Celeste Soueid

Fly High Fishing

Summary

• Goal: Create an enjoyable VR experience within 4 weeks.
• Languages: C#
• Tech Stack: Unity Engine
• Notable Achievement: Fully realised and deployed game (Without having a headset).
• Status: Completed

Completed Features (Hollow: multi-person contribution, Filled: Solo contribution)

• Custom multi-threaded boid implementation [1]
• Atmospheric gameplay experience
• Awaitable VFX Sequences [2]
• Custom shaders for arrows, the bow, and fish [3]
• VR Controller fireable bow and catchable fish

Description

Fly-High Fishing is a VR archery game about collecting glowing fish using a magical bow and arrow. It was developed by a team of 9 people over the course of 4 weeks to satisfy an educational requirement for a VR based game. To accomodate the short development period the game is limited in scope and aims to provide a 'VR experience' rather than a complex game loop. In this regard I believe Fly-High Fishing achieved its goal and I'm proud of the final product the team put together.

Challenges

The most significant challenge in developing this project was the lack of access to hardware. Only two of the nine team members had VR headsets, and only one of those was a programmer. This made it incredibly difficult to test both code and gameplay, and caused all testing to take over twice as many man-hours as it required both the programmer and a tester to actively work together including verbal debugging instruction. Unfortunately, technical issues meant that the Unity tools for simulating VR controls did not function correctly for this case. Additionally, the project's extremely short time period coupled with three of the team members only being available for the latter two weeks put a significant amount of pressure on the team.

Future considerations

As much as I love the concept of this game and what I percieve of its experience, it's absolutely impractical for me to continue any development on it due to lacking VR. Though I would never willingly submit myself to working without necessary hardware again, it was a stark reminder of just how important iterative workflows are. It also occasionally served as a minor ego boost when code I wrote and couldn't test actually worked first try!

Media