VR Game Development Blog

Pariag Travers

This is a blog showing how I worked within a team to create a VR game, this blog details all the challenges we had to work through during development.

Week 1

As the first week marched on and everyone on the team were given their roles, I became the concept artist of the team. My goal was to provide high quality concept art to better visualise the product for the team, this consisted mainly of developing concept art for whoever was in control of asset creation so they could work from clear reference while also allowing the entire team to choose designs for each of the assets together.

The first assets that were needed were keys, keys were going to be a key part of the game (no pun intended) so I worked on drawing some keys! The way the game was described to me, gave me a Tim Burton feeling so I used his style as reference. Due to my background in fine art, I decided to draw these by hand before digitising them to be sent to the team. This allowed me to alter the artwork in photoshop to fix any mistakes that I may have made when drawing.

This first set of artworks was very well received by the team and we agreed that the style on show would fit the game very nicely, the asset developer set out to create some keys based on the concepts! As a group we decided what assets were needed first and foremost so that I could prioritise which ones to do first.

Week 2

The second week was more focused as the team had set up a Miro board so that we could all collaborate and work in unison to see each other’s progress while we worked. I then worked on concept art for a lantern, which would have to be more detailed than other pieces due to it being seen more in the game. This proved more of a challenge than I expected as I had never drawn anything like this, nor have I even seen anything like this! I again leaned into the style that i went for with the keys.

Someone suggested the possibility of an oil lamp, I quickly jumped on this idea as I thought it was a great, I then sketched up some ideas for oil lamps, I really liked the variety of ideas I was able to portray to the team using this piece of concept art. I used photoshop to add a splash of colour to this piece to better sell the idea to the team.

Week 3

As I progressed with my concepts so did production of the game! Faolan came up with an idea for a hiding place underneath a staircase, I thought this was a great idea, but I struggled to find any reference for something like this on the internet, so I had to come up with it completely by myself, and luckily it seemed to be exactly what Faolan was looking for!

I created some concept artwork for a series of books that would be integral to the story of the game, I was able to find a lot of reference images for horror themed books, so this made the development of these books much easier than other things. After these were complete and the team was happy with them, I added them to the Miro board so that the asset developer could get them created!

Week 4

At this point I was given a bit of free reign to make some artwork for creepy items that would be scattered throughout the game, so I went all out and thought of some things that would fit with the horror/mystery theme of our game. For some reason I had felt that the idea of loose teeth was very unsettling, so I created three items that were made from teeth.

At this point some civil unrest had reared its head within the group and we reshuffled the responsibilities of our members, I was now the asset developer for the project, I then started work immediately on assets that were needed since I felt like I was a bit behind since I had only been given the job now!

I had to create assets using the concept art provided (by myself ironically) I was not very familiar with texturing assets created within Maya for use the unreal engine, so I had to learn as I went, luckily, I felt that this had a very intuitive learning curve.

I started with the keys as these were smaller object and any imperfections caused by my lack of experience wouldn’t not be as noticeable, thankfully these came out very nice and the team were happy with them as well,

Week 5

After I had made a pair of keys, I needed a door! This door would be replicated throughout the level so I needed to ensure there were no defining features so that the door could be placed numerous times and not look repetitive. I had no concept art for the door, so I had to use reference that I collected from the internet.

I modelled the door to look like it was made from planks of wood, I feel I pulled this off very nicely, substance painted I found to be an incredibly easy to use software and it also allowed me to create some amazingly realistic textures with things such as dirt and rust to better sell the effect of age.

Week 6

The team let me know that they needed statues for the level, this brought with it a certain level of anxiety as I knew my modelling skills were no where close to the level needed to model realistic statues! Luckily, I stumbled upon a website that 3D scans old statues for public use to preserve them.

I found two statues that I felt fit the theme of the game very nicely and them within substance painter to ensure they looked realistic (It seems that a simple concrete texture mixed with some dirt goes a long way!). On the statue of the angel I added blood to the base of the texture, I am not happy with how it turned out, but I am not sure if I have time to rectify the issue!

Along the way during the development of the story, it would be revealed that there were two dead bodies revealed to the player, it was decided that the corpses were not to be shown directly so I had to come up with a clever way to disguise them. This was my time to shine as I was incredibly eager to work with cloth simulations within Maya, I found a 3D model of a female body on the internet, I took it into Maya and duplicated it, I then adjusted some of the anatomy of one of the bodies to make it more masculine. Once the bodies were placed, I added a sub divided plane and used it as a cloth simulation to be draped over the bodies.

This proved oddly buggy, the cloth would randomly fall off the bodies, or even fly off completely! Once I felt that the cloth landed where I wanted it, I baked its position so that it would stay the way it was, I removed the bodies from beneath it to lower poly count, textured it and voila!

Week 7

With a new bout of confidence after the team loved my modelled corpses, I took to creating a lantern, I was able to use my concept art from earlier for this to better guide my creation, everything was working out okay until I got to the texturing phases of my workflow, I feel like the texture on the model really doesn’t suit the overall style of the game and it will probably be changed before being added to the final game.

The team notified me that they needed a chandelier, I felt this was a more unique object that required the creation of unique shapes, this excited me, and I believe it ended up looking very nice, I felt it was very easy to texture this to look lifelike due to how easy it is to texture highly reflective materials such as metal!

I was required to create a torch akin to something found in an Indiana Jones movie! I decided that the best way to do this would be to add an emitter to a mesh of a torch within a UE blueprints, I found a free fire FX pack on the Epic marketplace that was perfect for what I needed, this also helped me stay within the budget of the project. I sculpted the torch in Maya before texturing it in substance painter and adding it to the GitHub project file, I then created the blueprint and added it to the scene, I believe it turned out very well, I would have liked for the shaft of the torch to be more realistic but with the constraints at hand I was unable to achieve my full potential with it.

Week 8

I worked on adding my assets to the game, I took some time and figured out how to contribute to a GitHub project as I had never worked with GitHub before. With some minor hiccups I got it working and went about adding my assets to the game and then texturing them. I found GitHub to be an incredible tool that allowed the team to work together very productively, and I will try to work with it more in future projects.

Around this time, I had just seen the new ghostbusters so I felt that I would add a little Easter egg to the game, the team said that we needed some paintings, so I felt that this was fitting! This served dual purposes because paintings were needed for the game. I textured the frame but left the main area blank so that any image could be placed here. This made this model very versatile.

I started work on a chair, through this I learned some very valuable lessons when it comes to importing assets and textures to unreal engine! After I had modelled and textured the chair, I imported it into unreal engine but because I had not merged the entire mesh in Maya before texturing I had to apply the texture material in unreal engine to each individual mesh within the chair, this was definitely an unnecessary waste of time and in future I will definitely not make that mistake again!

Nevertheless, I believe the chair turned out very good and I believe that it is the best model that I have created for this project. I am especially proud of how realistic the chair looks; I believe that the leather and the small brass buttons help sell that affect.

It was made aware to me that the level would be littered with books! I decided that I could make one mesh for a book and then just slightly alter the texture to give us a variety of books, luckily one of the team members had a bookshelf model from a previous project they had completed. I took this model and retextured it to fit with the style of our game and it worked very well!

As the cherry on top I created an 192x192px icon using photoshop, I felt this was a small addition that added to the high level of polish that we were trying to achieve with our game.

I feel that the development of this project has helped me immensely on my journey of being educated on all aspects of game development, such as creating models within Maya to be textured in substance painter and brought into the Unreal Engine. I have learned how to work productively within a team, I feel this has taught me a few invaluable lessons and I am grateful for the experience.