Channel Surfing+: Our Q3 Postmortem
Hello, I’m Josh Powlison, Producer on Channel Surfing+. Last year I had the opportunity to join our Executive Producer (Nathan Blair) and an awesome team of highly skilled creatives to work on Channel Surfing+.
Channel Surfing+ is a VR game where you travel across many alternate dimensions that we call “Channels”. Each Channel has at least one unique core experience including starring in a cooking show, playing in a Teddy Bear arcade, and exploring a feast for giants. Many of their events are also interwoven into an overall narrative where you as the player discover a plot that threatens the multiverse.
We plan to release it first for the Oculus Quest and then follow up with other VR platforms.
Here are some of our updates for Quarter 3 2021:
Our Characters team has been building our characters and running more tests with DeepMotion, an AI motion capture tool, to learn how to use its functionality for our characters (the asset below is not one of our models, it’s purely for testing).
Our Environments Squad has also been building out Channel X more to both bring it to life and reduce the number of tris to improve performance:
Our Programming Squad has been adding respawning and helping fix bugs in the scenes so you can start interacting with the world more believably.
We’ve also just brought on a new Audio Lead! He’s reviewing our setups and onboarding new audio people.
On the admin side of things, we’ve been busy removing a huge blocker. This past year, we’ve been looking to move to a new project management system. Unity Collab just wasn’t a good fit for such a large volunteer project with so many moving parts. Thankfully, we’ve struck a partnership with Plastic SCM, and have been moving the team over to it and seeing fantastic improvements in speed and productivity already!
Our primary goals at this point are to build momentum, onboard everyone to the new processes, and build up more programming support to help move the project forward.Thank you to everyone who’s been a part of the team, and thank you for reading! Have a fantastic day.
