Ornament Express
Ornament Express is a VR puzzle game where you find yourself aboard the Ornament Express:
An art thief's secret lair filled with stolen art, trinkets, and curiosities. Explore, experiment and interact with everything you can get your hands on and discover clues and objects that bring you one step closer to retrieving that mysterious object your employer needs you to recover.
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Size: ~20 people
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Duration: 25 weeks
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Roles: Gameplay Programmer,
Lead Programming(first half), Product Owner(Second half) -
Awards:
- Nominated Dutch Game Awards 2023
- Nominated Indigo 2023
- Finalist GDWC Best VR game
- Won Best Overall Game BUAS 2023
Lead Programmer
These were some of the tasks that I had to do as a programming lead:
- Facilitate communication between disciplines
- Keep oversight over the programmers
- Setup pipelines for things like code reviews
- Communicate with stakeholders
- Issue resolving
Product Owner
The second half of the year I became the product owner, which had some new challenges and responsibilities:
- Quality control, making sure that everything that is in the final game is up to spec
- Up keeping a shared vision of the product
- Prioritizing and up keeping the backlog
- Communicating the product's state to stakeholders
Performance
When it comes to VR games, performance is key to player experience. To upkeep that, I have updated systems to be more performant then they were before. The best example would be the snap points system in our game.
The snap points in our game were based on tick. Which I ended up rewriting to be event based instead. By doing so, I saved reduced our game tick by roughly 7.5 milliseconds
old frametime
new frametime
Moving compartments
Throughout the concepting phase, I worked on a prototype for a potential core gameplay mechanic called the moving compartments.
The idea was that the player would have a main hub with small toy carts in there that they could place in slots. Each toy would represent a different room, based on the slot and the rotation the toy was placed in, the player would alter the sequence/direction they would enter the rooms. The player would then inside these rooms, solve puzzles, and collect new toy carts.
I talked with multiple designers about the requirements of the system. Things like should you be able to carry items between levels, can you poke your head out of the train cart to see the other train carts. After that, I looked into using multiple different systems to get this mechanic up and running.
While I did get it working, this prototype was sadly scrapped since we could not create the number of carts needed to make this mechanic viable.
One of the earlier prototypes where I would. Physically move the train cart around based on the player's input. This version was way too performant heavy, as all the static objects would have to be dynamic instead.
Final prototype: by creating these small in-between spaces often seen on trains, I managed to teleport the player from one cart to another seamlessly. The carts can be level streamed to optimize performance, with the only downside being that if you would look out of the train, the sequence of carts would not match up.
Puzzels and interactables
During the development I also worked on multiple puzzles which were integral to the progression of the game.
But also it included making a bunch of these small interactables like the chattering teeth, which were the juice of the game to make the player laugh.
Both required good communication with the designers/art to discuss viability.
Other contributions
- Created the starting sequence of the game
- Setup and Created multiple Steam achievements
- Strike team lead on multiple occasions