You are the famous song samurai, training in solitude to hone your skills. A dragon is attacking your dojo. You must put your life on the line and defend your home!
This game is a Virtual Reality Experience that will put you in the middle of Feudal Japan where you must use the Vive Controllers as your swords. Build up an attack streak and take down your foe, Dragon attacking your Dojo.
In game you will use a simple file browser to load any of your owned favorite songs, and then pick a difficulty to jam out to as you attempt to beat up a dragon.
We were excited to participate in our second Immersathon hosted by the IVRC. If you are not familiar with the Immersathon, it is an event where we were given a limited amount of time (36 hours in this case), to build an app in either Virtual Reality or Augmented reality. This year the theme surrounding the build off was Musical Mayhem. Codeworks was fortunate enough to have enough interest to form a student and a community team. For our community team, we came up with an incredibly fun experience that we now call Song Samurai.
Song Samurai, was birthed from several ideas we all contributed to. First, we all really enjoyed games like Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero and decided that to best fit the theme of music (since none of us are musicians) we would stick with classic songs and build a rhythm style game.
For our team, half of it was comprised of members that had participated in the previous Immersathon, whereas the other three were students who had only a few weeks earlier started playing around in unity.
We decided on doing a game where you would use swords to slice through orbs (later determined to be fire and ice balls) and make a game that can be mostly summarized as guitar hero meets fruit ninja. Because we wanted our swords to be Katanas and the name Song Samurai had a great ring to we built the rest of the theme around that idea. We also knew it would be important to make a fully playable game with a starting sequence, a scoring aspect, and an ‘end goal’ so the scoring system was developed around the idea of accuracy and staying on beat.
On the day of the event we all carpooled in and when we were instructed to we all dived right into the code. Since we had taken time ahead of the event to build a set of tasks and had assigned everyone the first task to complete, things went rapidly from there.
‘By breaking up into teams of two and partner programming each piece, switching partners in-between parts, we were able to ensure everyone knew a little bit about each of the parts that interacted with each other.’ -Jake Overall, Sr. Instructor.
In the end, we were all incredibly tired but felt like we had accomplished a lot.
‘I had so much fun hanging out with everyone while doing something that we all love, coding. Seeing our project at the end and how much we’d accomplished was awesome too.’ – Jaime Madsen, Student. ‘
My favorite part of the event was watching other people try our game for the first time.’ – Aaron Kim, student.
We love to see our students and team have a chance to participate in these events and we fully intend to continue doing so. We thank the IVRC for their continued support of the growth and development of VR in Idaho and putting on these great events.