Project Dates: October 2016 - August 2017
Utilizing: Unreal Engine 4
Team Size: 20

Summary: The Draft is a Virtual Reality action strategy game that heavily utilizes a sports and scifi theme. Originally, the concept came out of the simple question: Strategy games are great, but random rolls are frustrating and immersion breaking. Why not give the player complete control over the action? The game is divided into 3 sections: In the Strategist Phase, the player views the battlefield from on high, and commands the team via hand movements, similar to real time strategy games, towards the enemy goal. If the player's units are intercepted by the enemy team, the timer pauses, and the player moves into Combat Phase, teleporting into the perspective of the unit on the battlefield. From there, a short melee combat is fought, with the player swinging their weapons, dodging, parrying, and utilizing special abilities in an attempt to defeat the opponent. If the player defeats the opponent, the game moves into Strike Phase. The losing unit is stunned, and the winning unit is given time to swing their weapon into the opponent, knocking them flying, destroying their formations, and potentially knocking them into penalty zones, scoring points for their team and putting the losing unit on time out for a period of time. The game lasts for a set 5 minutes, and the team with the greater score at the end of the match wins. The project is complete as of August 2017.

My Role: I worked a dual role on this project, working as Project Lead during pre-production, and Design Lead during production. On a personal basis, I have:

  • Designed map objectives
  • Designed and implemented feedback systems for combat and strategy UI
  • Designed and implemented special ability systems for each unit type
  • Designed the combat and strategy AI, and worked with the programming team on implementation
  • Ran level design workshops aimed at improving optimization practices for Virtual Reality
  • Created many special effects for UI purposes
  • Worked with programming and art leads on weekly scheduling between all teams

Post-Mortem: Overall, the project has been a very interesting challenge to work on. VR presents many unique bugs and design considerations that have to be accounted for, such as: How do you make a sword collision feel real when no physical object is being hit? How do you implement animation based mechanics, such as attack speed, when the player can't have any animations? How do you maintain 90 frames per second and still simulate crowds, when flipbooks aren't supported in stereoscopic rendering? How do you make sure the player is standing in a safe location in real space? Every day on the project is met with new problems to solve and quick, adaptive learning, and ultimately, while this is the most difficult project I have worked on, it has simultaneously been the most rewarding and educational.