In Development
Button Realms is a city-building and offline
raiding game for Virtual Reality. Role: Technical Designer
PSVR & HTC Vive Engine: Unreal Engine 4 Team size of 30 (05/09/2016 - Present) Vertical Divider
|
|
My Work
DESIGN
|
TECH
|
Overview
This project is part of my latest work which was developed in 1 year.
I joined the team as a technical designer with the goal to prototype mechanics and be the middle point of communication between designers and programmers. In pre-production I was mainly doing VR Games Research and working with another designer and a programmer in a UX/UI feature team. Later on in production, I worked on making programmers systems easily usable by designers to ease the work flow. In addition to that, I prototyped several VR interactions and did general scripting. |
Detailed Info
In pre production, one of the first issues we had was displaying stats, events and general information to the player. After researching how other VR games present their User Interface, I came up with a solution to simply create an interactive book. The player can pick it up, hold it, flip through the pages and create buildings. By doing it this way, we give more options for other design departments to use it as a UI replacement. Below are 2 videos showing the book in its earliest version.
|
|
|
Prototypes
Below are videos of a few prototypes I did by myself. They vary from VR interactions to gameplay programming.
|
Exploding CHICKENS
(placeholder particle effect) |
Customizable flying path using splines
(see more below) |
Environment Interactions
(I worked on this with another designer: Emma Lintvelt) |
How did I create the flying path?
We did not have many animators in our team, thus creating an appealing flight towards the player would take quite some time.
We decided that it would be best if I am the one who approaches this issue. After careful planing I decided to use a SINE function to calculate a curvy path which can be editable by Unreal Engine's Timelines nodes. Meaning that we can change its speed at any moment of the calculation, the height and on which axis to use it on. With the assistance of a few programmers, I was able to make it work. |
Here is where the next problem was - navigating the book throughout the level. Through a raycast from the current book's position (A) to the player's position (C), I check whether there is an object in its way. IF there is one, It creates a spline point at position A, and then gets the object's height (B) and that's where we put our next spline point. Then the final one is at the player's location (C).
When the player summons the book, it will follow the spline path while still doing the SINE calculations. |