Development Period:
September 2016 - December 2017 Engine: Unreal Engine 4.15 Platform: HTC Vive Role: Content, Gameplay, UI, System & Sound Designer Team Members: 13 Total 1 Producer // 2 Designers // 3 Artists // 4 Programmers 1 Voice Actor // 1 Composer // 1 Web Developer DocumentationSword of the sorcerer - team trailer (1:59)Sword of the sorcerer - personal reel (00:59) |
Have you ever wanted to sword fight outside the I SPY Spooky Mansion while a crotchety old wizard yells at you? Look no further than this Hack N' Slash VR Experience.
This game has so far been the closest to being in a studio project that I've worked on. A team of 13 people came together to craft this VR experience. Utilizing mechanics similar to Call of Duty's Zombie Gamemode to create a Wave-based Survival game that gives the player a sword and says "You know how this works". Sword of the Sorcerer is a fun take on what would happen if you gave them the tools to be a stereotypical fantasy hero with the objective of protecting the crotchety wizard in the tower as he'll surely smite you if you fail. Coming into this project was very difficult. VR requires a very precise hand to handle the additional challenges that come along with the territory. I was staring down a mountain of work and a very short window to climb it in. Getting into the gameplay, when I joined the team there was a system of health in place. When the player would hit a skeleton, it would detract from the Skeleton's health pool. The skeleton would then hit the player back until the player did enough damage to it to kill it completely. This is a normal game loop and there's nothing evidently problematic with it. Here's the problem I saw, animating a set of combat animations for a VR combat experience was a huge waste of valuable time and resources. It was very out of scope for a 13 person team so I made the decision to move the skeletons to a single hit system. Now when a player hits the skeletons they ragdoll and fly off the map. We brought this revised combat system to testing and the results were infinitely better. Players LOVED hitting the skeletons off into the infinite abyss with a single swing of their sword. Player feedback is one of the trickiest things to get right in Video Games. Its even harder in VR because we cant just stick the UI on the players visor and call it a day, that's generally very immersion breaking. We made the decision to move forward with a diegetic UI (when the UI exists in the game universe).
We were facing a problem, Skeletons were destroying the objectives and the players weren't noticing. We can't FORCE the player to look anywhere without inducing major motion sickness. So I came up with a conceptual UI that had indicators that showed when/where objectives came under attack. (See Slideshow at the top of the page). With these indicators implemented, players were no longer losing track of their objectives and failure rate for first time players dropped SIGNIFICANTLY. This team and this game have been a major proponent to my transitional phase from student into professional Designer. We adhered to project deadlines as set out by our executive producers and practiced real use production structures used in actual studios. I am very excited to say this game is available to play on Steam for free and I highly reccomend checking out my fellow developers on this project. They can all be found by following the team members link at the top of this page, or by clicking here. |