Preparing for Lisboa Games Week – Ganbatte’s First Game Event
Next week we’ll be showcasing Ganbatte for the first time at Lisboa Games Week (Crossroads: Steam Early Access & Arcade Mode for events). We’ll be part of the Indie Dome initiative and PlayStation Prémios finalists group. This means that we’re pretty busy, testing our “Arcade Mode” build, and the set-up (Arcade Mode tales – Creating the spectator screen).
Three days ago (a week away from the game event), we took the gamble to migrate our project from Unreal Engine 4.17 to Unreal Engine 4.18. 4.18 Release Notes bewitched us with the sweet promise of fixing the player position on the Oculus Rift, taking into account the guardian system. Previously, the player had to have the headset on, while facing the right side in order to be correctly positioned in at the table. Of course, migrating a project implies being ready to put out fires. A lot of them. In 4.18, VR specific code has changed. So immediately after migrating, we were faced with the game crashing left and right. We also had to perform some exorcism on our cats. The position and rotation of our cats’ heads had to be changed from world space to local space.
The esoteric episodes didn’t end here, though. We found out that there was a specific computer in our studio that was not rendering the skybox with Oculus Rift. After some investigation, we found out we were not the only ones being haunted by this bug. We tried lots of things from updating drivers, restarting, checking the skybox material. And, as mysteriously as this issue appeared, it just went away. We’re still trying to figure out why.
Besides the getting our Ganbatte “Arcade Mode” build ready, and taking care of the nightmarish logistics involved in showcasing a multiplayer VR game, we have also been developing the first official set of Ganbatte merchandise!
During the event, our merch will be available at the amazing Weatherlight Workshop booth (take a moment to check Weatherlight Workshop, we promise it’s worth it!). Meanwhile, here’s a preview of some items that will be available. Most of our items feature our mascot, Dexter.
We will be having more items available such as stickers and t-shirts. Our journey to produce the merchandise definitely deserves its own post.
Twitch?
Surprise: we hope to live stream Ganbatte to Twitch, LIVE from the showfloor! Big disclaimer: we’re not 100% sure we’ll manage to pull this off, since we’re completely new to streaming, so a lot can (and will probably) go wrong. We’re unsure of many things, like the quality of the internet, the background noise, using OBS, the stability of the brand new spectator client, and the list goes on. But the ambition is there and we’ll try our best! So if you don’t want to miss out on the very first Ganbatte Twitch stream, be sure to follow us on Twitter for more information and for a shout-out once we go live.
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I’ll close off by reminding you that Ganbatte is now set to “Coming soon” on Steam at http://store.steampowered.com/app/691680/Ganbatte/. You can now wishlist it, if you’re brave enough to fight for the title of the biggest sushi eater of the galaxy!
Thanks for reading!
-Daniela
