Samuel Garber
Game Designer
VRchery is a virtual reality archery exercise game. The player's goal is to fight off waves of robots with your trusty slingbow, defending a central point on the map that enemies are drawn to. The game encourages moving around the level to get advantageous positions, and provides a near full-body workout. The game was made in a semester in Michigan State University's Game Design and Development program. A build was playable at IndieCade 2017 and received the Best VR Game award at the 2017 MSU Game Design Showcase.
Download the game here:
VRchery is designed for Steam VR and works best with the Vive headset & controllers
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My job on this project was to create interesting enemy designs to help switch up what parts of the body the player moved in moment-to-moment play, game difficulty, game feel for the slingbow, level design, and setting up sound for the game. VRchery was the team's first client-based game and underwent massive amounts of iteration, as our client encouraged us to follow agile development techniques and have a focus on rapid prototyping.
The initial concept of the game was intended to create an exercise routine based off of the player's heart rate. Several delays in getting a commercial heart monitor, then getting it to work in Unity caused us to scrap this by release and forced us to use our fallback plan of increasing spawn rates based on a predetermined difficulty setting.
The map was another part of the game that had to heavily evolve. After putting a lot of effort into it, the team lead and I decided to scrap the original in favor of a more streamlined space that allowed easier access to the different teleportation points the player uses to move around the map, as well as heighten player awareness of their surroundings, two significant drawbacks to the original version. These changes ultimately allowed the player to focus more on engaging with the game, than trying to maneuver through it, which was a big win for us, since we wanted the player to generally be as active as possible.
Color theory played a large part in the environment and creature design, with the environment largely keeping to cooler blues and grays, then using warm colors for enemies, enemy spawns, and destructible barrels. This was especially important in a fast-paced game like VRchery to easily keep track of interactable entities.
There are three enemy types in VRchery. One, the spider-ball, slowly marches towards your power core. Once it's there, it begins to start attacking it. Two others, the dodecahedron and the flyer actively try to attack the player. Both of these enemies are intended to distract the player from attacking the spider-balls.
Each of these two enemies force the player to move their body in different ways: the flyers circle around the player, and force them to turn either with their hips or moving with their legs. The dodecahedrons perform a sweeping beam attack, intending for the player to duck under or to quickly snipe the enemy out of the air.
The spawn rate of each of these enemies is on a set pattern. Harder difficulties also spawn additional spider-balls, forcing more actions per minute to keep ahead of the waves, and therefore the more you exercise.
In addition, there are explosive barrels which provide a single-use means of destroying waves of enemies if timed well, which is especially useful to help players catch up if they are behind.
VRchery was one of the most challenging projects I have undertaken, and it taught me a lot about what skills I needed to work on to improve as a designer. It was also one of the most fun projects I've worked on. I had to wear quite a few hats, and while it pushed me to my limits, I greatly enjoyed my time working on the project.