Making a VR Game
Hallway Horror VR: Dancing in the Dark
Solo Dev - Unreal
A game about shooting fireballs at zombies in the dark. The goal is to survive as many waves of zombies as possible, utilizing your unrelenting fire as your primary light source. Using Unreal Engine 4 and Mixamo.
I was inspired to create this project with a 1 week deadline to see if I could build a simple game in that time. I had already created the environment from a past project, so the time was spent creating the gameplay such as shooting fireballs, animating the enemies, and programming the AI to attack the player. I wanted to build an experience that was 'spooky' and dimly lit, but the act of interacting with the game (shooting at zombies or the braziers) lights up the room so you can see more oncoming enemies. The threat of losing light keeps the player on their toes, and the dark creepy hallway creates suspense as enemies spawn behind pillars.
The challenge of this game was creating a realistic fireball without having the time to learn Unreal's particle effects system. My solution was creating an animated 'fire splotch' material on a sphere with transparency and rotating it fast enough so it doesn't look like a solid object.
I built the system via Blueprints, and character models were downloaded from Mixamo. Other complex 3D assets were created in Maya, such as the braziers, with the rest of the level being crafted using Unreal's BSP brush. Lighting is done using standard point lights and emissive maps for the light bulbs. Difficulty increases as you progress through the waves!