with trembling sound and lots of smoke. Naturally you as Kolos and Grandpa have to go inspect the crash site. Maybe you’ll find something useful there…(Talking about cliff-hangers, right?)

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Challenges & Achievements of the Second Level

Once the player gets involved in the game we have to keep the attention and start introducing challenges where success can be achieved.

Today I asked an other developer of the game who did not have a chance yet to talk about the game.

Kristóf(Developer):

My favorite thing about this level is that creating it was much easier, because we could rely on the experiences and techniques used on the first one. This made creating the level a lot faster. 

However some of the mini games(quests) were harder to create due to being more complex. We used physics based puzzle game techniques, and on some cases I had to solve complicated spatial geometry tasks to create mini games like the one where you have to light fire. At this quest you have to collect firewood, then light fire using the heat generated by the friction of turning a stick. The turning speed,duration and intensity all had to be fined tuned to make it enjoyable. 

We also had a lot of work with the Tapir. All her animations consist of sprite sheets , she has more states than Grandpa has in the intro. 

A lot of quests require your progress to be made on different levels, we could not implement these until we created a save/load system. This went a bit harder than we thought, but we ended up with a working autosaving system. There have been talks that the Tapir might become a companion in later episodes who will follow you around the map and assist you. :)

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First Major User Test

CastawaysVR just had its first major user test at the gaming even called PlayIT in Pécs. 

The lucky audience members were the first ones to try the game. A special demo was created for them to see the reactions and survey their experiences. 

People found it easy getting used to the controls even the ones who have never used a GearVR before. Based on the feedback we are tuning the user interface and making small changes to the quest system. 

Surprisingly we managed to end the day without a single crash or technical problem, which is amazing and only shows that the developers have their head in the game. They could not believe that the devices and the game ran so smoothly even in pre alpha state while serving over 7000 visitors.  

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Making the first level

The aim of the first level is to make the player engaged in the game and the story. It was important to find a fine balance between being challenging and fun at the same time.

The level consists mostly of 2D elements but also some 3D models, this gives the environment special looks and feels. We wanted to add an other dimension to the game, something unique that cannot be seen in many titles. The underwater scene proved to be a good choice.  We had to develop advanced fish Artificial Intelligence though. ;P

I asked some of the developers about the first level here is what they had to say:

Anna(Graphic artist):

The first level definitely presented a challenge, I had to collect the technological techniques, and figure out a way to make the level using two dimensional elements and three dimensional objects. All objects needed to have a 2D look and feel.

Péter(Developer):

I had a lot of difficulties capturing the characters from the cartoon. It required a lot of time to get the exact frames we needed. The fact that the cartoon was never planned to become a VR game, meant that polishing the looks was even more time consuming than we thought. We had to capture the right frame adjust the size and the position of it to perfectly fit in every tile of the scene. We made a tool for unity that enabled us to move and adjust different elements on the scene at once. I must say that the time invested in the tool was worth it.

Most problems were caused by the lack of performance of the hardware. In this stage of mobile VR development you must find a very sensitive balance between perfect visuals and enough performance, the Gear VR needs a constant 60 frames per second. For example there is no middle way in rendering anything, your either render it fully or you don’t, there is no faded or partly rendered layers. Well there is a way but the weak performance does not make it possible.

The underwater scene was something new for me, the overlay of the goggles was anything but easy to adjust. The reason is that while in real life the swimming goggles are so close to your eye it won’t try to focus on the glass, in the VR headset the screen sits back more. This causes your eyes trying to focus on the goggle itself and not on whats beneath it. To solve this issue the goggles are positioned about a meter from the actual camera view, however it is done in such a way that the player will only experience a normal vision. The performance issue struck back at the underwater scene as well. I used a smart combination of blurring & and resolution reduction to achieve the sweet spot of desired performance and visuals.

Overall we are making good progress, this game really can be the first of its kind.

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Intro scene in progress.

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The team is preparing for the shoot. :)

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Forest building process.

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First level in progress.