Being a Bird WIP - Flight Demo Available

[molton]

Hello, I'm making a game called being a bird that uses the Oculus Rift VR system. Here's a playable flight demo, all you can really do in it is fly around. I can not change the loading screen because I'm using the Unity trial and it takes a little while to load, so when it hangs at that black screen after the Unity logo disappears please be patient. The menu responds to mouse movement and clicks. I replaced those hard to read buttons with transparent boxes with text on them, but that was after I released the demo.

http://www.lightput.com/Being_a_Bird-Flight_Demo.zip
Sorry for the slow performance and tilted cameras, the real version will be much better than this


I'm currently running a kickstarter to get funding for what I need to finish this project.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/164 ... ity-game-2

http://youtu.be/b1Ag7o9rGck
[youtube-HD]b1Ag7o9rGck[/youtube-HD]
[youtube]http://youtu.be/b1Ag7o9rGck[/youtube]

Here's some video of my recently finished Being a Bird multiplayer challenge, target drop.

http://youtu.be/-iSTbdhuh4k
[youtube-HD]-iSTbdhuh4k[/youtube-HD]
[youtube]http://youtu.be/-iSTbdhuh4k[/youtube]

I can't get the embedded videos to work. Also, I guess I should have put this under independant game development, my bad.

[molton]

Hello, the Kickstarter isn't going great but Being a Bird is really doing great. I updated the Kickstarter video to show completed gameplay footage of

Forest Flight
http://youtu.be/y61Jk33-LBk

and Bird Darts
http://youtu.be/-iSTbdhuh4k

The video of Bird Darts in the new version of the Kickstarter video is more updated and shows the game working better
http://youtu.be/_oCtUgiXGAE

Check out the Kickstarter here, it ends January 16th. Please help me get the word out about it.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/164 ... e_location

[Attreyu]

I love it man, will contribute and spread the word !

[molton]

Sweet, thanks

[johnfshaughnessy]

Wow, this is a great demo. The flight system is great. It becomes a very intuitive way to move around your landscape. You are limited by how a bird can move, what a bird can see.

I wish landing/taking off was a bit easier to get the hang of. Sometimes it felt as though I'd fly into the side of a mountain and get stuck for a bit. It may have been just me -- have you had any trouble with it?

That was an amazing experience, and definitely one I want to see come to fruition. I hope your kickstarter picks up speed in this last week! Have you considered developing a unity plug in that is a controller for birds? I imagined myself playing a game where I start as a human character - familiar controls and everything, and I have the ability to jump into different beings. I could stare at a bird for a few seconds and then press a button to teleport into the bird. Then the bird would have its own movement scheme / abilities / feel to it. After the bird, perhaps I can teleport into another animal or mythological creature.

Another thought I had while playing it is to build a history into a game. Something like Avatar: The Last Airbender spread out over a full-sized version of the Avatar world. Perhaps there would be a lot of in between space that we don't know a lot about, but the places we know well like the Earth Kingdom capital, Ba Sing Se can be built out more realistically. Fans of the show could just contribute bits and pieces of the world at different times and you'd experience the story in a new form. Avatar is just meant to be an example, but I thought your bird simulation gave the observer an interesting perspective on the world around him.

I hope my contribution to your kickstarter helps. Good luck!!

[molton]

Thanks for contributing! Taking off can be an issue sometimes, especially if the device needs recalibration, which happens kind of randomly. All the challenges are designed to recalibrate between each turn. Taking off on a steep incline sometimes you have to fly away from the incline first then turn around to go over it. That's a good idea about being able to jump from different characters on VR, I always liked that in the blood omen games but going into birds and stuff would be even better. The flight code is really just a modified ovrplayercontroller.cs script, nothing too special.

[molton]

Hello. Been getting a lot of work done on Being a Bird recently. It's starting to shape up into a pretty good game with lots of gaming / virtual reality experience options. I officially gave up on funding and went with the subscription Unity licence. Any new information I have about Being a Bird will be posted on Being a Bird's official website.

http://lightput.com/being_a_bird.html

Although for now it's pretty limited to information that has already been released. Since I'm not going the funding route, I'm deciding to keep a lot of new details a secret so people will be suprised when they get their consumer version Oculus Rift devices.

[cybereality]

Looks like fun.