Concepting
Research
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Researching how other games try and avoid player discomfort.
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Researching what gameplay genres are viable for a VR game.
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Researching VR immersion, what breaks it and ways to maintain it.
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Researching proper methods of brainstorming in a large team and obtaining possible game concepts.
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This helped us create the design pillars upon which we want to build our game.
Concepting
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As design lead, I was in charge of managing the brainstorming sessions, gathering concepts and cutting them based on criteria created through research and constraints set by the stakeholders.
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After the final concepts were chosen, we took time in development to test each for viability, feasibility, and desirability. From this, we chose the final concept to expand further in this phase.
Concept Prototypes
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I assisted in the creation of basic prototypes to convey the early concepts spawned during concepting and test them for desirability.
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Many prototypes were built in Unreal Engine 4 due to a proper. understanding of the engine among the team. The engine for the rest of development was Unity due to its requirement for the implementation of seamless portals in VR.
Transition to Pre-Production
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After the concepting, our team size decreased from 25 to 22
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I stepped down as design lead to focus on improving my technical capabilities within Unity.
Early Concept Art
Hand Concept Prototypes
Pre-Production
Gravity Hand System
I worked on the gravity hand system that allows the player to make objects levitate on touch.
The prototype was made to be modular enough to work with future systems and then iterated upon based on player feedback obtained through playtesting and to work with the SteamVR plugin. The design team were also able to assign objects to not be affected by the hand to create interesting puzzles around these restrictions.
Gravity Hand
Boosted Room Scale Movement System
I worked on the boosted room scale movement system that allows players in smaller playspaces to play our game.
From research done by the UI/UX team, we gathered that the average VR player has a playspace of around 2 by 2 meter. This playspace size caused issues with the level design team and they requested a solution. In collaboration with the UI/UX team, we created a system that boosts the virtual movement of the player allowing them to traverse a 3 by 3 virtual space while utilizing a 2 by 2 space in real life.
Boosted Room Scale Movement
Corruption Grid System
I worked on the corruption grid system that prevents the player from taking items between rooms and disables their hand powers.
I designed and prototyped the corruption grid. The corruption grid is designed as another puzzle element they have to think around while trying to solve the puzzle in the room. It does this by destroying items that come in contact with it and, if touched by the player, disables the use of the hand powers and all objects affected.
Corruption Grid Prototypes
Hand Switching System
I worked on the system that allows for the player to switch between different hand powers.
I altered the base of the hand and made it to be modular enough to add other powers to it later in development. Sadly though, we had to scope down on hand powers which made the system obsolete. Luckily, we were able to reused the functionality of the system to allow the player obtain the gravity hand.
Hand Switching Examples
Production
SteamVR Circular Drive Modifications
I modified the original SteamVR circular drive system to allow for hand poses to movable interactables like levers.
The original circular drive system did allow for the creation of levers and wheels that use the orientation of the hands to interact with them. It didn't, however, allow for poses to show up which would go against all the other poses on interactable objects currently in the game. Together with the UI/UX team, I was able to modify the script to their liking allowing for poses to show up on movable interactable objects.
Lever Example
Player Feedback Implementation
I worked together with the UI/UX team to implement the feedback for the players actions in the game.
Many of these implementations were focused around the gravity hand to show off its current state to the player. Besides the gravity hand, I also iterated upon buttons to make them feel more responsive to your hand, created breakable objects together with a programmer for the players to mess around with and fixed bugs related to these and similar interactables in order to make them feel better to the player.
Player Feedback Examples
Performance Improvements
I worked together with the programming team to determine areas where performance was lacking and focused on improving this
Due to the importance of high frame rate in a VR game, the latter weeks of production for me was looking into current performance issues and determining ways to improve it. Through utilizing Unity's batching system, GPU instancing and our occlusion system, I was able to increase performance throughout the game. Later on I also developed a small script that dynamically alters the far render plane on the camera per level in order to reduce batch calls and increase performance even further.