Episode #08 [04-1987]
"Trespass The Mansion"
Note: The "Stone Oakvalley's Moment In Time" project deals with 10 episodes, I just randomly chosen Episode #08 as my third focus. Other episodes are also still in production.
Introduction - 27 Apr 2022
This episode is currently very early in the planning/developing stages, but research already began in January 2022. I took a small 1-day break from working with Episode #2 and #7 (since issues there was luckily solved and had moved forward) I wanted to start to prepare some 3d-models (based on found assets on internet, but as always they must be heavily edited and improved by me to reach my intentions).
The story of this episode involves a car, road, landscape, dead trees, scary house mansion, some statues, interior of a hallway, study room and some more. The experience is based on a classic production in the mystery/horror category. Of course since most of my episodes draw inspiration from those productions I do not intend to recreate a full experience as the original ever was. My intention is to play around with a segment and focus on that as a stand-alone VR Experience/Game.
For the moment, I have started editing on a car, but need to replace the interior with a different asset to achieve a bit more details for the first scene of this experience. Since I have worked alot with Unity Terrains the past month, this experience will also be designed and sculpted using my very own VR Editor inside the Oculus Quest 2 headset (check my post about Episode #7 to know more about that one).
For now, this is just some teaser of the elements beeing focused on right now here at Stone Oakvalley Studios!
16 May 2022:
The past weeks was used to study light and shadow baking to understand performance and graphics in general. I added some notes especially about the Lightmap baking procedure which had haunted me for months. My problem is that what matter what I did, the shadows never seemed to bake on objects or on the terrain at all! Very frustrating, but after testing and a lot of baking and waiting, the thing finally produced some results. This will help for performance but also add realism to the objects, as running this on Quest 2 requires us to watch out for realtime shadows and lights and how and if you should use them or not to get the graphics and performance needed for a triple AAA-game like experience :-)
In other news, my VR editor needed some code change to support an array of terrains as my previous version only worked with a single terrain. This will take some days to get coded correctly, but so far its working great!
I'm one step closer to actually start design levels inside Quest 2, and this editor is also beeing used for Episode #7, but also for future unrevealed Episodes as well.
06 May 2022:
A lot of progress in this project too since last time. Started working on terrain, coloring, car, fence, tree for testing and some code and setup for the graphics performance. It looks really good and is so close to my goal of how I re-imagined this to be when I started working on it a couple of weeks ago already!
The next days and more ahead, I'll work on more models and texturing, finding models (www.polyhaven.com is amazing resource that matches the exact models I need to this particular experience), but I'll also work on my own models or modify some other free models I have downloaded.
The development of this will also use my own VR Editor inside Quest 2 once I have enough objects needed to design the level, just as the plan is for Episode #7 and probably some other undisclosed Episodes yet, stay tuned, I might start prepping and releasing information on those once I have done enough research and starting setting those projects up to in Unity. One of the Episodes is gonna feature snow and skies, so that will be interresting to start working on, as well as some gun mechanics, reloading, scope and experiments using the motion of the Oculus Touch Controller to move the player ahead.