In 2020 I entered the Oculus Launchpad program and joined  the No Static Games team  to work  as the  technical designer and lead engineer  on a  VR Rhythym Game project titled Supersonic Rhyme Chamber but we called it SRC ( Source) for short!  We would ultimately win a grant from Oculus for our work on SRC in the 2020 Oculus Launchpad cohort!

SRC as a Product changed drastically over our 7 months development time , the final prototype we made for Launchpad which won the grant was the one shown below but it took us many tests and lots of Experiments to get to that point!

Over the course of SRC's development the project would go through several revisions . We explored Speech to Text Solutions using IBM Watson and Oculus's own Speech recognition tools, We'd move towards  making a physical manifestation of Rap Battles  using boxing, We'd Experiement with transforming stages,  and bits of pieces of that helped us define the  ultimate experience we needed to deliver.

It. was one of the most fun and experimental projects I have enjoyed exploring VR functionality within.

Our initial concept of SRC was a way to make the act of participating in Virtual Rap battles fun . We were heavily influenced by both Parappa the Rapper  and Guitar Hero in our initial approach but we also wanted to experiment with Speech to text Tech to drive home the interactivity element of our experience . 

In the above prototype The Speech to Text system is displaying my words ( thankfully you can't hear my raps! ) I then wrote a Keyword parsing system that would take the sentences parse out the keywords and spawn a collection of Game objects I preset . 

My goal was to explore the ability to speak things to life and this prototype proved that out, the unfortunate thing was that Speech to Text was very hard to execute over music coming from the same speakers at an enjoyable volume.

One of the things I was VERY Excited to proof out was  the feeling of performing in front of a virtual crowd but I wanted to make sure the crowd felt alive and engaged as well . 

So I created a fun system to make the over 700 agents on-screen here move and for us to do it with less than 20 active tweens happening! I had a system of parent Gameobjects that each member of the Crowd would parent themselves too and those individual objects would tween at different speeds therefore creating a crowd of  characters moving at variable speeds that felt alive. It's not often my cleverness works out when coding but i'm really proud of this solution!

I'd really like to explore more with creating virtual crowds in the future !

When we were still trying to define our core gameplay loop we explored physically manifesting rap battles as boxing matches. For this first iteration I made it so that our player had a defensive mode where they had to physically block the word projectiles being fired at them and you can see by the lyrics in back  which turn red on a miss or green on successful block how well you did .

We also began to play with animated bouncing backgrounds , I used Sesame Street as a reference and recorded a gif of a dancing building then just animated it as a sprite sheet to frame what a simplified boxing concept might look like. We struggled to figure out who to translate the attack phase into a scoring system.

This was lao where we first got a chance to see our Parappa-inspired stylized characters in engine in VR !

The last experiment and perhaps one I most enjoyed was  a transforming stage prototype we did for SRC. I was  obsessed with Hamilton at the time and wanted to play with the idea of transforming a world or virtual space around the player as well as experimenting with the act of having players actions " create music" . So here I had a few random albums and when you put each one on a record player they play a different portion of the song, ultimately combining to play a full instrumental  of music for Aaliyah's " Rock The Boat" . 

I also included the final record which  I would describe as the "  city record which would gradually expand, , cause the city objects on it to fold out and grow in scale, and transform the virtual skybox . 

I had a blast putting this prototype together and seeing virtual spaces transform is also a subject that deeply interests me going forward.

I ultimately left the No Static Games team but I had a great time working with them to create SRC and I wish I would have had the opportunity to see the product further develop from our fun Rapping simulation to our ultimate dream concept for it .