Aurora - Gameplay Video
Aurora
Aurora is a fantasy survival game set in VR, where you play as a Shaman who regularly visits dreamworlds to gain new powers. However, these dreamworlds won’t let this happen so easily… Waves of enemies will try to banish you from their realm. In order to defend yourself, you have access to a staff and the stars above. You have to draw certain star constellations with your hands in order to access abilities, which you can then activate by using your staff. The goal of Aurora is to survive as long as possible and get the highest score.
Aurora was made by 3 artists and 2 developers using Unreal Engine 4 and C++/Blueprints.
What did I do?
I implemented:
• In game menus such as the main menu, pause menu and the leaderboard
• Assets by combining elements from different sections of the pipeline such as models, textures, RFX, SFX…
• The abilities of the game
• The grabbing mechanic of the game, used for the staff and the throwable potion.
• Sound effects created by one of our artists
• interesting sound implementations: see below
Heartbeat Death mechanic
Interactive Music
Playing melody when Connecting stars
What were my biggest challenges?
This was only my second game I ever made with a group of people and I still had a lot to learn about communication, planning and management. I believe we achieved a pretty nice result in the end, which was all thanks to our determination and teamwork.
Before starting this project I only had some very basic knowledge of Unreal Engine 4. I didn’t know how C++ worked in Unreal, let alone VR and how to set it up properly. Thanks to this project I learned a lot of new stuff in Unreal, learned how to use C++ in Unreal and how VR functions.
The most interesting problem I solved was how to handle the grabbing of the staff with 2 hands. Since you only have 2 separate controllers, and not an actual stick in between, it always felt a little weird trying to hold the staff. We tried grabbing the staff with 1 hand but decided it would be cooler if using both. I used vector maths and rotated the upward axis of the staff, using the lower hand as the pivot, towards the upper hand. I believe my solution worked out really well and this fixed the issues we were having with the staff.
