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Master's project

For my master’s dissertation, a VR game was made, this game was used to test the player’s sense of spatial awareness when the player is halfway through the game and once, they have finished the game it would put the player through an orientation test. However, due to low participant turn out no definitive conclusions could be drawn from the data.

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The game was in an apartment environment and had the player go around the place looking for certain objects (flowers, playing cards and food) it was a simple game that was designed to not be very taxing on the player but takes enough attention so that they would not be focused on the space outside the VR headset. two different locomotion methods were used and the players played through the game used each method, teleportation and continuous movement.

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If I was to try something like this again I've learned that a better area to look at than how locomotion methods affect spacial awareness but how locomotion methods effects play style and how play style affects spacial awareness 

2D and 3D game

This game was made as a prototype to test a game where there are 2 characters one that exists in a 2D environment and one that exists in a 3D environment. however the 2D plane intersects the 3D plane so the two characters can interact with each other, the 3D character is the one to directly interact with the 2D character such as by making objects intersect the 2D plane to create paths for that character. in this prototype, both characters are controlled by a single player but this can also work as a multiplayer experience. In this only basic shapes were used,  for simplicity but expanding the maths for working out the shape made in the 2D plane by objects wouldn't be hard.    

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see the below the image slideshow for the prototyping stage and the developed stage. in the prototyping phase, the 2D and 3D characters' views share the screen with a split screen layout. during testing some players found this to be too much information so in the next phase that was changed. as seen in the final images you have separate views for each character that can be switched between but you can also open a small window that lets you see the other character's view 

C++ bowling game

A game was made in openGL, the skeleton code of a pool game was given, and from this a bowling game was made, this game had multiplayer. The multiplayer is done through a server that is a separate program the specification for this game required that each lane has 2 players, by default the game can host 5 lanes but that can be increased or decreased by changing a value in the server program. The game only renders lanes that have players on them so as more players join more lanes appear. The networking is rather basic and was done by having each client connect to the server and the information being sent from and to the server and clients was plain text. Messages sent to the server start with an identifying character such as ‘S’ which meant the information sent was score based, or ‘P’ meaning it is about the position of the ball. To make the game more visually pleasing I made it so every player is in the centre lane from their perspective this however made it so each client saw themselves as lane 0 to make this work the server when sending messages from the players in the actual lane 0 (the first 2 players) to the other lanes would change which lane it says the information is from to the lane that client would be in, for example, the clients that are in lane 3 any message the server receives from lane 0 is sent to them as if it was from lane 3, and the information sent to the server from one of the players in lane 3 is sent to the server it is sent to the other player in lane 3 as if it was from lane 0.    

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Climbing in VR

For this assignment a climbing mechanic was developed, this climbing was a lot of fun to make and to play around with, whenever someone tested this they always enjoyed the climbing, even when it was in the earliest stage and there was only a pole with nothing on top everyone still climbed all the way to the top even though there was no incentive to do that.  

Unreal engine

During this project, I made a scene in Unreal Engine 4 and then had to come up with some benchmarks to reach based on different platforms, and then had to make the scene meet those standards. this involved changing effects such as the heat haze, or change the lighting.

Space game in urho3D

A game with LAN multiplayer made using urho3D with the players having different special actions.

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