Catacombs of Doom

CoD is the first of the  Firedrake adventures, created for the GearVR, Go , Pico Neo and Daydream VR systems.  

It is a first person fantasy RPG featuring first person melee and ranged combat, magic, puzzles, exploration, heavy story elements and level ups.

 

Firedrake Concept Art:

Below are some examples of pre-production concept art.  these were created from pen and ink sketches in photosohop.   These represent  the development of the initial idea through refinement cycles.   These were created to set the mood and tone of the game. 

Skybox Background Environments:

Rendered in Vue, a terrain and environmental CGI package, these are equallateral skyboxes used in unity to add depth and immersion to VR levels.   Each level has a new skybox and each had to be designed to simulate  specific weather and time of day requirements while maintaining performant.

 

 

Lightmapping In Unity

Here is an example of a scene in unity not light and the same scene lightmapped.   Firedrake required high performance  baked lightmapping.  it has ZERO realtime lights or pixel lights.  All effects were done via lightbaking.

 

Firedrake  3D Architecture Screenshots:

Below are a series of screenshot representing various dungeon environments.   These were assembled in Unity from a variety of custom modeled and textured 3d assets  created in Blender exported to Unity as well as  modifying a number of  per-existing assets in an object library.  

Performance requirements dictated a max of 50k verts, 50 k tris and 30 megs of textures per scene view, requiring pulling almost every performance and optimization trick in the world to keep framerates high.

 

 

Debugging and Building in Unity:

Debugging environmental levels in Unity is agnostic to VR.  many issues that crop up are completely decoupled from the VR overlay.  

Here is an example of trying to find a lightmapping issue.  (this one took a while to figure out, overlapping UV from teh source modeling program!!!!)   

 

 

GEAR VR – DAYDREAM Versions

Firedrake VR was originally created for Gearvr and ported to Google Daydrean VR.  The technical limitations of this platform were immense and it made for some serious challenges getting an open world first person shooter running on that platform.  

Below are screenshots from the GearVr version.   All assets were created in Blender or 3D studio and textured in Photoshop. 

Notice graphic fidelity, especially poly counts in the 3d levels,  is somewhat limited vers the Quest version.