Re: Blind Swordsman: audio game for Samsung Gear VR
Hi everyone,Im the developer of the Blind Swordsman VR experience. It was developed for the month-long Mobile VR Jam, which was about making VR games or experiences for the Gear VR mobile VR headset.Im aware that the gameplay/content is very simple compared to audiogames such as Papa Sangre. If it was developed for a non-VR platform there would have been little point in making it or playing it since theres so many richer audiogames and experiences out there for PC or mobile. The point of the project was to give the sense of immersion that VR provides to the blind-swordsman trope. Specifically by having the world respond to your head movements. My aim wasnt to make the best possible game, I just wanted to make a stripped-down experience of being a blind swordsman, and try to make that experience of being in a dojo and hearing the rain outside and people coming towards you feel as real as possible and give you as much presence in that world as I had time to develop. The head tracking of the Gear VR allows you to make turning and tilting head movements to help determine the location of audio and have the audio in the world respond correctly. Using the GearVR also allows for turning around in the world as the means of control since it isn’t attached by a cord to a computer. You hear someone circling around behind you, and you have to turn around physically while standing or by spinning in a swivel chair to face them. Another aim of the project was to explore if positional audio used with head tracking could provide the same sense of being-there as VR experiences that rely on graphics. I feel like the audio used in VR is currently treated as not as important as graphics, so people are almost making the VR equivalent of silent films, and not using positional audio as much as they could or should. Im sure that audio-only VR, or VR with a heavy audio focus is capable of much more than the hear-it and hit-it gameplay I developed, but there wasnt something I could find in the VR space to point to so I still feel that making the Blind Swordsman VR experience was worthwhile, even though its so simple. So its not a very full-featured game but I believe it succeeds at the being-there illusion that the VR medium seeks to create.The tools that I used to make the experience were the Oculus Audio SDK and the Unity game engine, and they are both available for free, so I think that a lot more people will start making audio-only or audio-focused VR experiences now that more head-tracking VR headsets are coming to market. I hope the VR equivalent of Papa Sangre comes along soon, but that was beyond the scope of what I was able to develop in my spare time over a month.I hadnt heard of Swamp or GMA Tank Commander before, so Im excited to try them out. Are there any other audio-games anyone would recommend I try out to increase my knowledge of whats possible with audio gameplay? Although it wasnt my aim to make the best audiogame, I want to learn as much as possible so it can be applied to VR.Cheers,Scott
URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=218512#p218512
___
Audiogames-reflector mailing list
Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com
https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
