Elixir of Life
Virtual Reality Game
Would you risk your life to adventure into the mountains to save your best friend?
PROJECT DETAILS
Challenge: Create a virtual reality (VR) game that is not sci-fi themed
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Role: Programmer, Concept Artist, 3D Modeler
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Duration: Sept. 2017 - Mar. 2018
TOOLS
Pen & Paper
Illustrator
Photoshop
Unreal Engine 4
Maya
Oculus Rift
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Overview
You play as a wizard who needs a special ingredient for a medicinal potion for your best friend. This snow flower can only be found in the mountains and the smell of it attracts all kinds of monsters as you make your way back home with it. Monsters are nocturnal and will attack during the night.
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The idea behind this game is to create a defense game with waves of various kinds of monsters coming towards the player. The player will have to fend of the hostile beasts until morning comes and the monsters leave. By using the Oculus Rift, in theory, we can have different move sets for each hand. Left hand would be defense spells and the right hand would be attack spells.
Project Design
The main reason why we want to make a VR defense game is because of VR sickness: the feeling of nausea partly due to the real-world user's body being stationary while their virtual point-of-view moves around a virtual environment. According to a Unity tutorial, "it is best to avoid moving the camera unless it's copying the user's movement because it may cause vection: effect of confusing the user's brain by having conflicting signals sent from the eyes and ears. Similar to being poisoned, the body triggers a response,
in form of sickness."
Existing games
Over the course the years, there has been a lot of defense games show up. Most well-known defense game is Space Invaders: it's one the earliest shooting games with the goal of defeating waves of aliens with a laser cannon to earn as many points as possible. Similar to this game, we want to have waves of enemies coming toward the player, but we won't have the walls to protect the player and the enemies won't shoot anything at the player.
Space Invaders.
Another well-known defense game is Desktop Tower Defense. In this game, the player build towers to prevent the set number of enemies, known as "creeps," from reaching a set point on the playing field. Unlike many other tower defense games, the path of the creeps themselves is not set; instead, the towers built determine the path of the creeps, who take the shortest path they can find to the goal. What this game does well is having different types of enemies: shapeshifter, flying, regular, immune to effects, etc. For our game, the player doesn't have to build towers with accumulated points, but instead, upgrade their skills.
Desktop Tower Defense.
Many defense games are 2D, like Metal Assault. It revolves around defending your friends and yourself. Like this game, we want to have enemies coming in multiple directions and have some type of mini map or radar to show you where enemies might be. Rather than having our game to be 2D and post-apocalyptic, it will be in 3D and a different genre.
Metal Assault.
We want our game to be a shooter with multiple levels and a story like Metroid. By incorporating the gun, the edges of the visor around the screen, and the way the HUD fits into the environment, the player feels integrated into the sci-fi world. Due to the fact that we are a group of two, we don't have the resources to create extensive levels or many art assets. We want to be able to incorporate some type of HUD for the player that provides information about skill cooldowns, time until the sun rises, and where the enemies are.
Metroid.
Summary
There's a lot of sci-fi shooter games and a lot of the defense games are in 2D. None of these games are in VR, and we want to use the best qualities out of these games and incorporate them into a VR fantasy defense game that still works in the limitations of VR.
concept art
We wanted a variety of different monsters that move towards the player differently. The main monster that would show up is the basic type, which walks in a straight line towards the player. Then we have a weaving type monster that will walk in an S as it makes its way to the player. The split type would split into two upon dealing enough damage. Another one would be invisible for periods of time due to having camouflage.
A flying type of enemy that would swoop down from time to time, and a boss when the set number of
waves are killed.
Early monster designs.
Design for basic type monster.
Character design for player.
Storyboard for intro animation.
Game HUD design.
models
These are our final versions of our game models. I used Autodesk Maya to create all our assets and uv unwrapped and designed the look of our models in Photoshop.
Environmental assets.
Skeleton of basic monster: dog.
Skeleton of weaving monster: spider.
Skeleton of flying monster: owl.
reflections
Developing for VR
If we were to continue to work on this game, we want to tackle the challenges that we weren't able to accomplish. One thing that we weren't able to understand and implement was our custom hand model. We created a skeleton and animation for it, but we didn't know how to connect the default hand model's capabilities to our dragon hand. After countless guides and tutorials, we had to keep the default hand models in our game. Another thing we had trouble in implementing with VR is the HUD. We didn't spend a lot of time on it because we want to get the game working properly first.
Future Work
I would like to spend more time on creating more skills for the player, like our game vision from the beginning, creating an intuitive and informative HUD to aid the player, and bring more of our monster concepts to life. Currently, we have dogs and spiders walking straight towards the player and owls floating in the air.