This week we formed our group and set out brainstorming ideas for the project. We quickly settled on wanting to work on a VR game, and eventually decided on something themed around Medieval fantasy, with weapons and sorcery.
Designing the Game Idea
The gameplay will mainly focus on fighting a variety of enemies using both weapons the player can pickup throughout each level, as well as casting magic. Some ideas for the magic the player could use included throwing balls of fire, freezing enemies in place or knocking them back with wind.
We also decided that the player could learn new magic abilities by solving puzzles, in between combat sections. A puzzle could require a newly learnt ability to solve it, so the player learns how to use it in the process.
We ended up with 4 main design pillars:
Diverse Combat System - give players a variety of options to experiment with
Interactive Environment - Spells and other things should be highly interactive, immersion + fun
Destructible Objects - Extension of the interactive environment, many objects should be breakable
Low-poly Artstyle - Ensure high performance and easier for our small group to develop
Roles
After these ideas had been put together, we each settled on our individual roles within the team. I decided to work on gameplay scripting / blueprints alongside Josh, as while I'm confident in my general scripting ability in Unreal, I have never worked on scripting for VR. It's an area I definitely would like to learn more about,
For the rest of the week, we mostly worked on setting up a schedule / system of organization, using platforms like Discord and Miro for communication.
This should make it far easier to schedule our work, and check the overall progress of the game over the course of the following weeks.
For example, with Miro we put together a full Kanban style backlog of assets and mechanics for the game, and can assign each to a team member.
Next week, I will begin development of some base weapon mechanics in Unreal. In anticipation of this I've started researching for any useful resources on things like Two-Handed Weapons or Bow and Arrow mechanics in VR.
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