Hi all,
I am building a game about working on cars. I have plans for a few different gamepplay modes but the primary goal is to build something with enough depth to teach real diagnosis and repair skills. There are a few similar games out there but in my opinion they become part clicking and rust spotting simulators- I want to avoid that. I am primarily building this game for VR but I don’t want to limit my audience so I will also be doing parallel development on a screen based version.
I believe this concept is a very good fit for VR. There is little locomotion required, the confined space allows me to throw massive amounts of resources at the visuals, and VR allows people to see spacial relationships and understand how things fit together. Additionally most of the visual information is in the player’s near field, which plays to the strengths of the headsets.
I am currently finishing up a due diligence phase that includes:
*The first licensing deal
*Establishing my art workflow and getting a good sense of how long the content will take to build
*Testing my content at scale to make sure I am building content that will run well and look good in VR.
*Testing forward rendering/lighting features to find out what I can afford to use and ensure that I will be able to hit my visual quality targets
Some images of my current testing space in unreal. The environment art is temporary, I built something quick so that I could testing lighting and reflections. The car body is also heavily work in progress:
My next phase of development will be working towards a prototype that includes a few more finished car pieces (front subframe, front upper control arm, and I need to start my re-use bolt atlas) and basic assembly/disassembly functionality. I am new to blueprint but so far it is fairly intuitive. I am planning to place a socket for every part of the car and snap parts on and off. There will need to be some logic on each part to check if all the other required parts have been removed before allowing removal. Eventually I will need to go into every piece and implement unique behaviors (things like using a pry bar, shaking on something to check for play, popping a ball joint, using a shop press…).
Really nice idea. I can see this being practical. Back in high school we had this game on the wood-shop computers that allowed you to tune cars and such (any maybe even race them). This kind of reminds me of that. It would be cool once you get to where you need to for mechanic simulation that perhaps a sequel or something lets you simulate races with them (not necessarily real time). It would be another niche market you could help fill.
Update:
I have finalized a license agreement for the Bauer Ltd Catfish: http://bauerltd.com/
I’m also making good progress on the art and basic functionality. I have a simple blueprint system for snapping and unsnapping objects. It still needs a lot of refinement it and it isn’t checking for dependencies between objects yet.
This represents about 1/3 of the mechanicals of the car. I’m building my content to be future proofed for at least one more headset iteration. On my CV1 with high super sampling, I can only resolve about 75% of the detail at the closest distance while still being in focus.
I started a development blog http://www.digitalmistakegames.com
And I have made good progress on the core functionality:
https://.com/watch?v=zYotOSdL4sw
I could see it being great for something like hololense where you could reference the guide while you are working (or learning in some sort of ultra clean tech friendly classroom).
Lots of updates. I expanded the garage, built some new VR hands, fleshed out the snapping system, and made changes to the pickup/grab system. I should also have approval and a trademark for my game’s name in the next week or two. http://www.digitalmistakegames.com/
The garage is still being kept simple since I know I will be making large layout changes for the next ~6 months:
I’m not planning to do wiring faults- At least not in the initial release. Personally, I don’t enjoy chasing down electrical issues and it would be difficult to build a system were players can diagnose and locate a short in a large bundle of wire harness.
Hi Alec, love the work you’re putting in on this. I have a million questions but, if you don’t mind me asking one, I was wondering what you’re using to simulate the oil pouring? Are you using a Flex port of UE or a pre-simulated particle flow that you imported? Or some other magic?
Thanks.
todd
Those models are in awesome quality
