Semester 1 Recap

Here is a recap of my flow over the first semester of my MA as I have been designing and developing none stop since the beginning, created 3 working Virtual reality design concepts and 2 replication projects that, technically are far more advanced than many of peers yet I was only given a 52/100 overall.

Start of my MA: Created a fully working singleplayer Virtual reality racing game in 1 week, created the vehicle mechanics, load and save lap and race times, gained 10+ playtests from other students and feedback for my next project. This was a "quick and dirty brief" to show something "cool" to my lecturers. I was using this project to get back into UE4 after the summer and I am proud I managed to get it working in such a short period.

During my playtests many of the users had been ignoring the races to explore around the map in the car, going up and down the hills and asking for ramps to play on. This gave me my next project idea "Mars Rover"

I then spent 3 weeks designing another Virtual Reality game which looked at exploring the solidarity of being inside VR and if that was directly affecting games which people choose to buy and play.

For this game, I created a mars-like level, very barren and blank, I changed the racing car to a Nasa Mars Rover and implemented a game concept where the player had to rebuild his Spaceship from parts found around the map, I made an "anti-gravity Gun" similar mechanics to the one from half life but more interaction from the user, they must hold with one hand then pull the lever with the other, these parts could be attached to the Mars Rover, Driven back to the spaceship building Site, then Attached.

Once I had created the mechanics, the Mars rover was driving smooth and the game was completable, I found during playtests, many players were getting bored of finding the parts asking for more "things to do". I then did spend the next week implementing Space mining and a mechanic for growing vegetation.

I did start to feel frustrated that even though there was gameplay, it didn't feel good enough for either of my games.... I needed to go down a Multiplayer Route. through looking at whats genuinely making money in VR are multiplayer Arcades, Experiences, and Multiplayer games through Steam or Vive Store.

I used the next week to try to mash what I already had of Mars rover, my then, none-existant knowledge of multiplayer in UE4 and 2 HTC Vives. through trial and error in this project, I now know how I can get my games working but at this time, I failed to get mars rover working multiplayer, as play in editor does not allow traveling to maps and you can only play in VR in play in editor or packaged games and I had a lot of errors when I came to packaging due to upgrading the engine version during the project.

I had, however, managed to get it to work using my First-person character to join the game world from a separate PC but when my second player joined, many of the Events he did wasn't "replicated".

Replication is a way of ensuring all commands are run through the games server rather than from each player. this can stop hacking or cheating but also notifies every other player of an action

Player 2 shoots gun > Tell server > Server tells everyone.

I did not know any of this then. I spent about a month learning about how replication works, what it is for and how to implement it in my Projects.

I did this over Christmas when I had no access to a second Vive or PC to test so I Began to create my first project on replication. PVP Tower Defence for Mobile. this came out fantastically well for what I needed to learn.

Both players Can host, find or join from a Mobile in the same Wifi router. send units, build towers, upgrade towers, lose lives, restart, end and Leave games. I also made it completely optimized for inputting any new Tower Classes in just a few clicks.

It's easy to write in a couple lines what I achieved but that doesn't show the days of having nothing or many things not working how I wanted them too.

I also made a multiplayer Drone racing game for mobile devices that followed replication and using similar mechanics to the VR racing Game.

I have found through my first semester. Solitary in VR is not the way to go at all. it would be like living on Earth, Singleplayer.

All of this was so when I came to make my Semester 2 project "Multiplayer VR shooter" I can hit the floor running with Replicating events, multiplayer hosting, and network connections so my worry can be about implementing immersive gameplay for the users.