The team focused on nailing down our vision for the project, and solidifying our development pipeline in our remote environment. Therefore, our sprint this week primarily focused on team discussion and development of a playable “gold spike” in Oculus Quest and Oculus Rift S.
Our biggest priority was to get our direction set as it would dictate all development moving forward. After discussing what each member of the team is excited about for this project, we ultimately decided to proceed with the following mission statement:
An exploration into providing an intuitive and enjoyable Virtual Reality experience where novice musicians familiarize themselves with music mixing concepts by interacting with audio in the space.
We ultimately decided to focus on the “engaging” aspect of the experience over the educational side of things. We decided that Virtual Reality is at its best at getting players to be actively engaged and immersed in the experience that they are playing. We still are committed to determine how to effectively let players discover these mixing concepts while being immersed in the experience. However, we are more focused on building interesting interactions with the mixing tools over creating a tutorial of sorts. If people ended up only wanting to jump in our experience to learn, why wouldn’t they just find online learning tools for the DAW software that they are using? Essentially, the experience needs to be enjoyable for our project to be appealing to our audience.
After interviewing more professionals in the industry, we began discussing how to abstract sound mixing concepts to the player. Some of the questions that we tried to answer:
- Should we place them in environments that naturally create these effects for players to understand (Reverb in a Church, Echo in a cave, etc.)?
- Should we keep them in one space, and show these as symbols for players to make the connections?
- How abstract will everything be in our experience?
There are no wrong answers at this point, so we will be choosing one path for our upcoming sprints to see what sticks.
On the development side of the week, we were successful in integrating FMOD to our prototype, and starting to add the “gold spike” assets into the experience. Unfortunately, we ended up over scoping our gold spike a bit as we were unable to have the project in a working state on our version control system in time for our art pipeline to integrate mock assets into the experience.
Looking forward to next week, we will finish up our gold spike, and decide what our first course of action will be on the development of our prototype.