In the Beginning was the Word…
Time Frame: 04.2019 - 07.2019
Roles: Programming, Directing, Lighting, VFX, Level Design, Marketing
Team Size: 8
Experience one of very few VR Games achieved in the beautiful CRYENGINE!
Dive into the beautiful magical forest world of this VR puzzle game and shape it to your liking!
Responsibilities
Implementing a roomscale VR Player controller with collision and locomotion via arm swinging
Creating a physical trigger system utilizing colliders to detect objects entering areas without these colliders actually interacting
Implementation of interactive object logic:
Physical objects that can be grabbed and react realisticly when dropped or thrown
A thought system, where thoughts are text floating in the world that can be touched to execute the described action after the player collected the necessary keyword
Implementing a system to display 3D text
Puzzle scripting
Designing and setting up a sunny and a rainy lighting scenario
Designing and implementing all VFX
Designing and setting up the menu level
Creating marketing material
Coming up with the original pitch and directing the team to stay true to this original idea
Full Pitch
In the beginning was the word… and the author writing it. His words and thoughts shaped the world around him – until his writer’s block obstructed his path. Take on the role of the author and dive into the beautiful fantasy forest of this world. Use the words you find to shape this magical realm in order to overcome the writer’s block in this VR puzzle game.
You will encounter:
a beautiful, magical forest environment
4 Puzzles to solve
free locomotion in room-scale VR to let you explore the world you enter
Physical interaction with the world
Manipulation of the world by your author powers
Summary of my Work
This project was one of my original pitches. Since this was the last project before my Bachelor semester, I wanted to do something new, and I had never done a full scale VR game before, nor used another engine than Unity. Since I wanted to improve my C++ and wanted to apply at Crytek after my studies, CRYENGINE was the engine I chose.
While I did learn a lot during this project and do not regret my decision to use CRYENGINE, using a relatively niche engine like this one with not a lot of in-depth documentation and a small developer community meant that development was very cumbersome at times. Furthermore, the quality of the final product was not as great as it could have been had we used Unity, which we all had quite a bit of experience with at this point.
My main role in this project was that of the only programmer in the team. As such, I was responsible for all game logic, which was exclusively implemented in C++. The main features and systems were:
A roomscale VR player controller. It allows the player to move freely within the confines of their play area and utilizes an arm swinging motion to “walk” distances that lie outside the play area. The Oculus Rift controllers are mapped to hands that can be used to interact with the environment.
Physical objects that can be grabbed by the player and react in a realistic way when dropped or thrown.
A thought system that consists of floating text that can be touched to execute an action such as spawning or changing an object in the environment. Thoughts have to be unlocked by collecting key words; the text is rendered as 3D objects using a custom system.
Scripting for four puzzles designed by another member of the team, consisting of thought actions and world interactions.
One of the biggest challenges I faced pretty early on was settig up a physical trigger system with colliders that could detect collisions, but not interfere with other objects in any way. I needed this to detect the player entering areas or touching things, and was used to having a feature like this on an engine level from Unity. CRYENGINE, however, had no straight forward builtin way to do this, and with the very limited public documentation it was quite difficult to set up the physics system in a way to allow this.
Apart from programming, I also had the responsibility of directing the project to make sure we stayed true to my originial vision of the game. Furthermore, I was responsible for designing and implementing lighting and VFX, as well as the menu level which is a 3D space the player could walk around in. It contains a mural serving as tutorial for the arm swing locomotion, credits and of course a “thought” the player can touch to enter the game.
Finally, I designed the needed marketing material. Since this was a student project, marketing in this context meant information handouts for the final presentation, as well as the itch.io page. For this, I put the focus on the lush and bright nature aspect of the game world while using a typewriter-looking font to convey the idea that the world of this game has been created by an author in writing.
Lighting and VFX
I created two different lighting and atmosphere setups for the game: Bright and sunny, which is the default atmosphere throughout most of the game, and rainy and gloomy, which can be activated by the player for short durations during the course of some puzzles.
Since the game takes place in a forest, most of the light is natural sunlight and was set up using CRYENGINEs environment editor. It was set up to envoke a dreamy and magical atmosphere, with pronounced light shafts and volumetrics. Additional light effects where implemented with VFX.
Example of the rainy and gloomy lighting.
Since we wanted the game to have a magical and mystical feel to it, we needed lots of glowing, flowing visual effects, as well as letter based effects to allude to the fact that the game world is a contained in a story and shaped by writing. The main effects I created were:
A glowing letter-cloud to highlight executable thoughts
Glowing sparks, halos and runes to highlight interactable objects
Key word collection and thought execution effects
An inky material sucking in letters to represet writers block
An effect to highlight the magical growing of a tree as a puzzle reward
Various atmoshperic firefly-like effects providing small lightsources
I took lots of inspiration from The Legend Of Zelda - Breath Of The Wild for the mood of the VFX, particularly for the flowing key word collection and thought execution effects, which were inspired by the Sheika tear effects when updating the map in Breath Of The Wild.
Menu Level
My relatively small level design contribution was the menu level. Since this is a VR game, we needed an actual space for the menu, and decided to have it be in the world of the game, with the menu actions being thoughts that can be executed. The menu also doubled as a simple tutorial area, with a mural explaining the player how to move around and some space for the player to try out the movement.
The main focus here was to make it look as lush and pretty as possible using existing game assets, showing off the physical grass and foliage. I also needed to make sure the player could not escape the confines of the space.