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Contributions

Title

Team Programmer (1 of 4, total interdisciplinary team of 18)

Roles

  • Prototyped mouse-guiding and VR grab/drop with Vive's controllers

  • Implemented and extended Unreal 4.13 templates for VR locomotion

  • Synced animations to the game grid, in place of engine physics

  • Maintained JIRA tasks daily, planned with the team prior to each sprint

Time

  • Pre-production: 90 hours over 6 weeks

  • Production: 336 hours over 18 weeks

“When I saw that Ben was going to be on our team, I knew from working with him on For the Family that animations would get in -- and be good.” – Clay Howell, Lead Game Designer

Mouse Playhouse is a light-hearted Vive virtual reality game, in which you manipulate objects to solve puzzles and guide your pet mice to the cheese! Mess around with objects, play basketball and darts, and so much more! Enter the Mouse Playhouse and lose yourself in an immersive adventure.

Postmortem

What went well?

  • Forging new territory on the VR platform as the first ever SMU Guildhall capstone in VR.

  • Coding in a department with not only a lead, but also other programmers at my level.

  • Fulfilled personal career goals of teaming up with art/design (e.g. implementing animation).

What went wrong?

  • Wrestling with a few engine tools/implementations, in particular localization and rotations.

  • Not learning how to data-drive more systems for non-coders (e.g. to add audio/translations).

  • Coupling transforms into animations when code can handle them more flexibly (e.g. turns).

  • Marrying the animations to the grid did not have enough time to evolve to where artists could parametrize the framework’s animation curves for ramp blocks on their own.

  • Underestimating grid-based gameplay’s physics/animations needs, which effectively required inventing custom definitions for both, all in terms of the game’s grid
     

What have I learned?

  • Throwing/toying with things in VR is a lot of fun, but getting the physicality right is tough.

  • Current VR games must integrate onboarding of players to the game’s set of VR controls.

  • Balancing a positive work environment and goofing off or having fun together as an investment into the team, while still being on point about staying professional and not letting the jokes communicate a lack of acknowledgement. That it is wise to filter sarcastic replies made for laughs until the team understands you are still acknowledging them.

  • That a key benefit of the puzzle genre is its modular scope, affording easy addition/cutting of levels based around its clearly defined ruleset.

  • Providing a keyboard-driven actor proves invaluable, accommodating development without HMDs on a team size outnumbering the VR stations available.

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