Project: Discarnate
Role: Lead Programmer
What is Discarnate?
Discarnate is a narrative and experimentation-based VR experience built in Unity where the player is part of a witch coven's plot to resurrect their High Priestess, who was killed by a mysterious and persistent enemy. The player must play through 4 levels to get each ingredient for the resurrection, guided by the corresponding witch.
Personal Contributions
Main Contributions:
Anything VR:
2 Movement Systems (slide locomotion, teleportation)
Custom object interaction & object behavior
Fluid Physics
VR-compatible fluid rendering & simulation using Obi Fluid
While objects and interaction took up most of my actual development, I also had additional responsibilities as the Lead Programmer:
Organize & disperse information to Systems Team
Act as support for other developers
Debugging AI, puzzle creation, etc.
Manage Git repository
Make final decisions and remove impediments before they happen
Production Overview
This project went through a lot of challenges through its 10 weeks of development. The first hurdle is one that all Production 2 teams go through: Greenlight. This is meant to be a simulation of a real pitch, wherein each team gives a demo and pitch presentation to the rest of the Game Studio and the "executives", i.e the professors. After the presentations, each team sends one representative to deliberations, where voting takes place and eventually about half of the original teams get cut and redistributed to the remaining teams. Those teams chosen to advance will continue development for the rest of the semester. Each team starts with just 5 people, and is given 2 weeks to concept and iterate through prototypes prior to the Greenlight presentations. My team (Rats w/ Hats) wanted to go ahead and take a risk with a VR project, since none of us had ever tried developing in VR. We originally targeted the Oculus specifically, as that was the only headset we had access to for these 2 weeks. We accomplished so much during these first weeks, enough so that we wowed our Greenlight crowd and were unanimously voted through. After we went through Greenlight, 5 more people were added to our team, so we needed to do a full onboarding process, as well as a massive repository restructure. We lost about a week of actual development, but we effectively integrated our newest members, got everyone used to VR development, and just generally got to know each other much better. For the next 10 weeks, we encountered a lot of challenges, ones that our professor thought would cause us to halt production and try for another idea entirely (hint: we didn't like that). The first roadblock we hit was the loss of our only VR headset. Since we were borrowing, the owner needed it for a project of his own, and that left us with a decision: retarget for Steam, or abandon the project. Of course, we chose to do an entire refactor using SteamVR since a few teammates had a VIVE system, and I was able to borrow another from a friend. We lost another week of production to this refactor, but not for our artists. This week of refactoring allowed the artists and designers to get really far ahead in development since we used a true agile system, so we had multiple weeks' worth of assets and design done by the time we really kicked into gear. Problem 2 was the COVID-19 pandemic. Our team got spread out across the East Coast, and online education made collaborative development really difficult since we hadn't done it remotely. Thankfully, my team was an absolutely incredible group of people, and all of us came through to make this project the best it could be considering the circumstances. The only negative effect the pandemic had was reducing our production time by another 2 weeks, so we had to reduce scope to just one complete, polished level (which is what you see in the video above). Again, our professor didn't expect us to continue development, so of course we took that as a challenge and absolutely delivered. Overall, I absolutely loved my team and this project as a whole. We overcame so much through the development of Discarnate, and we created such a neat VR experience in just 10 weeks of production time. I'm always going to be super proud of this project.
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