See The Light
A VR puzzle game.
THE PROJECT
You are dead, chocked by a pretzel and now you are in the afterlife trying to get back (and restore your honor at the same time).
See The Light started from the idea to create a gameplay based around vision (the player's gaze).
By default, the character can only look around him. He can't move.
By gazing at a light orb, you lock that orb and can use a power depending on its color, as long as it doesn't get out the screen.
HIGH LEVEL TIMELINE
- Year 1 : Game Design, Writing, Development, Proof of Concept.
- Year 2 : Production of 3 more levels, voice recording, art production.
THE TEAM
- Product Owner.
- Scrum Master.
- Graphic Designer.
- Game Designer.
- Writer.
KEY GOAL
End of studies project : Achieve a short game in 1 year and 6 months with classmates.
MY ROLE
I had many roles on this project as I was at the initiative of it. Later on, when the teams were organized, I was the Product Owner, Game Designer and Programmer throughout the development.
- Created a game concept for a first-person puzzle platformer in virtual reality, but also playable without VR.
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- Did a market research and a benchmark around the game's key features.
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- Managed a team that went up to 7 people.
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- Prototyped under Unity, Playmaker, Oculus Rift DK2 then Gear VR.
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- Created the basic Level Design elements to use by my fellow level designer teammate with ease-of-use and automating processes in mind.
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- Established an Art Direction, created graphical assets and particle systems.
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- Supervised voice recording in a studio.
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- Composed the original soundtrack.
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- Published in social media around the project.
BREAKING DOWN THE PROCESS
This school project had to follow every step of a commercial game pre-production, production and the defence of end of studies projects served as a launch simulacrum.
First, the team created the identity of the project, benchmarked the market, established the gameplay and the unique selling feature.
A gameplay prototype was developed and the best production methods were identified.
Each level was designed on paper before being whiteboxed within Unity Engine. On top of it, we defined the background and wrote the main character's lines.
We produced an Alpha version of the game and could start producing the marketing content and the voice recording.
We reached the beta in time for the Laval Virtual VR festival and we playtested it there as we were invited in the student projects isle.
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The creation and production process here were pretty classical Agile, but one major complication was that the team was composed only of classmates. Which means similar skills (not always complementary).
It's all about the lights.
The player doesn't have any way of moving initially, but he has to cross each level using the main mechanic :
When the player gazes at the light, he gets attracted to it.
If the light gets out of sight, the player becomes motionless again.
THESE WERE SOME MAJOR LEARNINGS
Communication is not to be taken lightly.
It was my first time working with a team of up to 7 people. Making sure everyone has the same level of information and keeping everyone up to date was a challenge. Decision-making was also tough because we were all supposed to be at the same hierarchy level (classmates).
The asset production pipeline has to be reliable.
The proof of concept is also meant to test the reliability of the asset production pipeline.
The team designed many different features for the game and so much time was spent on trying to integrate them instead of level production. At the end, all the ideas were implemented but it was at the cost of content.
A game not thought for VR from the start will have a hard time adapting.
The project actually started as a "flat" game, then we thought that our game mechanics were perfectly suited for VR.
In the process of converting it to VR, we had to get rid of a big chunk of the original concept, because it didn't work anymore in VR.