Pharaoh's Labyrinth
(Current project)
Project Introduction
Pharaoh's Labyrinth is a VR dungeon crawler game, set in an ancient Egyptian pyramid filled with mystical secrets. The player must venture deep into the maze of corridors to reach the lowest depths of the pyramid to stop the ancient magic it contains from being used for evil.
Background
This project was created for the third year mobile games development module that focused on the concepts of optimizing code and graphics for mobile platforms like android and ios. This interpretation of what makes a device a mobile gaming platform was an open one, and as a result of this, if you could argue that your chosen platform was a mobile gaming platform you were allowed to develop your project for it.
For this module, I chose the Meta Quest platform as the device could be considered a mobile platform and would both allow me and require me to employ the optimization knowledge taught by the module. It was definitely interesting making a mobile VR game and transferring the knowledge over from mobile phone development to aid in the optimization of this game
Inspiration
For this game, I wanted to bring back the feeling of older video games dungeon crawling experience, that you would find in games like The Legend of Zelda in a VR experience and I also wanted to focus on trying to take this project to the state where it can be published to the Meta App Lab and become publicly available.
Development Process
The start of development revolved around creating the prototype for the player, some locomotion, platforming and combat aspects of the game. Overall developing this extremely simplistic prototype gave me indicators of things that worked well for the game and things that wouldn't be possible to achieve in the timescale of the assessment and make them feel right. This prototype had very rough mechanics and only a basic set of visual assets to get a feel for the aesthetic of the game. Here is a short video of the game's prototype.
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Overall there were a few things that stood out from the prototype that would be addressed in moving forward with the later iterations of the game:
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The menu system was boring and didn't take advantage of the interaction VR provides
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The platforming aspects of the game were uninteresting as the only mechanic that stood out was the grappling hook (granted that was awesome to be able to swing around in VR)
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The level design would be a problem for the time constraints. I wanted to have the ability to make some fairly large levels. It was meant to be a Labyrinth after all
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The sword mechanic would have felt too clunky given the time I had to develop it alongside all other components
From his information, I could start building towards a far more polished version of the game. The first of which was to develop an editor side procedural generation system that would let me create potentially massive maps at the click of a button, as well as have the ability to customize the parameters that affect the generation of the environments.
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From this, I started to experiment with different ways of making traversing the levels more interesting and risky. For the timeframe, I chose to add moving platforms and deadly pitfalls to the game and that opened up a lot of options for the customization of the map and the platforming aspects.
End of semester 1 project state
By the end of the module, the game reached a state close to ready for being published to the Meta App Lab; however the game has been brought over to semester 2 as it can be used in another module and can therefore be extended further to incorporate better sound design and more levels.
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The changes between the initial prototype and the version of the game submitted at the end of the module consist of drastic improvement, to say the least. It is my hope that I can continue to develop the project further and find even more creative ways of incorporating the best features that VR has to offer and create a game that could potentially become a basis of knowledge to take forward into future VR projects. That being said, here is a video illustrating the gameplay of Pharaoh's Labyrinth at the time of submission for the first-semester module:
What is currently Happening?
The project is being used in the Game Audio module as a base project to sonify, working in teams with audio production students and will have more features added alongside that in personal time. Currently, these are the next objectives for the development of the project:
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Add more levels
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Add another tool/weapon
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Visually polish the game and improve stylization
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Work on a boss battle level as well as improvements to the current AI complexity
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Optimize procedural level generation and the meshes used in the room pieces
Links to game
The game is currently not available publicly but will be released on the Meta App Lab in the near future