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[APK download] Crashland Reborn

sfaok
Protege
Hi my name is Llŷr. In this thread I'm going to document the development of my VR gamejam entry.



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ChallengePost : http://vrjam.challengepost.com/submissi ... and-reborn
Download : Crashland Reborn APK
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In Crashland Reborn, you will find yourself marooned on a hostile alien planet. Armed with only a smart pistol and motion scanner, your will need to fend off waves of increasingly ferocious aliens and survive until rescue arrives.

While the odds are stacked against you, killing aliens yields credits which can be spent on various power-ups for your gun. These will (probably) come in two forms:

• Firing modes (single shot, three round burst, full auto, rockets).
• Upgrades – stackable stat boosts (damage, reload, accuracy, rate of fire, capacity).

Power-ups will be purchased via a HUD that appears when you tap the Gear VR’s touchpad. The HUD will also display information such as credits and time left.

The power-ups will be delivered in the most metal way imaginable - via mortars launched from orbit! These will land in your general vicinity to encourage movement.

The game’s theme and visuals will be a pastiche of films such as Aliens, Predator, Robocop, Dredd and Starship Troopers. Very blocky, 1980’s design with Paul Verhoeven levels of blood squibs.


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There are four salient aspects to my entry:

1. The aim is to develop a fast and action packed FPS that adheres to VR best practices. Of paramount importance is how comfortable the game is to control. All rotational movement will come from the player’s own body, balanced around using a swivel chair. There will be no analogue rotation. I will attempt to create an intuitive control scheme that combines head tracking with decoupled aiming.

2. The game will be wholly designed around a short 10-15 minute experience, which I believe is the perfect length for mobile VR.

3. The gameplay is designed to invoke a constant arms race between the player and the attacking aliens. It will be completely up to the player how they upgrade their pistol, yielding many permutations, strategies and meta gameplay for the community to discover.

4. The aliens will hopefully be driven by a procedural animation system. This means that every encounter will be unique and should result in a very visceral minute-to-minute experience.

I'll leave you with a work in progress render of the alien species you will face in Crashland Reborn, 6 legged terrors I'm calling Frog Demons!



Note: As mentioned I released a DK1 demo called Crashland in Summer 2013 and I will be reusing the name, premise and some assets from that demo here. However I want to stress that the experience I am developing for this gamejam is completely new and will be designed and coded entirely from scratch for the competition.
Developer of Ocean Rift. Follow me on Twitter @sfaok
72 REPLIES 72

sfaok
Protege
^^^ cheers!

While testing the gameplay mechanics over the weekend I found that while walking speed is comfortable it's not great for covering large distances, especially when you are being harassed by aliens!

This lead me to experiment with a 'personal teleporter' mechanic that allows you to jump short distances. Basically you hold a button down and wherever you're looking a silhouette appears, and once charged up you can let go of the button and instantly jump to that location. It works similarly to the blink system in Dishonored.

Within a few rounds of playing with the teleporter I was in love. Here's some gameplay footage of me using the mechanic:


Developer of Ocean Rift. Follow me on Twitter @sfaok

miketucker
Honored Guest
!!! can't believe you're so far along. Will you have any mode for touchpad only?
Developer of VRJam submission: Tana Pura

sfaok
Protege
"miketucker" wrote:
!!! can't believe you're so far along. Will you have any mode for touchpad only?

Hopefully I can bring motion controls into it when something like the STEM comes along but unfortunately the mechanics are probably too complex for touchpad only. Maybe I can create a 'touchpad' game mode that is a bit more streamlined.
Developer of Ocean Rift. Follow me on Twitter @sfaok

HelloMeow
Explorer
"sfaok" wrote:
"miketucker" wrote:
!!! can't believe you're so far along. Will you have any mode for touchpad only?

Hopefully I can bring motion controls into it when something like the STEM comes along but unfortunately the mechanics are probably too complex for touchpad only. Maybe I can create a 'touchpad' game mode that is a bit more streamlined.


That's the case for a lot of games. It's great that it's there and it has it's uses. There will probably be some great games that use it in ingenious ways, but there isn't a whole lot you can do with just a couple of buttons/swipes and head tracking.

It get's gimmicky rather fast and having to look around all the time while holding your fingers on the touch pad can get tiresome and/or cumbersome.
VRJam: Hexagon

sfaok
Protege
I have added explosions!




This is the Hellfire firing mode, which is a mid-late game upgrade for the smart pistol.
Developer of Ocean Rift. Follow me on Twitter @sfaok

nilstastic
Explorer
Looks excellent! Hellfire mode is a good name. 😃

How many triangles / drawcalls ?

sfaok
Protege
"nilstastic" wrote:
Looks excellent! Hellfire mode is a good name. 😃

How many triangles / drawcalls ?

I've left the stats on in that video if you watch in 1080p.

Currently hovering between 70-100 draw calls, about 75k polys. Not done any optimisation yet though - using T4M plugin can drop Unity terrain draw calls from 20 to 1 for example. I'll probably have to tone down the explosions a bit because of overdraw etc.
Developer of Ocean Rift. Follow me on Twitter @sfaok

HomerS66
Expert Protege
And you added an arm which is nice to have 🙂

dignifiedweb
Protege
"sfaok" wrote:

I've left the stats on in that video if you watch in 1080p...


Excellent work! I feel so dumb, I have been creating a copy of my Unity 4.6.3 project and opening it in Unity 5 to check the draw calls and vertices counts. Turns out, I just have to hit the stats button I didn't see, thanks for that! I really should have seen that, didn't think Unity Free had that information readily available.

🙂
Check out my Mobile VR Jam 2015 title Man Overboard! - Try the DK2 Version if you don't have a Gear VR

sfaok
Protege
"dignifiedweb" wrote:
Excellent work! I feel so dumb, I have been creating a copy of my Unity 4.6.3 project and opening it in Unity 5 to check the draw calls and vertices counts. Turns out, I just have to hit the stats button I didn't see, thanks for that! I really should have seen that, didn't think Unity Free had that information readily available.

Great - Glad I could point it out! Those stats are absolutely invaluable for optimisation.

"HomerS66" wrote:
And you added an arm which is nice to have 🙂

There's actually been a full avatar in there since the first week, even before the aiming. The problem is basically that it feels a bit wierd to have a torso / moving legs, especially when sitting down. I removed them for the same reason as the gun / arm drops to your side after a few seconds of no activity - trying to make it as comfortable as possible.

Later down the line I also hope to integrate STEM / Lighthouse motion tracking into this game, designing it around that fact - which will mean floating guns again. However for the gamejam I'm probably going to keep the arms there because they are awesome 8-)
Developer of Ocean Rift. Follow me on Twitter @sfaok