Design & Art
This week was focused on preparing for our playtest day, beginning discussions on our next prototype, and finishing documentation for our previous prototypes. Our playtest day will potentially bring in newcomers who have never experienced any of our prototypes before, so we want to create an easy interface for the guest to be able to select any prototype they want to experience. We decided to bring all of our prototypes into one build, allowing the quest to select each prototype in a menu at the start. We also added 2D instructions for each prototype to make our experience more easily digestible without our input.
Through discussion with our team on EQ, we have come up with a few high level concepts that could be used to represent it in virtual reality:
In this concept, the EQ wavelength is represented by various vertical rectangles which are attached to the orb. The newly added y-axis in this implementation represents the frequency level of the track. Guests would use their controller to change the intensity of particular frequencies in the track. To keep things simple for the guest, they wouldn’t interact with each individual rectangle. Instead, they would choose to adjust the lows, mids, or highs. This approach is much closer to what is shown in DAWs. However, this approach may be a bit overbearing when jumping into the prototype blind.
The second idea involved creating “gravity wells” whose level of deformation is dependent on the weight of the frequency of the track. While this concept is both cohesive with our space setting and very interesting from a conceptual standpoint, we found that this functionality may be a bit too abstract for our audience to understand.
We have started discussing the implementation details of the EQ prototype and what to support. We will be looking at giving guests some basic EQ functionalities like the HighPass, LowPass and a band pass filter. We might start with something as simple as adjusting the lows, mids and highs and then move on to supporting something more detailed. The focus would be to show how changing EQ in a single track affects other tracks, i.e, showing how much weight does each track have in the frequency bands so that it becomes visually clear for guests to know what to tweak in terms of EQ of a track.
FMOD has multiple EQ plugins that can be controlled through code but we will be focusing on the Multi-Band EQ that supports everything that we spoke about before.
Tech
The focus for this week was two fold. The primary focus was to finish the previous week’s effort to implement automation and the next was to make the build playtest friendly where guests can try out all the prototypes we have built within the same build.
After iterating for a bit we decided to go with the animation curve representation of having it fall down from the sky as the time moves forward. This created both an “Aha!” moment, and helped in the anticipation of what is to come for a particular tracks automation. We refined the curve to have keyframes shown explicitly instead of just the lines. We also made it possible to erase the automation for tracks and redo it at any point.
The timeline head gives a scrubbing like feature where when scrubbed around you can actually quickly navigate to the part where you have created the curve and check it out when it’s stationary as well. An important addition to the timeline was to show the time scale on it as we scrub through it, similar to how it can be seen on any editing software with a timeline.
Our second focus was to get everything in a single build and we were able to achieve that by the end of the week.
Looking at our next week, the focus will be our playtest day along with beginning our development of our EQ prototype.