Itch.io: https://matchagatcha.itch.io/vampires-demise
Vampire’s Demise is a final project I made solo for the 7 week course ISTA424, Intro To Virtual Reality. Being a 7 week course, the timeline for this project was extremely tight, with conception to implementation being roughly around a week. Initially I had an assigned partner to work with, but due to some mishaps they were unable to work with me on it. Due to it being around finals week and some overlapping schedules, I coded this in 1 day.
Pre-Development
Coming up with the idea was relatively simple. After all, the intense time crunch at the time caused me to want to keep the scope of this project small. Thus I thought of something arcade-y, quick and easy to play, and that brought me to a shooter game. The vampire aesthetic I thought would be cool, making it a bit horror-ish in concept, and should I wish to develop it further, I could imagine various mechanics that could make this an intense and heart-pounding experience.
Development
Since this was a solo project pulled over an all-nighter, I had to move quick. The idea was simple, sit as a stationary target, and shoot enemies that move at you. The biggest systems were not too complex, and I broke them down like so.
Enemy Spawn System:
- Wanted them to spawn in a circle around them.
- Limited X+Z’s total value so it’d spawn within a predictable arc.
- So I split the circle in 4 different quadrants. X, Z values each used a random number generator to determine if they were negative/positive.
- Y value was a simple range, if they were above ground level it would spawn a flying vampire.
Enemy Behavior System:
- Enemies simply spawn and beeline towards the player
- Global difficulty variable that scales with time
- Increases number of shots to kill enemies, ground enemies always take one more hit than flying enemies
- Enemy spawn rate increases with difficulty factor
Player System:
- Gave player HP for multiple hits
- Gave player a crossbow laser for aiming
- Wanted the PC emulation to have a physical component to mimic VR, so I added an option to reload either via button or by scrolling back mouse wheel to “notch” the arrow
Aside from that, it was mostly a matter of assigning UI that floats similarly to VR games, ensuring interactions between objects worked, and so on. Key note: the controls that mimic VR control were provided beforehand, so that system was not of my own creation.
Post Development
The build I finalized for the class is admitted quite barebones. There is no audio at all, I couldn’t quite find free art assets that truly matched the vampire theme, and the game is that truly simple arcade style for better or for worse. Upon future re-visit I would definitely love to polish it up. Additionally, working with the VR simulation functions has really piqued my curiosity on VR game design. This was definitely an intro piece, and I am working on learning the medium more in the future.
For it’s simplicity, I did find the one unique thing, the mouse scrolling reload, to be quite satisfying in practice. A few people did play the build, and one guy got to around 50 with ease, and seemed to quite enjoy it, so I take pride in this project overall.
