Risk at Light: a Udacity Teamworks Project
Four weeks ago, Team Halliday was formed for the 5th version of Udacity’s Teamworks; an experimental platform for VR Developers to collaborate on designing, prototyping, testing and polishing a project within 28 days. This version’s theme was “risk”. For more information on project specifications and development process for every team, take a look at the following link:
Project Start
At first, our team had to get to know each other and understand the skills and interest of each member; on our first session we brainstormed a couple of ideas and decided to work on a project focused on traversing a map, sneaking into a place to collect an item without being detected. We decided that being detected by a guard would be the risk the user could experience.
We brainstormed different possible environments, stories, locomotion systems and secondary functionality to create an immersive experience.
We agreed to develop the game as a 6 Degrees of Freedom VR experience, using both Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive. Since then, we concluded that for our purpose, climbing and dashing were the types of locomotion that most suited our game design. A game about traversing a map stealthily, slowly, and patiently. Climbing locomotion allows the player to stalk around and peep around corners as the user moves forward.
Climbing can feel pretty intuitive in VR; it is a type of locomotion that has a small room for motion sickness to occur. It provides movement that feels more natural than teleporting around and it adds a degree of attention to the user’s position and cautiousness. To us, it seemed that the easiest environment to build for this project would be a jungle, as the player could use specific vines, trees, and other objects to hang and move around. Once we had this decided, we split our team in two groups. Two of us worked on Map Design, a climbable path and setting a mood through light and colors. The other two team members decided to work on making the game interesting: detection as a challenge.
We knew that the most important tasks were to:
- create a traversable map
- have a detection system
- design an intuitive environment with a start and end point
Concept Freeze
By the second week, we knew what kind of experience we had to build, then we started reducing all of our fantasies into achievable functionality. Some ideas we wanted to work on were implementing more tools and options for the player to interact with the environment. Implementing a particle system with a smoke-like effect to enable lasers’ visibility, giving the player a bow to fight back, adding loot and collectibles around the map were some of the ideas we thought of implementing but saw as secondary and not essential for the game’s core development. So we started prototyping the climbing experience.
To create an understandable and intuitive traversable map, a series of climbable prefabs were established to create a recognizable pattern of objects used to move around. Trees, vines, lianas and bushes were the answer as to how the player would move around. Trees in particular play an important role in this game as they allow the player to gain higher ground, hiding from plain view, and scouting in advance the next move. Waiting to understand which path to take.
Risk at Light says it all in its name. There is risk in lighted areas. This guided us to elaborate a map that had both darkness as safety zones for the player to lurk around and bright areas where the player needs to react fast and move hastily. With this in mind and a working prototype that felt good to play with, we had to start creating the real scene for the experience. This is when we decided to use The Lost Lands 3d enviroment asset package from the Unity Asset Store. This is a low-poly, jungle themed asset package perfect for our needs. This approach was one of the best decisions we could take as the package had everything we needed in a very optimal format. For our development time, maintaining a good frame rate through the entire process was crucial.
By now, the looks of the project perked up and the colors of our path started to immerse us into development. Having everything we needed to develop the core-game mechanics, we built the map by using colors. Light, bright green plants, mostly with ivy leaves were plants used for the player to climb around and opaque looking plants, bushes and palms served the environment to create a more immersive looking ecosystem.
As the path kept growing and the map looked ever more alive, we still felt a need to play around with lights and opted to try and set the game at Dusk, a time where day and night meet, a mixture of darkness and brightness that went perfectly along with the game mechanics.
Feature Freeze
So far, development felt great, but there were many adjustments that had to be made. Scale, distance, brightness and rhythm was something that we had to keep in mind, as well as users that have no idea of what we built. With the right environment set up, we were able to more easily test and iterate on this decisions. We had to ask ourselves: How long were the average player’s arm? How dizzy may one feel falling from a short or a tall tree? How tall should the guards be and where should they be looking at to set up detection traps?
Having the right hierarchy organization allowed us to work independently on different map sections which could be easily pushed and mixed with collaborators on GitHub.
Project Freeze
With a complete map, the time for optimization came. At this point the Hierarchy was heavy in objects, but we decided to keep most of these objects to maintain our environment’s sense of immersion, a design choice that gave much life to our experience. This being developed for 6DoF VR meant that lighting could be a problem. At this point we decided to bake all lights and started working on maximizing the game’s efficiency.
The Performance Bounceback project within the VRND’s High-Immersion Specialization gives a clear and practical set of traits that most high-immersion projects need to be optimal. Just after applying all recommendations given by our instructors, the project ran smoothly and the game was ready to be enjoyed. This is a walk-through of one of the paths that the player may take in Risk at Light:
Conclusion
There are still many features that we would love to implement, but this short time gave us a powerful prototype that shows how interesting and different virtual reality can be from many other platforms. The Teamworks experience fits perfectly for any VR developer looking forward to practice and improve all sets of skills required in the industry. Project managing, game design, programming, art creation, user experience design among other core-development skills are techniques that can be practiced through this collaboration. More importantly, learning from your teammates provides so much insight as in how we all can grow and learn in a very primitive industry. Each one of the teammates comes and proposes very interesting and unique points of views that add up into a very complex experience. It is simply great to work along with other people who share a passion for emerging technologies.
