#but more importantly i have a sick obsession with having the layout to buildings

[todayisafridaynight]

STOP I OVERPLAYED ODE TO JOY WHILE LEARNING PIANO 😭😭😭😭😭

However! I am happy to share and am so glad you see the vision. Sorry In Advance to you and all your followers for the spam but here is a (mostly corrupted) office tour (please note the "Mine Power"-brand gym equipment):

P.S. I recall really liking The Wings of the Kirin, please enjoy!

EVERYONE OVERPLAYED ODE TO JOY GROWING UP IT CAME WITH YOUR PARENTS FORCING YOU TO LEARN THE PIANO LERKJALEKJ

BUT OH MY GOD NO DON'T APOLOGIZE THIS IS LITERALLY PERFECT I thank you again for my life this is so important to me you have no idea

[saint-ossifrage]

God i wish I had your determination for fic writing 😭 can I ask how you go about doing outlines, bc im horribly disorganized and I have no clue and would like to learn 🥺 (if thats okay to ask rip)

Ok so first of all. I am so sorry this got so long. Second, thank you for asking about something I love. I never get to talk about this. Unfortunately, that means I have way too much to say about it. I don’t know if you were expecting something as detailed as this...either way, take it with a grain of salt. Different people set up outlines how they like, this is just how I do it. Ok, here we gooo!

What I’m doing right now is working on a detailed chapter-by-chapter outline. I started with a vague plot that I didn’t even think I would write out because of the complexity/length. It turns out my hubris will be my downfall!

Anyway, I started with three broad plot points. Beginning, middle, and end. Example: A gets taken. X happens during their abduction. In the end, B and C rescue them. They’re broad on purpose because that makes it more flexible as I flesh it out, which is important in case I figure out there’s a plot hole or a different scenario I prefer. Then, I start nitpicking as I expand it. I like to ask simple questions. Ex. Why did A get abducted? This helps me determine what happens leading up to the fic and pushes me through the story. Consider character arcs throughout this process.

(I also ask myself how that might affect canon, but that’s because I want this fic to fit into canon without completely changing the ending. So, I lay out the pros and cons of trying to shove my fic into canon. Would this change it too much? Would it make sense at all what with X and Y? I’m kind of a freak about it when I put my mind to it, so you should by no means feel pressured to do the same!)

Once I figure out if it works or not, I start laying down the groundwork. I use Artistotle’s story structure because it’s easy to understand for me. I'm actually drawing out the chart right now. I start by assigning the exposition and rising action to chapters. Additionally, I like to know my ending because, otherwise, the middle might get muddled due to excessive meandering.

Here’s how I lay out chapters:

So on and so forth. This is just how I do it, you can format it however you want! You can have as many scenes in a chapter as you like. I try to stick to 3-4 depending on length for my own sake. I also strive to make my scenes and, more importantly, chapters end on a specific note. It could be happy, hopeful, suspenseful, sad, or even a cliffhanger.

(FYI, I specified DAY/TIME - which would be something like TUESDAY MORNING or MID-TUESDAY, etc. - because I was getting confused about how many days passed in a past fic and how that affected the current fic. I’ve learned my lesson. I estimate how much time a scene would take so I can count up how many days pass over the course of the chapters. This isn’t necessary, of course, but I included it just in case.)

Oftentimes there will be a narrative thread that will wind through multiple - if not all - chapters and this can get very confusing to keep track of. I have to consider how it will develop and build on itself, so I take some time to think through it in a separate bullet list. I write down the basics. For example, if a character gets sick at the beginning of the fic and gets steadily worse, it would look somewhat like this:

Or, if a character is grieving, I jot down the 5 stages of grief. Then, I start brainstorming about how their specific externalizations of each stage would look like.

On my doc, I have four sections. Section 1 is for the broad plot. Section 2 is for the detailed chapter outline. Section 3 is dedicated to the threads I’m fleshing out. This is also where I put the Q&A's. I’m kind of a control freak so I even highlight very important things, like motives for characters. This layout is just so I don’t get confused, but it’s not necessary.

Then there is Section 4: the scrapped bits. It’s important to be flexible while building your outline. You don’t need to completely throw away things that don’t fit! Just stick ‘em in Section 4 or some equivalent and let it rest while you cultivate this story.

Going back to the outline - I give each scene a working title that’s dumb as hell, for fun. Again, not at all necessary, but it makes me laugh. Plus, I like having chapter titles sometimes, and I can get inspiration from a scene title if it fits.

I use this outlining method specifically for multi-chapter fics. I wrote a very long crossover chapter fic in the past and it was a huge, unwieldy project. I know it's sort of the standard, but posting a chapter before the rest of them, or at least the next one, is written made it hard to keep track of all my loose threads. That's why I did a 180 and started obsessively organizing things. Unfortunately for my readers, I developed this method halfway through the fic. Oopsies :3

That’s about it. I did my best to explain it, but I’m not sure how much of this is comprehensible to someone who isn't inside my brain. If anything is unclear please ask me about it. If you can’t tell, I like talking about writing. I don’t mind. I’d feel super bad if my explanation was confusing. I hope it helps 💗

[blackrose-ffxiv]

A Little Local Flavor 07/19

“I c-can make tea, also, I suppose, if you’re going to stay.” Rinha’li Dhavha offered reluctantly. On the desktop appears to be a map of the southern shroud, with several additional locations drawn on it in red and black ink. Charcoal lines are sketched between them, as though trying to sort out the outline of something that once stood there that is now marked only by ruins.

“You may as well. It is a rather long trip.” Lebeaux Desrosiers noted, waving a hand to dismiss Rin to task before his attention turned to the maps laid out on the desk. The medic reached for one, sliding it closer as he peered down his nose at them. “Marking lines between, if I recall the Shroud’s layout properly, ruins?” He mused as he hovered a finger over the lines as he traced them, unwilling to get charcoal on his fingertips. “These would be the remains of Amdapor, would they not? I thought your interests would lie closer to the saltmoors.”

Rinha'li moves to stop Lebeaux, then realizes he’s not actually touching his work. “Their histories are…intertwined, but Amdapor is…it is…” he trails off, not sure what to say about the topic. His life’s work? An obsession? A calling? “…of particular interest to me d-due to a number of personal factors,” he settles on. He makes his way to the door and confers with a passing employee of the coffee shop on the other side in quiet tones before retreating back into the library. “I’m…s-surprised you…recognize the area. It’s…n-not exactly well traveled by most.”

Lebeaux smiled lightly, pale eyes moving intently over the map. “I have some passing familiarity. It was the fascination of someone I knew previously. It became an obsession. It eventually consumed him.” He noted calmly. Actually, technically, it was an aggravated mud puddle that consumed him. But that was like the same thing, anyways. The medic reached for his glasses and slid them onto his nose before he flashed that saintly smile over at Rinha’li. “You’re not concerned you may fall into the same pattern, are you? You’re a far more reasonable sort I’m sure.”

Rinha'li cocks his head and regards Lebeaux warily, wondering if this is some kind of conversational trap. Of course, everything is a conversational trap with Lebeaux, so maybe it hardly matters. His interest almost immediately gets the better of him. “I…did not know you knew a scholar of the War of the Magi,” he says. “It is a topic that often leads t-to…um…strange circumstances.”

“Not as such.” Lebeaux noted as he settled onto Rinha’li’s desk chair as it was the closest to a light source, sitting with his back to it so he could observe the surrounding room. “I have only a passing familiarity, but something of an interest.” He noted. “The Amdapori practiced a sort of magic you don’t see very often anymore, didn’t they? Something similar to conjury, yet more powerful. Their white magic?”

Rinha'li frowns as Lebeaux sits down at HIS workspace – doesn’t he know not to do that? So rude – but is distracted by the arrival of tea, and Lebeaux’s mention of white magic. “…yes,” he says in a hushed sort of tone. “It’s…not practiced anymore, save b-by the horned children the Gridanians revere, or so it is claimed.” He brings the tea over, and tries to act casual. “Who was this…individual who lost himself?”

Lebeaux tilted his head and wrinkled his nose slightly. “I’ve seen one who is capable of it.” And proceeded to demonstrate in his face. “Perhaps once we’ve stabilized the other research it could be another avenue of investigation. Trying both sides of the spectrum to find a balance.” He noted offhandedly, waiting patiently for the tea to be brought to him. “An Isghardian scholar researching methods of improving aether control. He felt Amdapor and perhaps even Gelmorra held the keys to unlocking potential. Is that your interest as well?”

“…you’ve m-met a mage of the white who wasn’t a padjal? Rinha’li’s ears tilt forward, and for the moment he ignores the rest of the question

Lebeaux nodded. “A troublesome sort in Gridania. One of their trumped up ‘Hearers’, a hyuran boy.” He explained calmly, the serene smile remaining perfectly in place as a brow lifted slightly. “Potentially a valuable subject to research if that’s truly your interest.”

Rinha'li stops, thinks, and tries to steady himself and disguise his excitement. How would Lebeaux even KNOW he’d seen true white magic? He was very likely to be either lying or mistaken. “I should like to meet him, yes,” he says. “Though I…um. Typically I have n-not gotten along well with…G-Gridanian Hearers.” He rubs at one ear, indicating the tea tray. “There’s, um…there’s brandy, too.” Rinha'li sighs and takes a seat at the table he uses to mix ink. “…Aether control methods are not my…P-PARTICULAR area of interest. I am…I am interested in the city itself. Much of what they did, and who they were, has b-been…lost. Hidden away, in many cases.” He wrinkles his nose.

“You’ll likely not get on with this one either. He’s an ill-tempered brat and incredibly stubborn. Selfish to boot.” Lebeaux explained with absolutely zero awareness he could very well have been talking about himself. “Ohh? I’d say you were trying to butter me up. I’ll have brandy, cream and double sugar in my tea.” He noted, expecting Rinha’li to prepare it for him. He settled back in his chosen seat, resting his elbows back on the edge of the desk once he was sure they wouldn’t end up in ink or charcoal. “Historical rather than aetherical culture?” He sniffed. “A shame.” He had been hoping to have that Hearer taken care of. Permanently. Maybe dissected to see where his abilities came from, though vivisection would have been preferable.

Rinha'li pushes the tea tray towards Lebeaux pointedly, indicating the cream saucer and tasteful silver sugar bowl. “You c-could…say that,” he says. “Though they are intertwined. They s-seem t-to have had…a m-method by which they made their very walls to walk. And much of what they knew has b-been…deliberately suppressed.” Rinha'li pauses, considering for a moment. “I’m f-from there, you know,” he adds quietly. “The ruins.” Maybe this information will help convince Lebeaux to continue offering information.

Lebeaux tilted his head thoughtfully, though he still made no effort to reach for the tea service. “Brandy, cream and double sugar.” He reminded him with a small wave of his hand as his attention drifted briefly. His efforts to be rid of Marvik for good slipping away as Rinha’li seemed more interested in chasing his ancestral home. “And what would you do with such a method?” He mused with a smile. Rin’s moving castle, of course. 

Rinha'li nods at the description of the tea. Yes, that sounds dreadful and cloying, his opinion has not changed. “I would…” here, he finally stops. What WOULD he do? He was not an architect. He simply wanted to know how it worked. He wanted to know EVERYTHING. And his deepest desire in toying with the powers of Amdapor made for poor conversation. “….w-well, to start, I should like t-to see how such processes interact with aetherically active geometry forms employed by arcanima,” he says. “Imagine if…if you c-could build such glyphs into the very blueprints of buildings. If you c-could have them shift direction according to your will.”

Lebeaux blinked slowly, considering that. Sure he had heard about shifting walls. But more importantly, statues. His pale gaze flicked aside as he considered that. The towering statues of the Saints brought to life to march beside him when he brought revelation and redemption to Ishgard. Alright, maybe it wasn’t as stupid as he initially thought. “The one I mentioned, he had done some research and paid several visits to the ruins.” He noted slowly as he smiled at Rin. “I could perhaps be convinced to allow you to have a look at his grimoire. If it would help you reconnect with your roots.” Because he was just that sweet and considerate, wasn’t he.

Rinha'li cocks his head. “You…h-have a grimoire in your possession?” he asks. “I d-didn’t know you took much interest in…the aethero-mathematical arts.”

Lebeaux looked a little smug as he tilted his head at the question. “I’ll have brandy, cream, double sugar.” He repeated for the third and final time. Folding his arms lightly across his chest as he waited to continue the conversation until after he had his tea in hand.

Rinha'li stares at Lebeaux, then sighs and mixes the tea delicately, as though dealing with volatile compounds. He wrinkles his nose quite obviously at the amount of sugar and cream – unused to a rich diet, or even much of a diet at all, all of this would make him dreadfully sick. “I know Geoff has some ability b-but I do not know the general state of arcanima research in Isghard.”

Lebeaux accepts the tea with an entirely too-pleased smirk. “It’s developing, something of a newer interest so far as I know. I’ve not dabbled with it myself but I worked with one for some time. It certainly has its uses. Spreading illness and ailment throughout the body that can then be aetherically cleansed at will. The ability to cure or kill. It’s rather impressive.” He tilted his head thoughtfully. “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to allow you a look. So long as you allow me to accompany you on an expedition or two, once you’re prepared for it.”

Rinha'li cocks his head, not prepared for this offer. “An expedition into the Shroud?” he asks.

“You’re planning to revisit the ruins, are you not?” Lebeaux took a sip of the tea. “Not bad, could have used a bit more brandy.” Another sip showed he didn’t mind too terribly. “I would be interested in seeing it for myself. This is, after all, the subject that drove an otherwise reasonable and respectable man to madness. I wonder what’s buried amongst those moving stones that called to him. Though of course I wouldn’t be foolish to venture in on my own.” Lebeaux smiled too-sweetly at Rin. “Not without a local’s expertise to guide me.”    

@black-omen-born 

[junkremovalauthority-blog]

Don’t Retire and Don’t Settle

Good morning guys. I’m a little bit early to a meeting I’ve got here, so I’ve got a little bit of time. Just recorded a Junk Removal Made Simple episode on the worst mistakes we ever made running our junk removal business. That’s a really great. My hope on it and my goal is that when you all watch that, you’ll avoid making those same mistakes we made. I’d love to know where our business could be if we had avoided those mistakes early on.

When I first reached the point at which I didn’t have to be on the truck all the time, I relished the fact that I had a new freedom to do what I wanted to do. I was making a decent amount of money. I started to settle. I stopped improving the business. I stopped pushing as hard. It only lasted for a month or so, but over just that one month I noticed a decline in business. I noticed I was sleeping in later and I really wasn’t as happy. I went to the beach more and I had more time to spend on my hobbies, but I wasn’t as happy as when I was pushing hard and working towards clear goals.

Growing up, I got into aviation through my dad. Because of the expensive and time-consuming nature of the hobby, most people in aviation are older. As a result, I had the privilege of being friends with a lot of older people. Most of them were in their 60’s when I was a kid. As a grew into a teenager, they grew into their 70’s and 80’s. Many of them have since passed on, but what I remember most about them was their passion and uncompromising determination. These guys were out at the airfield every day, honing their skills and talking about the things they loved and the goals they still wanted to accomplish. Then there was my grandfather.

He had goals and ambitions when he was a younger man. But those days were long past. I began to see the signs as soon as he wasn’t working anymore. Even as a kid, I could tell that the TV had replaced his ambitions. He wasn’t striving for anything anymore. He was retired.

He stopped engaging his mind. He stopped engaging his body. He stopped striving for things that mattered to him. Most importantly, he no longer had goals to strive for. And that’s ultimately what people live for. We’re a species meant to hunger for constant improvement, and though the type and degree of improvement differ from person to person, everyone has to have something to work towards. As soon as we allow ourselves to lose that hunger, that yearning for the thrill of achieving our own goals, we start to lose our purpose.

Without a purpose, a motivating reason to get up every morning, we start sleeping in. Why should we get up when we won’t accomplish anything meaningful? When we start sleeping in too much, we get lazy. Sick. Our energy levels go down. We don’t find joy in the things that once fulfilled us. We’re not happy. Our work, families, friends, and hobbies all miss out on our much-needed attention. We’re still alive, perhaps. But we’re not truly living.

This may seem like an overly bleak or fatalistic outlook, but it’s the truth. Though it may seem like the simplest and most obvious thing in the world, having a purpose for your life is absolutely essential to living a good and enjoyable life. That’s why it’s so important to stay hungry and never settle.

Don’t settle on your income when you hit your target. Set your sights higher – make it five or ten times the amount you’re currently making. Make it a goal that you have to work for – one that makes you a little nervous. After all, if your dreams don’t scare you, they aren’t big enough. Write that goal down once or twice a day at the beginning. I write my goals down at the beginning of the day and again at the end of the day. Long-term goals, short-term goals, goals that you want to accomplish that day – write them all down. Remember them. Want them. Be hungry.

Let’s say your goal was to own a home. Once you buy the home, you’re happy. And you should be – you’ve accomplished a very big goal you set for yourself! Chances are, however, that you settled for something about the home. Maybe it was the neighborhood, the layout, or the funky column jutting into the living room. Maybe you discover that the grocery store five minutes down the road doesn’t stock avocados (which is obviously unforgivable). Don’t settle. Make it your goal to fix that funky column, move to a better neighborhood, or live closer to the grocery store that somehow only stocks perfectly ripe avocados.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be happy with your home. After all, if you’re never happy with the life you’re building, there’s no point to building it either. There’s a balance to be struck here. Enjoy the present and remember all the work you’ve put in to get where you are. Just know that as corny as it may sound, life really is about the journey more than the destination. Remember being a kid and staring at the toy catalog for weeks, saving up pocket change and birthday money a little at a time to finally buy it? Oftentimes the excitement of wanting the toy, obsessing over it, and imagining it was greater than the feeling of actually possessing it.

If you’re completely happy with your home and it’s everything you want, do you just stop and rest on your laurels? Of course not! Just find the next part of your life you want to improve. Maybe it’s your vehicle. Maybe it’s your body. Maybe it’s your relationship; that’s the hard one. With everything else going on in your life, you have to make sure you’re not being complacent in your relationship. That you’re not taking the other person for granted. That you’re really pushing hard and that you’re trying to keep the heat in that relationship going. You’re intentionally setting aside time just for that person and for your relationship. When I plan my day out (and I plan the entire day in advance), I plan out the time that I’m going to spend with my wife.

Then there’s your business. I enjoy flying. I enjoyed cars. But growing my business, seeing it flourish, seeing how many people I can help through my work – that’s what gives me the most pleasure in life. So I’ve poured my heart and soul into this business and it’s done wonders for my goals. I achieved my five-year goal a couple years early. I’m on track to hit my ten-year goal by year five. When I hit that, I’ll be setting another ten-year goal. I’ll be doing that at least five or ten times – and hopefully even more than that!

You see, the only reason you ever settle is because you convince yourself that your dreams and ambitions are unattainable. You may have gotten sick and tired of all the disappointments along the way. That’s tough. But disappointments happen all the time, and they’re simply teaching tools; stepping stones on the path to success. There may be hundreds of these little steps, and with so much to accomplish it’s possible to psych yourself out, to start believing that your dreams can’t happen. Break that long-term goal into little pieces and tackle one at a time. Sometimes they won’t go so well. Sometimes they’ll hurt, bad. Disappointment might last days or weeks. But you can’t settle, you can’t give in to the easy way out and give up. Because if you choose to be hungry, to chase those goals and keep pounding even through the really bad days, you’re gonna get there. And you’re going to be at your happiest through it all.

You’re going to feel your best and have the most energy when you’re working towards a goal. As they say at Men’s Wearhouse, I guarantee it. Everybody, have a wonderful day. Don’t settle for a good day. Chase after that great day, that extra one percent. Be hungry. Chase after your ambitions and make all your dreams and aspirations come true. When they do, set more goals. I’ll talk to everybody soon.

The post Don’t Retire and Don’t Settle appeared first on Junk Removal Authority.

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

In some ways, The Gallery began in 1992. My first experience in virtual reality was that year, with the aptly named Virtuality—an early VR platform steeped in the cheese of late-80s sci-fi design. It wasn’t a good experience, and honestly it left me feeling nauseous, but it was a bubbly and bulky dream for a future that technology simply wasn’t ready for. That’s when the obsession started; one day VR would be just like the movies.

By 2012, I was personally experimenting with approximating 3D vision in a virtual space. There were forums where people were just throwing ideas up against the wall, trying to figure out what hardware we would need to build VR the way we saw it. We developed simulators and collimated displays, all hacked together in our garages. Palmer Luckey was there too, and he had figured out a way to make a headset affordable using off-the-shelf components. He promised to send a few of us the parts to test his new schematic.

But then Palmer got quiet on the forums, and John Carmack’s name started floating around. We knew then that the formula was cracked, and it was time to start taking VR more seriously.

That year, I formed Cloudhead with two colleagues, Christopher Roe and Matt Lyon, with a vision to build a game specifically for virtual reality. We decided early on that, for VR to be the VR we imagined, we would need some sort of hand input as well. There was only one device at the time that we thought might work—a flat-game peripheral called the Razer Hydra, which tracked hand position using a weak magnetic field.

In the spring of 2013, we launched a successful Kickstarter, received our first Rift, and got to work.

Starting with DK1 meant that the development of The Gallery became defined by design iteration.

An early experiment in hybrid locomotion

First came overcoming motion sickness during artificial rotations. We introduced snap turns (“VR Comfort Mode”) as a way to skip the perceptual hiccup of seeing movement while the inner ear doesn’t feel it. The only way to skip it was to literally skip it; skip increments of rotation. (We found our sweet spot to be at 10-degree increments.) We consulted for the Perceptual Psychologist at Oculus, and they ended up including snap turns in their Best Practices guide.

Next was iterating hand interaction systems that just didn’t exist yet. We had to figure out how to manipulate, grab, carry, and use objects in a 3D space with virtual hands in a natural way. As well, we needed constraint systems. If you grab and turn a door handle in VR, for instance, your meat-space (aka real world) hand will move independent of that fixed object in virtual space, creating a cognitive disconnect. We found that we could trick the brain by giving the virtual hand some affordance to stick to the handle, even when the meat-space hand isn’t perfectly in place, and then unsnap it if it moves too far away.

That process repeated with DK2 and positional tracking. Technologies improved, our team grew in size, and every time we were introduced to new hardware capabilities, we had to rethink design fundamentals.

When Valve brought us to a secret summit in 2014, everything changed. The implementation of roomscale was a dramatic shift in design. On the one side, it was a huge wave of relief; tracked hand input and full, volumetric movement was going to be ‘a thing’ with commercial hardware. On the other side, we had to reverse-engineer our entire game and reconstruct its framework to fit roomscale VR. Not only that, but as soon as we crossed the 90fps threshold, perceiving VR became like looking into a true representation of reality. Even if you’re holding up something cartoony, the smoothness of the motion makes your brain think, “Oh, that’s a real thing, it’s just painted to look cartoony.” It also meant that smooth, artificial forward traversal could make people feel ill or uncomfortable because peripheral vection was more easily perceived—an issue that only affected artificial rotation beforehand.

Cloudhead Dan with the V Minus-1 Vive prototype

So, how do we move an entire room through 3D space without artificially pushing it forward? And what happens if the player only has the carpet in front of their TV as their play area? What if they only have the space in front of their desk? What if they have a full living room? All of these questions came before Valve had time to introduce chaperone as the VR standard.

Our solution was an elastic playspace and teleportation system which we called Blink. It began its life as a simple teleport—you point to where you want to go, push a button, and suddenly you’re there. We started adding layers of complexity, one by one. A reticle. A preview of your relative orientation. A preview of where your new boundaries will be. The ability to rotate your projected orientation. The ability to rotate your play volume itself. We wanted players to ideally orient their playspace to take full advantage of however much room they had, so they could comfortably move around in their volume without worrying about boundaries.

Finally, we added a cinematic fade to mask the “blink” between choosing your desired location, and ending up at the new location. Along with some naturally timed footfalls, we created a system where the further you teleport away, the longer the fade to black lasts and the more footfalls you hear. Added together, it created a form of locomotion that fit the world and the flow of the game, allowed full use of the player’s space, and—most importantly—wouldn’t make anyone sick.

The entire time we were building these new systems, and solving each new subsequent problem, we were also trying to ship a game. Valve and HTC had quietly given us access to one of the first Vive devkits with only one stipulation: Make something incredible. What we learned as we built our first roomscale demo was that smaller, more well-considered spaces with a tight narrative loop fit the format. We stepped back into the whole arc of The Gallery’s narrative and started to sculpt it down to be something more intimate.

An early iteration of the beach (Top) and the final beach scene (Bottom) in Call of the Starseed, redesigned for roomscale VR

Despite The Gallery being a fantasy experience at its core, every time we shifted direction, or a new piece of technology came online, we always went back to the beach—the level most grounded in reality. Having that real-world constant helped players better acclimate to the virtual environment, and better learn gameplay interactions without a sensory overload. It also made the transition to fantasy that much more wondrous. We ended up redesigning the beach numerous times before it became the opening level you see in Call of the Starseed. And even after launch, we iterated on the scene again to support Valve’s “Knuckle” controllers last fall.

When we launched Call of the Starseed alongside the HTC Vive in April 2015, we weren’t sure what the response would be. We worked countless long nights to meet that release date, and had to scope down many ideas that we just couldn’t make work in time. We knew that for VR to resonate with people, our experience had to not make them sick. Everyone within that first VR launch period knew that. But we also knew that we had to make our experience good. And, honestly, we didn’t know if it was.

The final sewer layout was fundamentally changed to better suit roomscale VR

At launch, the reviews were polarizing. There were comments that the experience was too short, or that we priced it too high at $29.99. Both were completely valid concerns from the public, but it was difficult for us to contextualize those comments, because every developer in VR had worked so hard and taken so many risks (financial and otherwise) to be there years prior. In the general Steam landscape, players expect that a game X hours long is worth X. It left us in a pickle, because we had to find a price to make a good ROI in a very small VR market. The playtime also varied; for many, Starseed was a 2 to 3-hour experience. But players more acclimated to VR were less likely to stop and touch the roses, and could finish it in half the time.

And then there were reviews that said Call of the Starseed was the first VR experience to make them cry, or the first to completely fill them with wonder. And it kept trickling in like that, with comments going so far as saying Starseed was the best gaming experience they’ve had in their entire life. Admittedly, I’m more jaded than most, but when you get reviews like those it’s hard to really believe them.

Still, they kept coming, and keep coming to this day. People approach us at events and reiterate those same sentiments. Eventually we realized that it was having the impact we really hoped it would—not just The Gallery, but the whole promise of virtual reality. Eliciting that sense of wonder in any medium is difficult, but virtual reality takes that up several notches. VR was enabling The Gallery to feel like a true memory of an event. A real moment in people’s lives.

Four months after launch, Valve and HTC reached out with the tremendous honour of including Call of the Starseed in the second Vive content bundle. By that time, our design motif of making an approachable VR experience that was comfortable and gradual was no longer feeling complex enough for some. That was partly our intention; we designed Starseed for everybody, in the same way that movies are for everybody.

Now, I am a massive, nerdy fan of all the Indiana Jones movies—even the bad ones. So, to me, virtual reality and The Gallery have always been about bringing 80s movies to life. Roomscale VR is about emulating a fantastical sci-fi future, rife with personal Holodecks. It’s about immersion, being taken to new worlds, and eliciting a childlike wonder. All the types of experiences I dreamt of growing up in the 80s, and have been teased with ever since.

With The Gallery, we wanted create that sense of adventure, fantasy, and freedom. To give people the chance to step into those characters and their journeys. People who have always wanted to participate in an adventure, but never could, for whatever reason.

It’s not often that you get to be there at the birth of a new medium, that you get to influence what it can become. That’s the opportunity that all of us understood—from the blood, sweat, and tears of the Cloudhead team, now nearly 20 strong; to the incredible passion of each and every developer and fan who’s been a part of this past year, forging the industry, and creating memorable experiences. Real moments.

VR isn’t just like the movies quite yet. But it’s becoming something much more important.

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

In some ways, The Gallery began in 1992. My first experience in virtual reality was that year, with the aptly named Virtuality—an early VR platform steeped in the cheese of late-80s sci-fi design. It wasn’t a good experience, and honestly it left me feeling nauseous, but it was a bubbly and bulky dream for a future that technology simply wasn’t ready for. That’s when the obsession started; one day VR would be just like the movies.

By 2012, I was personally experimenting with approximating 3D vision in a virtual space. There were forums where people were just throwing ideas up against the wall, trying to figure out what hardware we would need to build VR the way we saw it. We developed simulators and collimated displays, all hacked together in our garages. Palmer Luckey was there too, and he had figured out a way to make a headset affordable using off-the-shelf components. He promised to send a few of us the parts to test his new schematic.

But then Palmer got quiet on the forums, and John Carmack’s name started floating around. We knew then that the formula was cracked, and it was time to start taking VR more seriously.

That year, I formed Cloudhead with two colleagues, Christopher Roe and Matt Lyon, with a vision to build a game specifically for virtual reality. We decided early on that, for VR to be the VR we imagined, we would need some sort of hand input as well. There was only one device at the time that we thought might work—a flat-game peripheral called the Razer Hydra, which tracked hand position using a weak magnetic field.

In the spring of 2013, we launched a successful Kickstarter, received our first Rift, and got to work.

Starting with DK1 meant that the development of The Gallery became defined by design iteration.

An early experiment in hybrid locomotion

First came overcoming motion sickness during artificial rotations. We introduced snap turns (“VR Comfort Mode”) as a way to skip the perceptual hiccup of seeing movement while the inner ear doesn’t feel it. The only way to skip it was to literally skip it; skip increments of rotation. (We found our sweet spot to be at 10-degree increments.) We consulted for the Perceptual Psychologist at Oculus, and they ended up including snap turns in their Best Practices guide.

Next was iterating hand interaction systems that just didn’t exist yet. We had to figure out how to manipulate, grab, carry, and use objects in a 3D space with virtual hands in a natural way. As well, we needed constraint systems. If you grab and turn a door handle in VR, for instance, your meat-space (aka real world) hand will move independent of that fixed object in virtual space, creating a cognitive disconnect. We found that we could trick the brain by giving the virtual hand some affordance to stick to the handle, even when the meat-space hand isn’t perfectly in place, and then unsnap it if it moves too far away.

That process repeated with DK2 and positional tracking. Technologies improved, our team grew in size, and every time we were introduced to new hardware capabilities, we had to rethink design fundamentals.

When Valve brought us to a secret summit in 2014, everything changed. The implementation of roomscale was a dramatic shift in design. On the one side, it was a huge wave of relief; tracked hand input and full, volumetric movement was going to be ‘a thing’ with commercial hardware. On the other side, we had to reverse-engineer our entire game and reconstruct its framework to fit roomscale VR. Not only that, but as soon as we crossed the 90fps threshold, perceiving VR became like looking into a true representation of reality. Even if you’re holding up something cartoony, the smoothness of the motion makes your brain think, “Oh, that’s a real thing, it’s just painted to look cartoony.” It also meant that smooth, artificial forward traversal could make people feel ill or uncomfortable because peripheral vection was more easily perceived—an issue that only affected artificial rotation beforehand.

Cloudhead Dan with the V Minus-1 Vive prototype

So, how do we move an entire room through 3D space without artificially pushing it forward? And what happens if the player only has the carpet in front of their TV as their play area? What if they only have the space in front of their desk? What if they have a full living room? All of these questions came before Valve had time to introduce chaperone as the VR standard.

Our solution was an elastic playspace and teleportation system which we called Blink. It began its life as a simple teleport—you point to where you want to go, push a button, and suddenly you’re there. We started adding layers of complexity, one by one. A reticle. A preview of your relative orientation. A preview of where your new boundaries will be. The ability to rotate your projected orientation. The ability to rotate your play volume itself. We wanted players to ideally orient their playspace to take full advantage of however much room they had, so they could comfortably move around in their volume without worrying about boundaries.

Finally, we added a cinematic fade to mask the “blink” between choosing your desired location, and ending up at the new location. Along with some naturally timed footfalls, we created a system where the further you teleport away, the longer the fade to black lasts and the more footfalls you hear. Added together, it created a form of locomotion that fit the world and the flow of the game, allowed full use of the player’s space, and—most importantly—wouldn’t make anyone sick.

The entire time we were building these new systems, and solving each new subsequent problem, we were also trying to ship a game. Valve and HTC had quietly given us access to one of the first Vive devkits with only one stipulation: Make something incredible. What we learned as we built our first roomscale demo was that smaller, more well-considered spaces with a tight narrative loop fit the format. We stepped back into the whole arc of The Gallery’s narrative and started to sculpt it down to be something more intimate.

An early iteration of the beach (Top) and the final beach scene (Bottom) in Call of the Starseed, redesigned for roomscale VR

Despite The Gallery being a fantasy experience at its core, every time we shifted direction, or a new piece of technology came online, we always went back to the beach—the level most grounded in reality. Having that real-world constant helped players better acclimate to the virtual environment, and better learn gameplay interactions without a sensory overload. It also made the transition to fantasy that much more wondrous. We ended up redesigning the beach numerous times before it became the opening level you see in Call of the Starseed. And even after launch, we iterated on the scene again to support Valve’s “Knuckle” controllers last fall.

When we launched Call of the Starseed alongside the HTC Vive in April 2015, we weren’t sure what the response would be. We worked countless long nights to meet that release date, and had to scope down many ideas that we just couldn’t make work in time. We knew that for VR to resonate with people, our experience had to not make them sick. Everyone within that first VR launch period knew that. But we also knew that we had to make our experience good. And, honestly, we didn’t know if it was.

The final sewer layout was fundamentally changed to better suit roomscale VR

At launch, the reviews were polarizing. There were comments that the experience was too short, or that we priced it too high at $29.99. Both were completely valid concerns from the public, but it was difficult for us to contextualize those comments, because every developer in VR had worked so hard and taken so many risks (financial and otherwise) to be there years prior. In the general Steam landscape, players expect that a game X hours long is worth X. It left us in a pickle, because we had to find a price to make a good ROI in a very small VR market. The playtime also varied; for many, Starseed was a 2 to 3-hour experience. But players more acclimated to VR were less likely to stop and touch the roses, and could finish it in half the time.

And then there were reviews that said Call of the Starseed was the first VR experience to make them cry, or the first to completely fill them with wonder. And it kept trickling in like that, with comments going so far as saying Starseed was the best gaming experience they’ve had in their entire life. Admittedly, I’m more jaded than most, but when you get reviews like those it’s hard to really believe them.

Still, they kept coming, and keep coming to this day. People approach us at events and reiterate those same sentiments. Eventually we realized that it was having the impact we really hoped it would—not just The Gallery, but the whole promise of virtual reality. Eliciting that sense of wonder in any medium is difficult, but virtual reality takes that up several notches. VR was enabling The Gallery to feel like a true memory of an event. A real moment in people’s lives.

Four months after launch, Valve and HTC reached out with the tremendous honour of including Call of the Starseed in the second Vive content bundle. By that time, our design motif of making an approachable VR experience that was comfortable and gradual was no longer feeling complex enough for some. That was partly our intention; we designed Starseed for everybody, in the same way that movies are for everybody.

Now, I am a massive, nerdy fan of all the Indiana Jones movies—even the bad ones. So, to me, virtual reality and The Gallery have always been about bringing 80s movies to life. Roomscale VR is about emulating a fantastical sci-fi future, rife with personal Holodecks. It’s about immersion, being taken to new worlds, and eliciting a childlike wonder. All the types of experiences I dreamt of growing up in the 80s, and have been teased with ever since.

With The Gallery, we wanted create that sense of adventure, fantasy, and freedom. To give people the chance to step into those characters and their journeys. People who have always wanted to participate in an adventure, but never could, for whatever reason.

It’s not often that you get to be there at the birth of a new medium, that you get to influence what it can become. That’s the opportunity that all of us understood—from the blood, sweat, and tears of the Cloudhead team, now nearly 20 strong; to the incredible passion of each and every developer and fan who’s been a part of this past year, forging the industry, and creating memorable experiences. Real moments.

VR isn’t just like the movies quite yet. But it’s becoming something much more important.