Following Blade Ballet, we did a couple months of prototyping in order to determine what our next long-term project should be. We knew a few things we wanted to pursue: Unreal Engine and VR. The IOTA Project was what we decided to pursue after a prototype that involved smashing buildings in VR was well-received in studio. Personally I think the project never really clicked because we hadn’t really figured out what was truly fun about it, just that we liked the novelty of knocking over buildings in VR. Additionally the technical challenges of having a fully destructible city in VR proved to be a bit much for our still fairly green team.
My Role
I was Lead Programmer for The IOTA Project, working with the same team of 4 programmers that had developed Blade Ballet. As the lead I had a much smaller development role because I had to spend much of my time planning features and meeting with the other team leads. The two features I worked on were the AI for the enemy giant mech, as well as the tech for having destructible buildings but not having the rendering cost of a city full of destructibles.
Technology
Unreal Engine
Audiokinetic Wwise
HTC Vive
Oculus Rift
Challenges
Learning Unreal at the same time as dealing with the increased rendering costs of VR proved to be very difficult especially given how ambitious the project was. Also this was my first project as a lead, so that was a major learning experience for me. After much iteration we were able to implement the buildings such that only the nearest buildings would be fully destructible and interactive while anything not in range would be instead rendered as instanced meshes - which did allow us to have a city full of destructible buildings and a framerate that was usually ok. However we were never able to reach the goal of a constant 90 fps.