Game Development

Intro

Fowl-Play is a two-player VR/PC cooperative puzzle game. It challenges the players to work together using their problem solving and communication skills to beat the game.

Fowl-Play Website

My Contributions

I am both the project manager and VR specialist of the development team. There are five group members, Kylie Duck, Max Ingleton, Ronan Boyd and Thomas Vanderwyst. We each have a wide array of skills so many jobs within the project are shared so it is somewhat difficult to separate roles. However I was responsible for the VR controls and interactions, as well as the project management tasks such as task delegation, scheduling and facilitating communication.

The main programming language used is C#.

Made using

Fowl-Play poster with authors names below the title. A long hallway with a person in a hazmat suit peeking around the corner at the end and a security camera looking down the hallway towards the viewer, where a scary goose silhouette looms.

Project Management

We made use of Trello for task assignment and tracking, and Gitlab for file organization and version control.

We made sure to have a solid base design done early on and committed to an agile development model that allowed for changes and growth throughout the design process.

A short video demonstrating how to interact with the generator puzzle.

Level & Puzzle Design

Each level has a minimum of three puzzles that get more difficult as you go. They require both players to work together in order to complete them.

Our puzzles underwent multiple stages of user testing, a physical prototype, low fidelity digital prototype, then a final test stage for both the puzzle designs and the interactions.

A short video demonstrating how the players must work together to solve the puzzles.

User Interfaces

When designing the UI we had to consider both the Desktop and VR interfaces. We created a surveillance system and messages board for the desktop player allowing them to read clues and keep an eye on the player.

There is also a settings menu that both players can access and change the gameplay settings. These are mainly settings for the VR controls that allow the player to choose how they would like to move around in the game. Giving them a choice between smooth motion or teleportation, snap or smooth turning, and vision tunneling. This is all in an effort to reduce cyber-sickness (motion sickness brought on by VR).

A short video showing the player going from the real world, into the game.

Assets

All the game assets with the exception of the set dressing props where created by our team. Even the textures were designed to be cohesive and play into the game feel.

Whether it was the generator from the first level, the bird skulls in the second, or even the goose that the player encounters. We felt that making sure we made those models was important and gave it a sense of authenticity.

A short video of the goose approaching a moving robot bird.

Enemy AI

The enemy in our game is a menacing mutated GOOSE. Every part of it has been designed to create an eerily creepy and somewhat goofy creature.

It is programmed to exhibit realistic hunting behaviors of a predator, stalking prey, hiding and ambushing them, and a scaling aggression level that makes it a more difficult adversary the longer you interact with it.

Our Process

This project is the result of a full year of hard work and was a team effort. The last year of my degree we are required to do a capstone project, a large team project that you work on over the span of a year. Our team decided early on that our main goals going into the project were to make a collaborative VR game. After many wild brainstorm sessions we came up with the idea for Fowl-Play.
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The game being collaborative was very important to us and since we didn't want to take on the technical challenge of using networking to connect two devices to the same game, we opted to explore our own theoretical implementation. We wanted to run the game on one machine (desktop computer) with the VR headset connected and trick it into showing the two different displays. That way the two players would be experiencing the same environment in real-time with two different perspectives. It worked to, after lots of research and experimentation.
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After we knew that our idea was possible all our effort went into making the puzzles, AI, and experience of our goofy game. In the early design stages we would discuss the inspirations behind our environment and what kind of atmosphere we are trying to emulate. These group discussions ensured that everyone understood what the goal was with the design, so that they could make decisions throughout their process with confidence that it will align with the overall idea.

Our team is conducted 3 waves of user testing at different stages of development to ensure that our game is immersive, intuitive, challenging and fun. Various promotional materials were also made to advertise the game to the public and our fellow students such as, posters, stickers, a trailer, and social media posts. We also created a website and a page on itch.io to release a build of our game for people to download and play on their own. We hope to eventually publish the game on steam but until then it will be available for free on itch.io.

Download the game from itch.io