Crypts Of The Golem King

Posted on by JS

Firedrake: Crypts Of The Golem King.

Firedrake VR is a open world, first person sword and sorcery RPG, set in the vast and mysterious kingdom of Dorin for the Oculus Rift, Gear VR and Go, Pico and Quest virtual reality platforms.

Sole developer of experience.

  • Created all pre production material including, story boards, concept art and story scripts, schedules, budgets and project plans.
  • Created all game assets.
  • Created 3d models in Blender and 3D Studio
  • Created custom sound effects in Adobe Audition and Audacity.
  • Developed performant Baked lighting models and custom shaders in Unity3D
  • Became a expert in Optimization techniques for VR, including Mesh combination using tools like Bakery Meshbaker Pro. Utilized Texture atlases and crated custom atlases in Photoshop. Created levels for best practices for automatic culling.
  • Programmed all experience interactions in C#. Such as door openings, pickup, lever and control surface interaction. Utilizing MSVS for custom code and Playmaker or Bolt for interactions.
  • Programmed A.I. modules with Emerald A.I. and custom heuristic routines.
  • Developed all U.I. elements in Photoshop.
  • Created all corresponding marketing and social media material in photoshop and managed all social media and paid ad campaigns.

 

 

 

Example of A Pitch Deck:

In the entire development cycle of an VR experience, a lot of corresponding design and development material needs to be crated. These include, storyboards,design bibles, camera breakdown, scripts and wireframes, Use Case studies, test plans; as well as, marketing and business plans.

Below is an example of a pitch deck designed in Adobe Photoshop. for Oculus Store review.

 

 

 

Example of a Store Package:

In designing a VR experience, there is much more that goes into other then just the VR experience assets. Below is a typical example of the corresponding visual assets needed for inclusion into a VR store Such as the Oculus store, Applab, Sidequest or Steam.

Each asset is designed in accordance to required technical specification like size and aspect ratio and is an overall exorcise of product “branding”. Each assets must be unique in its own way, while maintaining brand identity.

This set represents the main game logo teaser and is the same design, just in different sizes and formats.  Some with transparency, some designed for mobile display, VR display and some for PC  high resolution display.

 

 

 

Example of Marketing and Launch Promos:

Below are some examples of launch marketing promos used on social media to introduce and promo the experience to potential target audiences.

These are used to post into social media feeds such as Facebook, Twitter or Reddit. These were designed in photoshop using ingame screenshots.

 

 

 

Screenshots From the Quest Version of Firedrake:COGK

Optimized to run at 90FPS on the Quest1 using UNIT3D. It was very challenging to get as much visual quality, and interaction in the VR experience while maintaining the performance budget required for publishing on a mobile stand alone deceive. Luckily I have 25+ of 3D animation and modeling experience, so I knew many optimization techniques from the days when computer CPU processing was based on single threading technology to speed up rendering. Many of these techniques transfer directly to the VR space.

 

 

 

Hand Building Levels in Unity.

Many hours are spent tweaking the levels in unity to find the right balance of perspective, size, photorealisum and lighting.

I have found, designing the levels takes a mere fraction of the time that actually play-testing and then tweaking the levels requires. Sometimes I play a level 2 to 3 hundred times to get the right balance.

I have played a lot with procedurally designed levels and find hand building levels brings a certain “Je ne sais quoi” to the experience, that computer generated levels do not have.

 

 

What Dungeon experience would be complete without some first person combat!

Core gameplay in Firedrake is based around melee and ranged combat. The player can combat a wide variety of monsters (over 30 types) and each monster type has their own specific A.I. behavior heuristics and animations that were programed via a blend of custom C# scripts and Emerald A.I. integrations.

Firedrake features over 50 different types of weapons and each one had to be modeled, scripted, play balanced and tested thoroughly.

Here are some examples of the melee combat “interface” from the players perspective.

 

 

 

Six Side Cube Maps:

Here is an example of a six sided cubemap generated out of Unity/OVR toolset. These maps are used in social media to allow a end user to preview and experience actual 3d environments and used in the store listings for the same reasons.

This one was generated Raw out of Unity and then edited in Photoshop.