Cyber Attack

What is it?

Having a futuristic-space theme, the ship AI has gone crazy and ejected the astronauts out of the ship D: The players first start on a turn based board game, where they control the remaining good robots and have to cooperate to collect enough data so they can recover control of the ship. It's a fast paced, strategy game where most of the actions to perform are randomized, from the movement, attack, energy points, to a special option that can spawn more enemies, give more time for turns, or maybe teleport the player to the other section of the game, the MAZE.

How did we do it?

The team started with 4 people (me included), who did the all the development, later, some people from the same school joined and helped with design, story, and SFX.
It's an Unreal Engine 5 (Blueprint only) VR network game for up to four players.

What did I do?

When a player gets teleported to the MAZE, it changes the whole game mechanic, from a board game, to a first person shooter. In there, you will find two different challenges, fast, self-destructing, chasing robots, and terminals that cotain two different puzzles. The objective is to find two specific terminals that will allow the player to go back to the board game, however while the player is trapped, shooting at robots while figuring where Terminals are on the labyrinth is the most fun part for me. So, this is that I did:

Robots

  • The behaviour for the enemy robots:
    • Randomly patrol on the MAZE, until a player enters their field of view, or shoots at them.
    • Chase the player around the map using AI movement.
    • When a player is close to them, the self-destruct counter will start, making them jump, play an alerting sound and a glowing effect is triggered. It's pretty scary if you don't notice them...
    • They need to be shot 3 times in order to destroy them and not damage the player... Did I mention that, if the player gets damaged 5 times, it will be game over for everyone?
  • Spatialized sound implementation for all the robot actions:
    • Matching footstep sound with walking, and running through animation events.
    • About to explode, exploding and getting damaged sounds.
  • Implemented all the gun mechanics for destroying the robots:
    • I used a gun from the Lyra project template (By Epic games) and adapted it to VR. The model, Niagara VFX and SFX come were taken from that same project.
    • Used a shooting mechanism that damages the robots.

Puzzles

When a player finds and enters a Terminal, two different puzzles can be spawned:
  • A memory puzzle. The player can grab and move to check the position of different shapes. Once a shape is selected, the rest of them will change to the same shape. The goal is to find where the matching pieces are and select them one after the other. Once the user has found all the matching pairs, the puzzle will be completed.
  • An alignement puzzle. The player needs to grab the moving sphere and align the connection lasers to the contact points that are scattered around. The goal is to align all the cables at the same time. This one, although sounds pretty simple to solve, because of the niagara effects implementation and the very bright lights (because of post processing), can be pretty confusing.

Credits

Final project for the VR and AR Design and development course at Vancouver Film School. Team members: Dmitrii Orlov Hugo Carrillo Morlán Beltrán Jorge León