Toy Island
Done in 3 weeks with a full team
Goal: Realize a game offering a 10 min of full experience.
Our Pitch : Network adventure game with 2 players having a different view and an asymmetric gameplay.
Game powered by Unreal Engine 4
Since it was our last project, the goal was to put in common every profession of the video game. I took part in a group with 1 Producer, 2 Game Designers, 5 Game Artists, 2 other programmers and 1 Music and Sound Designer.
More details about the pitch: it is an adventure game where one player has a Real Time Strategy view and must move his toy on his rug. The environment of this player is a bedroom with a lot of toys everywhere mixed between them to create buildings, mountain, etc... This player has a UI indicating the objectives to achieve.
In another side, the second player is in VR, embodying The Favorite Toy of the first player. This player can shoot and interact with his environment. His map has the same architecture as the first player but his rendering is totally different. Sounds are differents too and so is his scale.
Both of them have to communicate since they don't see the same things.
As you can imagine, the programming of this game has been full of technical challenges.
It was our first time using the HTC Vive. Most of the team had never work with Unreal and with versioning softwares. We took time to explain them how to use them.
We had to handle the double rendering (visual and sound) in one level, the attribution of the good controller since it's an asymmetrical gameplay (VR & RTS) and all of this using the network.
We had a problem beyond our control. We discovered a little bit late on the project, that our Unreal version had a bug handling light scenario system. This tool helped us to handle two different lighting for one scene. So we had to update our project to a new version which was really tricky because we were close to reach a really important milestone.
We had to do a lot of optimisation to make the VR playable with a good framerate in order to avoid motion sickness.
It has been a lot of work for everyone because every technical issue required a lot of work. Our milestones were close one to another. But all this work has been rewarded with the Gameplay Award discerned by a professional Jury.