A cooperative VR arena shooter.
THE PROJECT
Welcome to Hexarena, the most popular AI court in our system.
Guilty of crimes against humanity, dangerous robots think they can go unpunished!
Your mission: protect the mainframe by preventing crimebots from reaching the cloud through it and find underserved redemption.
Teach them good manners by destroying them, armed with your deadly evolutionary gear. Alone or in coop up to 4, shoot straight and be the vigilante.
Let justice be made, no quarter and no mercy!
HIGH LEVEL TIMELINE
- Month 1 : Planning and writing docs, proof of concept, whiteboxing.
- Month 2 : Graphics, audio, writing & recording.
- Month 3 : Localization, testing, balancing, fine-tuning & shipping.
THE TEAM
- Game Director
- Project Manager / Game Designer
- Developer
- Writer
KEY GOAL
Produce & ship a multiplayer VR shooter in 3,5 months with minimum expenses and staff.
MY ROLE
The initial constraint was to make a multiplayer game on Unity in approximately 3 months with only the ressources at hand.
- At the pre-production phase, I prepared the different plannings and assigned the time each team member would have to spend on the project.
- To do so, I established a list of required assets (2D, 3D, SFX, BGM) throughout the development.
- In order to be able to finish on time, I also chose some 3rd party assets we would have to use in order to reduce development time, with the help of the other team members.
- I organized some brainstorming sessions with all the team members so that we had the final Game Design elements we wanted for the game.
- I held documentation of these elements and updated them when needed.
- Then I worked on the level design by creating the particular shape of the map using Greyboxing directly in the engine.
- I created the initial enemy waves in an excel sheet.
- After all the enemy types where created and their behaviors were ready, I integrated the enemy waves using Scriptable Objects.
- I organized playtesting sessions and proceeded to the balancing and fine-tuning the game settings for the player abilities (bullets' speed, rate, etc) as well as the enemy waves (speed, numbers, health points, etc).
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BREAKING DOWN THE PROCESS
Initially, there was a need to offer a multiplayer shooter experience in VR Connection's catalogue for arcade partners.
The genre was initially the only constraint. As we had some pre-production meetings and benchmarked similar games on the market, the team agreed on certain important game design directions we wanted to take.
For example, we noticed while benchmarking that verticality is left out in this kind of game, so we wanted to make maximum use of it and implemented a dynamic individual elevator system actioned by the player. Being on ground level makes aiming enemies easier once the player is flooded with them, while being at height gives you a strategic advantage since you can see enemies coming from afar, but they are harder to shoot at that distance.
After the project direction was clearly defined and documented, I planned the sprints in advance and all the delays were met. As it was a short development, I chose straightforward tools such as Ganter for macro-planning combined with Trello for task management and Unity Collab for merging.
The team then proceeded to the production, which was one of the rare VR Connection productions to happen entirely internally.
Same background, different everything.
The action happens in an arena. That arena remains the same throughout the game. But everything else changes : The player's guns, the enemy types and numbers, round duration, etc.
THESE WERE SOME MAJOR LEARNINGS
Clearly defined constraints make for a better game.
We had a clearly defined schedule and budget from the start. This has actually made the development much easier, as the vision was focused on what we can do rather than what could be.
A game made in 3 months can be a best-seller.
Hexarena Robot Rage quickly became the best selling game in partner arcades.
The game came in response to a real need of the genre in VR arcades.
Tailor tools to your production needs.
I decided to go for the tools the team mastered the most, because there was no time for everyone to learn new tools and also no point in using tools with more depth when that depth was of no additional value for this particular production.
The result was better than what I had hoped because the deadlines were met and the team had even time to add new features.