Labyrinth VR - Tenth Update

We're in the home stretch for this project with just one sprint left after this one, so most of what's happening in the experience is related to bug fixing and ensuring the mechanics and lighting are in a good place.

I spent some time this week polishing the physics of the mute door knocker, ensuring that the handle is able to be removed from his mouth without issue or flying off into the ether. As of this update, the mute door knocker is not going to be interactive, since the handle clipping into his head makes the swinging physics joint too volatile. This was something I thought I'd fixed in a previous sprint, but it turns out I accidentally left it with physics marked "on," so I reset that and ensured it was working properly in engine.

The majority of my time was spent working on sound attenuation. I did a little more research into UE4's "Sound at Location" node, and realized the reason the sound didn't have a location was because it didn't have an attenuation radius. I set up one for the goblin laughs and one for the door knocker voices, and added them in game. Then it was just a lot of back and forth testing to ensure the sounds carry to the user, but seem to come from a location in the experience.

After Daniela spent time on another lighting pass in the tower, I went through and ensured my slightly "expensive" stained glass window still worked for the tower and wasn't causing any framerate issues. Thankfully this was a pretty "cheap" level, so we don't currently have any problems.

I've also been going through each blueprint used in game to ensure that they are as optimized as I can manage to make them. This is something that will carry over into next sprint too.

Lastly, due to recent feedback, I opted to remove the aura "guideline" post-processing shader from the game. I may try and implement something over the next week and a half that will be more subtle, but since this is supposed to be immersive and not a "game," I agreed with the feedback and decided to cut it for now. 

Currently, in lieu of the aura, the plan is to have Ludo's wave animation and call of "Friend," until the player interacts with him. Hopefully this, plus the addition of the sound attenuation (for the door knockers), will be enough to guide the player through the experience.S

Labyrinth VR - Ninth Update

 It was a major relief to finalize and ship out the second door knocker rig for animation:

I was hoping to get it done in the previous sprint, but I was at least able to meet my abridged goal of completing the rig Sunday, 6/27.

For the interior of the Tower Level, I wanted to make the goblin a hand drawn asset instead of a screenshot from the film, so I created this stylized little guy in Photoshop and then made him "wiggle" in engine. I tried to make some of the linework and colors exaggerated to ensure he shows up well in the shadows. I also added two other options for goblin laughter to add a little variety to when the goblins spawn around the tower.

This sprint I also made some tweaks to the lighting and textures in the Tower Level.  Following Crissy's lead of desaturating and adding some post-process static in the bog, I also copied that effect over into the tower for added continuity. Additionally, I wanted the floor tiling to have a little more of a "beat up" look on the edges, since I felt the tiles looked a little too perfect, so I played around in Substance Designer until I was happier with the effect of the ground tiles.

My final task was to rerecord and add the dialog for the door knockers.

Once both door knocker animations are fully set up in game, the voices will be fully synched up with the animations. This week, I did a quick and dirty set up, putting the dialogue and animations in the blueprint with delay nodes, but next sprint I'd like to polish these up and make them more efficient.

Not all of the animations were in place at the time I created this blog post, so some of the blueprints contain placeholders for future animations. As a result, some of the dialogue may get rerecorded next sprint to ensure it properly lines up with the animations.