Cold Survivor Post Mortem

itch page: cold survivor

Introduction

• Cold Survivor is a VR experience survival game which you play as a robot playing to survive the cold conditions of a blizzard. The goal of the game is to keep the fire from going out as the blizzard will knock in the windows blowing in snow that will diminish the flame in the fireplace. The player can keep the fire going by feeding it chopped logs and making sure to close the windows as soon as possible when they fly open.

What went right?

• For sound works, the most of sources had a little scratch sound at the end. Moreover, the main character design was not finished so it was hard to find the sources. Therefore, I started with mix and combine sounds using Adobe Audition. At the first time that I played with Oculus Rift, I found out the sound work is important in playing VR. It was the horror simulation game that the player had no choice of movement. The visual also horrified and realistic, but the sound did make me nervous and scared. The sound gives vivid feelings to player with the combination of visuals. In addition, the fire sound added as linear sound that the actual sound would only play in specific area.
• In the producer’s perspective, I felt we had a solid idea to follow through with. Trello was extremely helpful outlining the beginning steps of our project. Then we moved onto discord as we got the ball rolling being able to pop in questions and communicate. The meetings were helpful to flesh out more of the game as well as talk about next steps. Setting priority for our next steps were communicated through discord.

• Creation of all 3d assets went really well. We had an idea of what assets we wanted to put in and most were already made and all others were created quickly for use.

What went wrong?

• There is not many samples and examples for the sound of VR. I tried to research it but even Youtube does not have good ones. Thus, the biggest problem was ambiguous feelings of sound. For 2D works, it is very easy to find sound because the 2D games mostly use arcade sound not realistic sound. Likewise, I needed to find VR-ish sound but most of sources are the realistic sounds. For instance, what should I choose for the sound of grabbing something. At the end, there were mixture of realistic sound and arcade sound, not cohesive feelings.
• Producer: It was very difficult to find a time where everyone was available because of our differing schedules. In the end we never were able to meet outside of class with the full group. I also felt that despite discord, there was lack in communication with some departments when constructing our game. This caused an issue with time management and was constantly hard to pinpoint exactly where we were with the production of the game.

• Creating the player character was easy, but rigging it was not as such. Some parts of the rigging would move things they aren't supposed to leading to weird bumps or things popping up.

What we learned

• Through the project, there was lot of obstacles because it was our first project of VR. Especially, most of our group members had zero experience in playing VR and making VR game. Moreover, none of us had a working laptop so that we had to borrow laptop from the school service. Even we had these problems, we still communicated well. We used another channel in Discord, Trello, and Google Docs to communicate and set the deadline for our project. In addition, we had group meeting only for testing built games and free games on Oculus which helped a lot in progress, because after the playing, we finally got plan for our project. Before then, we only had sketches and vague ideas but after the collaborative group meeting we found out the way. Thus, we learned how to operate as the group, how we should communicate with other group members. As individual member, my part was the sound works. As I mentioned before, through the group meeting, I realized how much sound is important. To improve sound, I used Adobe Audition tool fixing and amplifying some sound materials. Though our project does not have many place for sound work, I learned the sound work is essential in VR gaming.

• Being a producer was a lot harder than I anticipated. I feel if we knew what to expect with a 3D or 2D game it would have been a lot easier to manage but I feel like we all struggled by the fact that we were in the medium of VR. Communication is a two-way street and I wasn’t sure what to do when there’d be no response from the other end as being forward and firm is not exactly my strong suit. It’s just very frustrating when you are the producer plus not in the unity file because all you could do is say what needs to be done without the guarantee that it will be done. I wish I could’ve been more hands on like how the other groups’ roles bled into one another. A flaw that we had was the fact that we stuck solely to our roles which made it very difficult to help out each other but to wait for each other to catch up if at all.