https://youtube.com/watch?v=5uwWyHPRVTA
Traverse the maze of the miniaturized underground world and light the fire to appease your gods in this third person experience.
It is currently and will most likely remain a VR exclusive project!
Download of the traversal demo is available at the Oculus Share App Page
Oculus forums thread is here.
Notes:
Controller required, currently compiled for Windows x64.
Controls:
Left stick to move the character,
Right Stick to move the torch,
A (bottom face button) to jump,
Y (top face button) to leave a Mark,
B (right face button) to warp to said Mark,
X (left face button) to enter game in the Menu level,
Home on keyboard to restart level,
End on keyboard to go to Menu level.
Play through from Game_Hard4-0:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=IUc8aH1T5K0
I know I have used A LOT of stock assets provided by Epic, but at this time this was just a small demo put together for an equally small gaming event / game show here in Estonia.
Random rambling on the future of the project(sorry for copy paste):
About combat. I have a few maybe not so common ideas (might be horrible though) I want to try out to make combat feel more physical (and physicalised) and work with VR in a good way. Just mashing a button to swing a sword for example feels a bit underwhelming, force feedback might help her a bit (also not this is one small detail that could help the feel a lot I think and I am sad to have omitted it from the demo), but I also want to keep the controls as intuitive as possible (so fighting game like combos don’t seem likely here).
About RPG elements. Text does not work well in VR, breaking the immersion, as seen from the reaction to the tutorials in the demo. So having gear/loot that has different numerical stats (attack multiplier for example) is really hard to convey well. Ploughing through menus is not the way to go in my opinion. Also if the physicalised part of the combat works out, the damage given with each strike will heavily depend of the physical properties of it (speed, angle, armour etc), so there’s that. This makes me want to take a more rock, paper, scissors approach to combat, rather than changing per instance multipliers, but this makes the systems more complex. Loot and gear seem really appealing as being in the same space with a character in VR feels a lot different to me than regular games or movies and I feel you can get more attached to the characters or simply appreciate them more similar tu miniatures in real life, but alive kinda.
About having enemies and animated characters in general. They are very likely the most expensive part of developing a game, especially if going for “higher fidelity”. (A small side note it really pains me not having IK on the characters feet in the demo, but also there are other small annoyances so lets leave it at that). So depending on how things go I might simply not be able to afford having big variations to them, although I’d want to. So in this case I’d have to concentrate more towards exploration and puzzles.
Also to note the idea of rogue likes and, oh dear, permadeath actually really appeals to me. So difficulty is most likely going to be a thing. I want it to keep as fair as possible though.
A couple of people discovered that you can actually light torches in the environment. Which makes me happy. Making the environment as responsive to player interaction as possible is very high up on my list of things I want to do.
Looking at this list of things is extremely scary and way too blue eyed for my experience and means I have a lot of things to try out or simply just omit in in a very short amount of time. And find people to help me out.
( *Note I had a thread in released projects for this, but as WIP seems the more appropriate section I deleted it, as it seemed faster and less intrusive than asking a mod to do it.)
I really like these type of games !
