Ultimate God Angel: Gigaforce EX was a project made over the course of a week for VR Jam 2020, with friends Taylor Shechet and Jeremy Kaufmann.
I set out with the main goal of designing virtual cockpit controls with the functionality of a HOTAS but using 6dof motion controls, similar to games like Ultrawings and VTOL. Started out by implementing the Oculus Integration with VRTK v3. Turned out to be a day one success! Special thanks to Brian Hernandez for the awesome space flight framework.
Flight sticks are tricky. In a sense, the one you see in-game is fake and has no interactivity. The grabbed collider only moves on the X/Z axes while the “fake” stick simply rotates to follow it. This way I didn’t have to worry about using weird grab mechanics or dealing with glitchy physics joints attached to other physics objects.
At this point Taylor had completed our space goddess with Tilt Brush and Clayxels, soon to be named Ultimatra. Super fun getting up close and personal. I added guns, accidentally made this weird web effect, and used the Hypercolor Tilt Brush shader as the skybox.
Taylor also cranked out this sweet space worm in Tilt Brush as our first enemy. I used a series of configurable joints and random noise to animate them procedurally with physics. The spinny part responds directly to their velocity.
Jeremy brought up the cool idea of using time as a health mechanic. The game runs on a timer, and inflicting damage gives you more time.
Another skybox effect, with Taylor’s new ship design in view. I hooked up a gradient to act as a low end amplitude visualizer for the music by Jeremy.
Here we have smaller enemies from Taylor. I applied a “boids” implementation for some sweet flocking behavior, and added some satisfying trails to top them off. From here we decided it’d be cool for them to be part of the same life cycle.
After a few more bug monsters were made, I put together the full evolution. Here’s a sped up look at the whole thing: the small guys evolve into the worm, then the worm cocoons, and out bursts SPACE MOTH! With pollen attacks! Super fun programming all of this.
Making a proper VR reticle was another interesting challenge. This one exists in world space with multiple layers on the Z axis. The entire thing scales based on distance so it can accurately account for depth while appearing seamless and smooth to the player.
Jeremy wrote an epic script, mixed our own voice recordings, and implemented them dynamically within combat while I put together a free-for-fall battle scene and a nicer looking crosshair. Finally, I used a special smoothed out cam with a wider FOV for our gameplay trailer.
The game can be downloaded at:
Jason Gluck 