Abyss: Vault
A multiplayer action-adventure VR LBE game, Abyss: Vault is an exercise in innovation and cutting-edge design. A game where you must collaborate with your fellow rebels to escape an underwater base and defeat a larger-than-life boss, it contains many ways for players to physically interact with the world around them, by completing puzzles, defeating robotic enemies, or simply traversing dangerous terrain in VR.
Achievements
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Bodies in Movement
VR Games require heavy design work around player’s ergonomics, intuitive movements and behaviours, and many physical components. Helping design the game’s interactions, enemies, and boss fight gave me a much greater understanding of design that is grounded in the real world, and that works with the player instead of against them.
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Believable, Imposing Enemies
As the principal developer and designer in charge of enemy AI, I strove to find ways where the enemies’ design helped set the tone and tell the story we wanted. Through constant iteration and attention to detail, I ensured AI behaviour had personality, identity, and was still intuitive to the player.
In this project, my main challenge was balancing the multiple competing design philosophies from all aspects of the game - VR requires a focus on ergonomics and physical movement, Multiplayer requires reliable, fault-proof core systems, and action-adventure games require all aspects of the game to combine to produce tension and climactic moments. I overcame this challenge by rapid iteration and prototyping, using role-playing, make-believe elements inside a VR scenario to create quick proof of concepts for atomic mechanics or behaviour, allowing me to “find the fun” and marry working mechanics with creative ideas.
Interested in learning more?
The overview for this project can be found here.