Industry
The way the game industry is moving at the moment is tending to be moving in two different directions, virtual reality and Unreal. This is seen in the current hirings from Brisbane developers like “Next World Enterprises” and “Gameloft”. Other movements in the industry are movements towards mobile game development as well as many Unity developers, however, I personally have made many Unity games during my degree and have made a few mobile games for my capstone as well as in my own current projects. I also have had a large interest in the VR development recently and also wanting to see what Unreal has to behold. This is why for my project I would like to move towards creating a VR Unreal Engine game.
Virtual Reality
Virtual Reality is seen as the future for many developers. It is also a large part in training people who don’t necessarily play games. This is because virtual reality games are more intuitive for those who don’t play games because you use your hands like you would in the real world. This is seen in businesses like “Next World Enterprises” who are at this time, hiring a Junior Unity Game Developer in their VR business.
Unreal Engine
Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4 and 5 are becoming the leading public engines for game development in the current day. This is because they have leading technology in lighting and physics as well as support a range of other programs like Motion Builder. This allows Unreal to make leaps ahead of other engines like Unity. This doesn’t mean that Unreal is the go to engine for all types of projects, however, it does do certain projects best. This means that it is crucial to learn unreal as it is important to learn what’s the best software to use for each project. Local businesses like Gameloft Brisbane use the Unreal Engine for all of their current and future projects as seen on the right. This means if I would want to work there I would need to learn Unreal to get the edge on other applicants.
Game Concept – The Levels
With VR and Unreal being my selected choices of platform and engine, I had to boil it down to what would showcase my skills. Unreal is known a lot for its incredible visual aspect with the highest quality lighting and ray tracing as well as texturing. The way I wanted to approach VR development to start off with is to create a game that is either a sitting or standing experience where there isn’t any walking/running/driving experience. This is because that way, more people will be able to enjoy the experience and not have to experience motion sickness from playing. This gave me the idea of a sitting/standing shooter experience with a constantly changing scenery. This reminded me of the Tower of Terror in Hollywood Studios, this is an experience where you are in an elevator sitting down while it changes floors showing you different environments on each level.
The game concept is that you are on a ride where you are in a big elevator by yourself either sitting or standing and you stop at different levels where each level has a different theme, themes vary like bushland, broken buildings and more. While riding the elevator, you have a toy gun, each level there are a certain amount of targets that pop up and the objective is to shoot all the targets as fast as you can. This encourages replayability and different game modes like limited amount of bullets or time limit will also be available.
The guns that the player will have will be small plastic looking guns that shoot lasers. These lasers will add light to the scene as you shoot allowing for more of an aesthetic to the game. It will also allow the player to see where they are shooting and to adjust accordingly. This is because shooting in virtual reality can be unintuitive at times because of the common misconception of guns in video games. I decided to make a first-person shooter, because at this point in time, I haven’t created a first person shooter game. It will be helpful to my portfolio because shooter games are on top of the most popular genre of games.
There are planned to be four levels. The first level starts off as a simple corridor that allows for the player to learn the controls as they play and so they understand the concept. The next level up from that is a crumbled building setting where it is harder to find the targets, whoever, there will be small lights lighting up the scene. The third scene will be a forest setting where the targets will be hidden in foliage and on trees making it a harder level. The last level is a dark room where you shoot buttons that light up the room and other targets but they will turn off after a period to increase the difficulty of the level immensely. Doing all of this environmental creation will expand my portfolio on the design end and will show my ability to create realistic environments for games.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the scope of the project is quite large. However, using Unreal’s Quixel Bridge, the level creation of each level should be quite simple by molding different models together with Quixels large library. I already have a lot of the models I’m thinking of using, so most of the environment development will be in laying out the models and setting up the lighting. The main programming of the game will come from the shooting and level movement, creating this in C++ would be generally easy as well as the usage of Unreal’s Blueprint visual scripting. This game will also be completed to the point where it can be released on the Steam store, this will allow me to also say I have “Shipped a game/VR game” allowing me to be more diverse of a developer.
This project will be a great project to fill in the gaps in my portfolio by creating a game that is created in the Unreal Engine, which I have had minimal experience with. Also by filling in the gap in the VR platform being my first developed Virtual Reality game. An additional gap that is filled to hopefully have the game shipped to steam. On top of all of this it will increase my knowledge of Unreal’s Blueprint scripting as well as C++.
Flynn Kassulke 