Blog - Michael Smilovitch

January 17, 2019January 17, 2019

Master of Digital Media First Semester Recap

School is going by quickly so I want to post a recap of a bunch of the things I’ve created in the first semester of my Master of Digital Media before the second semester picks up. It’s easy to get caught up with deadlines and work and never have the time to slow down and reflect on everything that’s been made so far! Here are a few of my digital creations from the last four months, and some updates on ongoing projects.

Citizen

Citizen is an online interactive film created by Mo, Jonas, Daniella, and myself for our Foundations of Digital Media class. You follow a day in the life of Louis, a citizen of a futuristic “Smart City” that rewards or punishes its inhabitants based on their lifestyle choices. There are decision points at the end of each video, and the viewer can decide what happens next!

Since I was the resident coder and the rest of the team had experience with film, it made sense for me to handle the back-end while they produced the video. I coded the interactivity from scratch in Javascript using YouTube’s API along with Google Firebase‘s free database and web hosting plans. I can put together a little tutorial on how I built it if anyone is interested (let me know!).

Click here to play Citizen.

Click here to see statistics on what decisions previous players have made.

Also, Netflix’s Bandersnatch totally copied us.

Spooky Ragdoll Game

One thing I’ve been trying to do more recently are quick little experiments with Unity. I’ve been using the software for long enough now that I can whip up something ugly and functional quite quickly.

October was a weird month, I got sidetracked playing around with skeletons and ragdoll physics

It all started when a friend asked if I knew how to set up ragdoll physics in Unity. I didn’t, but 15 minutes later, after consulting the trusty old world wide web, I did. I kept messing around in my free time and soon produced this:

Don’t ask

This impromptu research and exploration proved invaluable. I learned a lot about how animation rigs work and how they can be controlled via code within Unity, which directly led to my next project.

Skeleton VR

SkeletonVR is a little VR demo I whipped up for Interaction Design class. It allows user to embody a performing skeleton from within VR. They can move and dance around and have these actions projected onscreen.

Messing around with third-person VR was something I had been meaning to do for a while, and the presentation fell on Halloween so it seemed like a perfect opportunity.

I made sure to include a mirror so those in VR could have a sense of how they’d look onscreen

Most VR experiences simply mirror the player’s view on the screen, but I wanted this to be more performative. I had a separate camera angle set up so that those watching from outside VR would not have to see the mirror.

There were some physics-enabled pumpkins. Also you can’t not dab when you’re a skeleton

I added in some buttons to spawn pumpkins and an MDM sign to make the whole thing more playful.

The leaning tower of spooky

I was impressed with how expressive one could be using only the headset and controllers. I used something called Inverse Kinematics to manipulate the skeleton based on where the player’s head and hands were.

Oh hey there

This skeleton demo was a useful exploration into asymmetrical VR, which I’ll explain more in the next section.

BirdQuestVR

If you’ve been following my criminally infrequent blog posts you’ll have read about BirdQuestVR. It was originally a single-player story-based prototype I built almost a year ago (time flies!)

The game has gone through a few iterations since then and I’ve been rebuilding it from the ground up with the support of the Transmedia Zone, a startup accelerator for innovations in storytelling and media.

It is now a multiplayer VR vs. PC party game. The VR player embodies a giant chicken at work, tasked with operating a Content Creation machine. The PC player is a bouncy little chick, with the sole task of inconveniencing the VR player as much as possible.

I’ll do more posts exclusively about it, as my classes this upcoming semester will be more directly linked to making it into a real business. I’ll just say that it’s very much happening and to stay tuned.

Here are a few sneak peeks from some very early gameplay tests of PC vs. VR interaction.

The VR player is swats at the PC-controlled chick to stop it from reaching the DO NOT PRESS button

The VR player presses buttons on a “Content Machine”, while the PC player bounces around

Other Good News

An early demo of Wolf at the Door, a text-based game for which I’m a writer was displayed at the Wordplay Toronto conference, a festival celebrating text-based games.

My band Bird Problems is working on some new material for an upcoming EP. We released a playthrough video for our latest song The Harpist earlier in the year. The reaction has been awesome and we even had someone make a reaction video!

New tunes like this one incoming

That’s all for now, just wanted to get all this stuff organized and out there. It would probably make more sense to do individual posts for each project in the future because of the tenuous state of the modern attention span. If you’ve made it this far congratulations! Your attention has spanned!

I’m not going to pretend that these posts will become more frequent because every time I say that I don’t post for months. So maybe if I say I’m not going to post for a while I’ll start posting more frequently? Worth a shot.

September 20, 2018September 20, 2018

A Text-Based Taupe Game and Other Updates

I haven’t posted in many months and I know everybody has been waiting with bated breath (jebaited breath??) for more C O N T E N T so here we go.

Where’s Bird Quest VR?

I’ve started working on Bird Quest VR again and am planning on spending the year revamping the gameplay and adding a multiplayer mode.

That’s right, you’ll be able to launch sharks and other farm animals at your friends while they are in Virtual Reality. Has technology gone too far? I don’t think it has gone far enough.

I plan on posting some more developer updates as well, I will get into the Chicken AI and maybe do some tutorials about implementing asymmetrical multiplayer in VR using Unity. I want to do the whole thing in a nicely structured way, and may end up launching a separate studio website, so stay tuned.

Some text-based adventures

I made a new text-based “game” called A Tiny Shimmer of Taupe earlier this year that I never got around to releasing. It’s a shamelessly punny dark comedy about a chemist who loses his ability to see colour and no longer knows what to do with his life. It’s deeply influenced by John Milton’s Samson Agonistes, which I studied a bit back in undergrad.

Click here to try it out!

I’m going to post it on philome.la soon for some added reach, but I want to maybe have a proper studio Twitter set up before then.

I’m also doing some writing for an awesome upcoming project called Wolf at the Door, a game by Damon L. Wakes. It’s been really cool working with a writing team on a larger project and I can’t wait for everyone to see it when it’s done!

That’s all I’ve got for now. I’m working on a lot of exciting new things this year while completing my Master of Digital Media. I’m going to try to post a lot more!

Keep it spicy,
Michael

April 2, 2018

Bird Quest VR Developer Update #1: “Why?”

Greetings fledgelings! Welcome to the first ever Bird Quest VR developer update. I’ve decided to start writing these in an attempt to create some accountability for myself, and to keep the game’s development going smoothly and coherently.

Well, as coherently as possible when one’s main gameplay mechanic is throwing flaming chickens into the vast expanse of outer space.

Watch out for Space Sharks. They’re like regular sharks, but in space.

Why is this happening?

So, the first thing to address is what exactly I’m trying to do here. The current version of Bird Quest VR (BQVR) is just a tutorial level that I put together over the course of a month as a capstone project for my Nanodegree in Virtual Reality Development.

Working on it made me realize that this is what I want to do. I want to make games, VR or otherwise. Most of all, I want to tell stories. I want to create experiences. So I’ve decided to continue to work on BQVR for a little bit and then launch it on Steam. I already have voice lines for a second level recorded, and it would be a shame to let those wonderful performances go to waste.

Your character may survive, but will your dignity?

No more VR for the sake of VR

I have a lot of opinions about how VR is being used these days. In short, I think there is a strange obligation to the medium that is only doing it a disservice. I’ve caught myself thinking up new ideas for games and immediately wondering about how to make them work in VR. This is a dangerous mentality. Not every game needs to be VR. The medium should serve the experience, and not the other way around.

So why does Bird Quest VR need to be in VR? Well for one, it’s in the name, but that’s a stupid reason. Mostly, I want to embrace the silliness of the whole thing. People in VR games look ridiculous, so how can we play that up? Easy: turn the player into a chicken, make them eat out of unreasonably low bowls by bending over. Make them crawl around on the ground. “This is art!”, I proclaim loudly from the corner of a Starbucks.

There is a resounding lack of VR games that allow you to be a caged chicken

The game will be free (as in beer)

I’ve been using Unity engine for BQVR, as it serves my purposes nicely. I enjoy coding in C#, and really appreciate the engine’s extensive documentation and community. The Unity Asset Store, along with Google Poly are chock-full of free assets for me to use.

On that note, I will be releasing this game for free. I would feel terrible charging money for something that I made using free assets. I also plan on eventually making the project open source. In this day and age, everyone should have access to the inner workings of my Chicken AI.

What the future holds

I won’t get too into how each component of BQVR works right now, as I want to keep these posts short, but future updates can touch on different components of the game. If anyone is interested in any particular component, please let me know, and I can write a post about it. For now, I plan on doing one about the Chicken AI, one about the Level and Sound Managers, and maybe something about the process behind writing and recording all the voice lines.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for coming along on this strange journey!

Until next time,
Michael aka “The Goose”

March 28, 2018March 28, 2018

Real Demos and Virtual Realities at GDC

I had the opportunity to attend the Game Developer’s Conference Exposition for the first time last week. The event, known as the world’s largest professional game industry event, was held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The three days I spent there were frenetic – between networking events and workshops, I only managed to make it to the expo twice. The venue was so densely populated and widespread that it would take over a week of planned exploration to see everything the conference had to offer. So I prioritized, and tried to focus on as many Virtual Reality (VR) booths as I could.

In terms of VR game companies at the expo, it was the Los Angeles-based virtual reality video game development company, Survios, that maintained the greatest presence. From the fast-paced robot shooter Raw Data, to the quirky and competitive Sprint Vector, Survios games are pervasive and well-respected within the VR scene.

Survios was promoting two new VR Experiences at GDC; Creed: Rise to Glory (which I will henceforth refer to simply as Creed), and Electronauts. I had the chance to try them both.

Get knocked right out of your VR body

Creed is based on the 2015 Rocky tie-in movie, and features a virtual Sylvester Stallone to guide you through a quick tutorial–teaching you the ins and out of virtual boxing. The game is high-energy and immersive; promoting strong, precise punches while punishing you for being greedy and overextending. You’ll need to hide behind your gloves and weather incoming blows, before getting in a few jabs of your own. “Take your time” the demo assistant kept saying.

Creed sets itself apart from other VR boxing titles through its “Phantom Melee” system. As you swing your arms, your character will lose stamina and your arms will start to desynchronize from the avatar’s. If your character is staggered or knocked down, you will be knocked right out of your body, and will need to engage in a Sprint-Vector-esque run back to the ring and back into your mildly concussed body. It felt accessible but deep, with the capacity to get players to work up a sweat (albeit less so than Sprint Vector). I’m confident that this game will be a hit at VR arcades.

Become the DJ of the future

Next there’s Electronauts; an entirely different specimen of VR experience. Electronauts is a virtual DJ game. Many VR DJ games attempt to be simulators (Tribe, Vinyl Reality), allowing for someone to learn to use a turntable without having to actually buy one. There is a space for this, and it is a great way to try your hand at DJing before purchasing a rig. Electronauts is not trying to be a simple simulator, and uses some abstraction, providing a unique brand of DJ experience.

Players hold drumsticks which they can use to drag song components around, cycle through loops, and, of course, drum. It’s all nicely put together to ensure a solid amount of depth and customizability, while still ensuring that anything you play is in key and sounds decent. You can write custom riffs and loops by aiming and dragging notes around, set sequences of drums, and even throw sound-effect “grenades” with the flick of a controller-bearing wrist.

This type of balance between accessibility and depth is not easy to achieve, and worth noting. I’m hoping to gain access to the beta and exploring the game further to see how deep the customizable aspects really go.

The most badass rhythm game around

Survios dominated the VR gaming scene at the expo, but VR games from several other companies caught my eye at a SVVR (Silicon Valley Virtual Reality) mixer event. It was there that I was lucky enough to get the chance to try Beat Saber. Think Guitar Hero with lightsabers in VR. This game comes from Czech Republic studio Hyperbolic Magnetism, and early online playthroughs have been garnering a lot of attention. It’s easy to see why–the premise itself sells the game (why didn’t I think of it!), and the aesthetic is polished and unique.

I jumped in on Hard mode and it felt amazing–exactly how I expected it to. The note placement is intuitive, and slashing through each incoming block is extremely satisfying. While I found myself sometimes hitting notes from the wrong end, I’m confident that this would be avoided with a little bit of practice. This will be a joy to master, and will be a must-buy for me when it’s released.

More ad-libbed madness from Squanch Games

I also got the chance to try out “Dr. Splorchy: Space Heroes”, the latest offering from Squanch Games. Their previous releases, Rick and Morty VR and Accounting, are wonderfully weird little games. They use the VR medium to disorient and surprise, elements which I highly value in my own games. Dr. Splorchy is a Google Daydream exclusive, and the demo was running on the new Lenovo Mirage standalone headset.

The Mirage headset was impressively comfortable, lightweight and easy to put on. It boasts a simple strap reminiscent of PSVR. Apparently it is also capable of 6-DOF tracking (both rotation and translation – a feature that most mobile VR headsets do not offer), but Dr. Splorchy did not make use of this capability, so I have yet to try it out.

The game itself was exactly what I’ve come to expect from Squanch Games; clearly ad-libbed self-aware Rick and Morty-style nonsense. I was grinning throughout the demo. Actual game mechanics involved leaning side to side to dodge lemons, shooting aliens with a blaster, and being shouted at by a space-blob with Justin Roiland’s Morty voice.

Virtual Reality and the future

Recent rhetoric has suggested that VR is a fad. An article published in Bloomberg claims that because tech juggernauts like Apple and Amazon are not investing in VR headsets, that it will inevitably be “supplanted by augmented reality”. I do not think that this is the case. VR booths pervaded this year’s expo, showing off new impressive technologies that will only become cheaper and more accessible and the years go by.

Motion tracking companies like Vicon and Optitrack demonstrated impressive advances in full-body tracking for VR, while companies like bHaptics and HardlightVR showed off haptic-feedback vests and attachments to increase VR immersion. Not to mention the massive Oculus booth, the aforementioned game demos, the handful of indie VR titles, and all those that I did not have the chance to see. There was even an entire sub-conference dedicated only to VR and AR (which I will have to attend next year and report back on).

I posit that any rumors of VR’s impending demise have been greatly exaggerated. VR is alive and well; barreling forward with incrementing speed. Standalone high-quality headsets like the Lenovo Mirage and Oculus Go (300$ and 200$ respectively) are important stepping-stones for bringing highly immersive VR to the general consumer public. I look forward to seeing where the next few years take us, and believe that VR’s future is as bright as the glow from an OLED head-mounted display.