Insight VR

Yes, there will be another Halloween driveway game this year. Oddly enough I don’t know yet what it will be, but I have two things in mind. We’ll see what works best.

Probably no lasers this year, just IR wii-Mote stuff.

I’ll post videos if I have time to take them. Usually the line is long and there isn’t a lot of time for documentation.

My brother-in-law saw the video from the previous post and suggested that I put lasers in the ships in order to use the ships to play games. Then it occurred to me that I could put both IR LEDs and lasers in the ships to make some crazy games… too bad Halloween is coming up so soon.

At some point I might put up some build instructions and detailed photos, but for now, here’s some video of the kids in nearly complete coroplast (campaign signs from years past that were littering the area after elections) space fighters. I decided to not put real lasers on them, and I hope the kids will forgive me for that.

There is a third one that is much smaller and lighter than the other two, but its paint is still drying.

Several big changes this time:

– Start screen (will eventually become a main menu)
– levels
– radar reduced to showing one dot at a time which indicates the nearest object at the time it was picked – put it the dot under the cross hairs and hit the thrusters to get to it
– green brackets highlight visible targets
– enemies are more accurate but not too accurate
– shield is recharged by grabbing crystals which have a new look
– levels: when you clear an area you warp to a new one automatically

Or, When Less Information Is More

Until now the asteroids game has had a pretty robust radar system. It displayed a blue dot for each item of interest on the screen and you could easily navigate to any of them. With it you could tell what was in front of you and what was behind you, and what the item was in.

Since the object of the game is to clear all the items (which can be either asteroids with hidden crystals or enemy ships) having all this information available to players seemed like a good idea. But sometimes you can give people too much information. Look at the video from the previous post. There is a swarm of 10 blue dots when the game begins. My experience is that most people have no idea what to do with those dots.

The problem the player is trying to solve is in a sense a traveling salesman problem: you fly around in space and attempt to visit each item once. Of course the items are moving, and you can shoot at them, and some of them shoot at you, but roughly it is a three dimensional traveling salesman problem. Of course giving the rough location of all the items in the area via radar didn’t help the player solve the problem efficiently. In fact, it probably hindered the player since distance was hard (arguably impossible) to determine accurately. So how do you help the player?

A reasonable (but not optimal) strategy for the traveling salesman problem is to simply head to the nearest node that hasn’t been visited, and then from that node select the next node that is nearest. The game now aids a player in doing this. The radar tracks one object at a time. So when the game begins, the nearest item of interest is tracked by the radar, and will continue to be tracked until it is gathered or destroyed. So the player only gets one blue dot at a time, which should help in understanding what it is the radar does, since before it could easily look like a giant nonsensical mess of blue dots.

In addition to this all items of interest get green brackets around them in the heads up display. So if two or more items of interest are visible at the same time they’ll all get brackets, but only one of them will get the blue radar dot.

In the screenshot below there is an energy crystal and an enemy ship both within view. Both are given green heads up brackets, but the blue radar dot is only visible for the energy crystal at the moment.

If anybody (especially beta testers) has any input on this idea, I’m all ears.

Here is the current state of things:

iPhone Game – Beta Build 2 from InsightVR on Vimeo.

New in this build:

• Stereo positioning of audio sources and 3d audio using OpenAL (use headphones for best results)
• Enemy ships are faster (too fast?)
• Enemy ships turn more fluidly
• Enemy ships are more accurate shots
• Enemy ships that are damaged and spinning off into space have a catastrophic explosion sooner
• Camera zooms away to show you exploding when you die
• Controls go away when you die

Feel free to comment here or via email if you’d prefer to give feedback privately.

If you’re not in the beta and are interested in being an active participant leave a comment and I’ll contact you via email.

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