TERRIBLE TERRY | Kaleb Brooks

A VR Arcade-Action driving game about death, destruction, and tobacco.

Drive through and destroy a cozy, quaint, western county after the townspeople steal your cigarettes in this action-packed VR game!

Game Website

Team: 5 // Role: Programmer, Technical Designer, Git Manager // Timeline: 8 months //

Tools: VSCode, Unity, C#, Figma, Miro, Google Suite, Adobe Suite, OpenVR

DESIGN PILLARS

Arcade Chaos

The game needed to be chaotic with lots of events happening at once. It was extremely important to manage cognitive overload.

Reactionary Gameplay

The player should mainly be in a reactionary role, using little effort to find and locate targets, with the majority of your brainpower being spent on reacting to obstacles

VR Interaction

We had to fully utilize our VR systems to interact with things within the car. This will set our game apart from similar titles.

GAMEPLAY:

X.R. INTERACTION

Research and Development

A cumulative 40+ hours were spent researching and developing prototypes using Unity's XRI Toolkit. Through this research, I learned how to set up an XR Origin, DirectInteractables, XR Hand Tracking and my own custom classes that utilize this package

Punch Interactibles/Interactors

In order to maximize the usage of our VR motion controls, we opted to allow things in the car to be quickly "whacked" with your hands/motion controllers. This allowed for quick, reactive interactions that don't distract the player too much from the road.

You can whack the hood, door, and radio when they malfunction to repair them.
You can whack the cigarette box to fling a cigarette to your mouth and heal HP.
You can whack "baby bombs" that fall in your car to prevent them from exploding.

Setup and Calibration

A major pain point early on in the process was that since we had a Physical steering wheel, turning your hands in the game would result in your hands appearing detached from the virtual steering wheel. This causes a sense of cognitive dissonance.

To ratify this I implemented a state-based system that helps align and calibrate the player so the physical wheel lines up perfectly with the virtual one.

CAR MOVEMENT / CONTROLLER

Non-Kinematic Bicycle Model

Based on research used for self-driving cars, I adapted the so called Kinematic bicycle model to be used in Unity. After significant modification, we decided to use Rigidbody physics for more chaotic and varied gameplay.

The model accounts for the cars wheelbase (distance between front and back wheels) for accurate rear-wheel turning. It also supports smoothing throttle inputs from Logitech setups and all other input methods.

Stabilization

A pain point early on in development was that when using rigidbody physics with the car, it would often roll out of control, causing motion-sickness and adding unnecessary downtime in situations where the player shouldn't be punished.

To address this I added in numerous stabilization features, adding maximum velocity throttling, self up-righting features, and more in order to provide a smooth player experience.

Turn-Assist

Similar to the reason I implemented stabilization, the player was also unnessarily punished for crashing into static objects. Especially when there is an obstruction in the car.

To resolve this issue, I added a Turn-Assist system that turns the car based on a projected angle on collision. The system kicks in at about 15m from a wall and in practice, if you never hold the steering wheel, you will always remain on the set path.

Boosting

Another major feature of our car is boosting. Players get boosts when ramming through buildings, and when Terry's Rage Mode is triggered. There are two speeds of boosts to help us better guide players. Micro-boosts allow us as designers to provide incentive for destroying buildings, and Turbo-boosts allow us to manually control the direction a player moves (for example when hitting a jump).

IN-CAR EVENT MANAGER

Statistic Tracking

The in-car event manager tracks all car-related stat values including Health, Rage, Cigarette amounts, and score. It acts as a game manager for just car related events.

Damage Events

In order to provide players with an interactive VR experience, we thought it best to implement events within the car. (See Punchables in the XR section).

The event-manager controls which in-car hazards occur when you take damage (Radio on the fritz, car hood pops up, door opens), making sure the events are shuffled so that the player never recieves the same event until the event queue is reshuffled.

Onboarding (Karlboro) Barks

We found that since this is an arcade game, most of our players don't retain required information, even after playing our tutorial. To fix this, I implemented a system that dynamically animates our mascot, Karlboro (Karl for short), around the car to draw player attention when required.

The dynamic animations use the Unity animator component to animate the mouth and movement animations on blend layers, and utilizes the audio event length for precise timing.

GAME MANAGER

Navigation Management

The Navigation Manager collected objects with the LandmarkZone script, and handled them for a number of means. For one, it tracked when a landmark was cleared, and handled removing it. It also determines what the nearest landmark is, and switches on light-up signs to guide the player, as well as switching images on billboards to your next target.

Fallback Object Storage

Many scripts on individual objects rely on defaults or fallbacks set in the GameManager script. This allows scripts that need specific references but sometimes can't access them bypass their process.

For example, most buildings have the same fire particle system, but a few of them have unique ones. The default fire particle system is set in the Game Manager.

SOUND INTEGRATION

FMOD

FMOD was used in our project for all sound effects and music. It was intuitive to use, and easy to integrate into our project.

To me, FMOD was a powerful tool as you could control it's parameters and automation via code.

VISUAL INTEGRATION

Particle Effects

For our game I created a multitude of particle systems to be used to notify the player of various things. From simple hood smoke when the car is damaged, to speed-lines as you hit a boost. I integrated nearly all the Particle VFX present in our game.

Navigation Signifiers

I Implemented a system in the game manager to add smoke and floating/spinning cigarette boxes to make it as obvious as possible that these are the main objective. It also puts outlines/surface shaders on various structures. Main objectives are outlined in red, and side-challenges are orange.

I also implemented a system that turns off certain flashing arrow signs to always point you in the direction of your current objective. This method allows us to path the player exactly where we want them since the idea is to always put the player in a reactionary role.

Model Integration

I implemented the vast majority of models into the project, making sure the correct materials were applied, colliders/rigid bodies were correct, and ensuring any necessary scripts were added.

Some personal favorites:

The Car - Complex Animation system with lots of animations playing layered at once. The car also had a steering wheel that had to be animated dynamically via code.
Karlboro - Numerous animation events had to fire off in a queue, and he required lots of scripting to make dynamic animations.

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GAMEPLAY:

X.R. INTERACTION

Research and Development

Punch Interactibles/Interactors

XR Rig/Hand Tracking

Virtual Steering Wheel