In the Beginning was the Word…
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!
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
Details
This project was one of my original pitches. Since it was the last project before my Bachelor project, 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 don’t regret my decision to use CRYENGINE, using a relatively niche engine like that 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 in at this point.
Programming
This was my main role in this team. As the only programmer, 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 an object or changeing an object in the environment. Thoughts have to be unlocked by collectable key words, the text is rendered as 3D objects using a custom system.
Logic for 4 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 interfer 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 documentation it was quite difficult to set up the physics system in a way to allow this.
Directing
Since this was just a small student project, my role as Director manly consisted of defining the vision for the project and approving ideas and implementations.
Lighting
I created two different lighting and atmosphere setups the game:
Bright and sunny, which was the default atmosphere throughout most of the game.
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 god rays and volumentrics. Additional light effects where implemented with VFX.
VFX - ADD PICTURES
Another of my responsibilities was designing and implementing particle and material effects. 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.
Level Design
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.
Marketing - ADD PICTURES/DOCUMENTS
Since this was a student project, marketing in this context meant creating information handouts for the final presentation, as well as designing and setting up the itch.io page. Again, I put the focus on the lush and bright nature aspect of the game world. I also chose a typewriter looking font to convey the idea that the world of this game has been created by an author in writing.