Zield

What is Zield?


Zield is an interactive multiplayer game with VR against eye tracking. As a VR player you are dropped in a deserted island with ancient ruins where you have to defend yourself from enemies who shoot projectiles at you. You can protect yourself by the shield that is given to you. There will also be a hammer which will kills your attackers. As an eye tracking player, you can throw projectiles by gazing at VR player.

Another gameplay video

About


Zield is a project created for the Advanced Graphics and Interaction course at KTH.

Goals and motivation

We have been through several stages during the design of our game. At first we wanted to make it as graphically advanced as possible using a very low level framework. This turned out to be too much of a challenge, so we changed our goal. We switched to the Unreal Engine 4, because we thought it would fit our new view of the game best. Our new goal became to create a well-balanced experience in Virtual Reality. Neither of us had tried Virtual Reality before, which made us very excited to create a game in that spectrum. Besides that we really wanted to get to know the finer details of creating a game in vr. We all read a lot about the fact that vr can be nausiating and that it is hard to create an awesome experience within a limited amount of time and with limited resources. That made us put the bar rather high for ourselves, but didn't ruin the fun.

Challenges and obstacles

As mentioned before, we had a rough start of the project. One of our team members, who really wanted to go for graphics, left our project early on. This was the main cause of our change in focus. The period that came after that also had its obstacles. We were all very inexperienced with creating games in general and especially in VR (virtual reality). This made it hard for us to make the interaction work as we wanted it to work.

Our creative process also had some struggles as we didn't really design a game from the start. We created our game with the graphics in mind, so it turned our game turned out to be more like an interactive graphics benchmark instead of an actual game. We had to change this drastically in order to make a game with the much easier and more friendly to use Unreal Engine 4. Since we were rather late with having our main game mechanics written down it was hard to implement them in a well-balanced way.

Lessons learned

We have learned a great deal about development for VR. We mainly learned that it is not easy to create a game that is interesting and challenging at the same time. We also learned a lot about the process of creating a game the hard way. Our vision for the game was not clear enough in the later stages which caused some trouble in the actual implementation of the game. Our assessment of the time we had and what we could do in that time was also a bit off, so we learned how to set clear and feasible goals for ourselves.

Techniques

In the beginning we used the G3D Framework, but after a lot of complications we switched to the Unreal Engine 4. Our game is made for the HTC Vive, we rely on the controllers and headset to make it all work. We used Blender for our 3D modeling and Photoshop for textures. Our GitHub repo can be found HERE.

Contributions


Halit Anil Dönmez

  • Hammer grab and throw events
  • Player movement with VR controllers
  • Game Logic
  • Enemy AI
  • Shield and Hammer collisions
  • Projectile movement and homing and collision

Floris List

  • Projectile graphics and logic (explosions)
  • Shield collisions
  • Projectile and hammer physics
  • Controller integration (early stages)
  • Webpage, video material

Mark Kerner

  • Hammer grabbing
  • Projectile graphics
  • AI design, intervals and randomness

Yuchen Qiu

  • Building 3D models
  • Creating Animation of Enemies (walking, flying backward, hit, emitting fireball)
  • Level Design
  • Posters
  • Interaction between hammer and enemies ( Feedback of Hurt, Killed)
  • Interaction between player and enemies (Heart of the player, how player could be killed)

Xu Han

  • Eyetrack development and interaction design
  • Eyetrack character model
  • Collision and damage for projectile of eyetracking player
  • Multiplayer network
  • Level design
  • User interface design

Who are the devs of Zield?


Photos