Project Announcement: WINGMAN

Welcome to the WINGMAN devlog!

I'm MK, and I'm a beginner Unity and VR developer. I'm extremely excited and privileged to be working with DMG.to and OCAD U on a Bodies in XR mixed reality residency starting in February 2024. The project I've pitched is an ambitious one for my level, so I'm working ahead on it a little bit.  I haven't made a devlog before, but I'll be using this tool to document/organize my thought process, learnings, and progress as I work on the game.  This is in part for myself and in part for the research team behind the residency with virtually no expectations for readers outside of those two groups, so I'm not going to go too crazy -- I want this to be a complement and a tool, but don't want to get caught up more in the documentation process than the creation process, IYKWIM. Very easy to overthink this stuff. 

WHAT IS WINGMAN?

WINGMAN is a two-player mixed reality game that blends a fully immersive virtual environment with auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and tactile stimuli. It's a simple time/chaos management game, with an emphasis on small, immersive details inside and outside the virtual environment. The premise of the game is that Player 1, wearing a VR headset, is on a date at a fancy restaurant and is trying to impress their date by eating as many hot chicken wings as quickly as possible. The headset streams to a screen in the real world, providing information that cues Player 2, the concierge, to trigger various stimuli to deepen Player 1's immersion in the virtual scene--for example, using a space heater to increase the temperature of the environment as the player eats more wings. 

WHY WOULD ANYONE DO THIS?

I was first introduced to VR about 10 years ago, long before I had any technical or creative skills I could use to create VR content myself. I fell in love with on the first day I tried it. I've always leant towards projects/ideas that are a little weird, maybe a little off-putting; ridiculous, humorous, and absurd. This idea behind WINGMAN is one of the first of many ridiculous joke ideas I had about how the tech could be used. I never thought it would be something that could be made, especially not by me. Now, I've accumulated a little bit of know-how and get to make my own dreams come true. What an inspiring story!

I've experienced some really elegant projects blending virtual and physical worlds in a visual way, as well as incorporating auditory input with virtual environments (e.g. Keep Talking and No One Explodes). However, I've never heard of anything that incorporates what I consider the funkier, more bodily senses like taste and  smell (outside of, like, the Cineplex 4DX viewings). In fact, I've never even heard the word Gustatory before I looked it up for this write-up. I suppose you can consider some tactile input as a standard (haptic feedback) but I've also never seen anything that incorporates things like temperature or pressure. There's a lot of delight and novelty to me in creating something that makes use of those senses, even if it is in a very low-fi, manual way. 

WHEN CAN I PLAY IT?

Probably never. The intention for this project is to be a limited-time-only, in-person, installation kind of game, with no intention of distribution or monetization. I'll likely release the virtual element here on Twitch; the real-world stimuli is going to be supplementary and not interwoven with the software from a technical perspective so in theory it should still function as a game, but you'll need someone at home squirting hot sauce into your mouth if you want to try to achieve the same experience. 

That's it for now, much more to come!