Tuniverse: An Immersive Music Experience

The concept of Tuniverse is an entirely immersive music discovery video game, which aims to elevate artists and gives users a new way to experience music.

When we first set out to do this project, Tuniverse was only an idea. We weren’t sure we’d be able to actually turn it into a real thing, but now we have.

The three areas we wanted to focus on were the three key areas of gameplay: flying around in your ship, the start screen/ship navigation, and watching a livestream. We also wanted to create some other elements: an animated logo, a website, and a promotional video.

The flying around:

Mark spearheaded this aspect of the project in Unity. Here’s what he focused on:

• Scaled up the size of the space environment
• Warp Speed mechanics in development
• Realistic thruster design (continued development)
• Keyboard controls for Forward, Reverse, Roll left, Roll right, Hover up, Hover Down
• Playable Demo available
• Flying mechanics for VR Controls in development
• Audio driven interaction mechanics in development
• Fictional planet surfaces added
• Updated space station designs

The biggest hurdle we hit here was trying to get the spaceship to work in VR. It involved much more complex coding skills than we were anticipating, and we weren’t able to hammer out how to move the user’s vision around while in the ship.

However, Mark was able to build out the desktop version, so we still have a workable demo to begin user testing.

Start screen & watching a livestream:

This is the part that Max handled. We’ve gone back and forth for a long time trying to figure out what a livestream would look like in Tuniverse. We finally landed on having a big stage and screen, to look and feel more like a concert.

Here were the steps that went into building out our stream:

First, was building out the stage.

Then, getting the video to play from it:

The final step was getting the robots to dance on the scene, then adding in lights and all the other bells and whistles.

The biggest issue we hit here, was a Unity crash. Max lost of all his work after he finished building it all out, so we weren’t able to make any changes or addition. Thankfully, he had already done a Unity build, so we are still able to play it as a demo and present it to class.

We also worked on how the start screen would look like, and put together a basic wireframe for what we wanted it to look like. Max was able to turn it into a workable scene, for when you log into the game.

Animated logo & promotional video

I handled the creation of the animated logo, website, and also cut together a promotional video to show in class. I was originally working on an opening scene for the game, but we decided to focus more on pieces we needed for user testing and prototyping.

I created the website with an email capture, so we could collect users’ emails for testing.

I also worked on the logo for the video, along with future promotional media for the brand.

We’re happy with how it turned out, but we’re excited to keep working on it. Here’s the next steps of the project we’ll be focusing on:

• Re-create Artists planets, develop cockpit
• Create VR gameplay
• Collect feedback from the tuniverse.co website,
• Additional feedback from mentors and artists,
• Await response from Catalyze CU