Lanterns Playtesting Party (Oculus Launchpad Week 10)

Invited friends over to demo the game today!  They got to try out the start screen and the beginning section in the cave.  I'd designed for a seated experience, so when they went to light the lanterns which were close to the ground, some of them tried to reach down without crouching, missing entirely!  We definitely noticed little things that can be improved!

This week has been super productive, and it's exciting!  The start screen has been sorted out with gaze-triggered events to start and exit the game.  I decided to focus more on designing and capturing the mood and lighting of the scenes, over detailed modeling and texturing environments.

Here's the starting zone with a distant gate and some old shrine rocks.  The light-emitting rock was really effective in drawing in the player to looking at it!  It'll definitely be used in more places in the game.

My programmer teammates have been working on getting the boat pathing to move smoothly, and on creating a system to let the lanterns follow the boat in a beautiful way.  The boat's movement can now be activated and deactivated by the player!  

We had a lot of fun working together this week, and tossed around the idea of meeting up in the future to do an in-person jam.

Looking forward to the last couple weeks of development (and a short break for PAX)!  We have the plan for the story arc for the demo locked down, with very clear interactions that will be demonstrated.  Onwards, to continue building!

Andrew