Kessler Syndrome VR
Meet the Team
For Kessler Syndrome, the team behind development consisted of 13 people. Our lead producer Edward Smiley, our QA manager Mollie Ingleston, our lead sound designer and product owner William Powers, our lead artist and environment artist Isaac Herbst, our other environment artist Abby Caldwell, our prop artist Brooke Richards, our 3D animator and rigger Anna MacLean, our lead designer and level designer Dylan Milligan, our systems designer Samuel Cote, our narrative designer Tristan Row, our lead programmer and system/gameplay programmer Jason Kmieciak, our UI/graphics programmer Nico Omenetto, and myself as the VR programmer.
About the Game
Alone in orbit with the corpse of your only colleague and no way to reach Earth, play as a weary astronaut who must struggle to keep a defunct space station in orbit. While aboard the Damocles space station you must maintain the various systems aboard, deal with the ever-present threat of great storms of space junk, and navigate the dark halls in zero-gravity. Day by day more and more systems fail, and the cold of the void draws ever closer.
My Work
I was brought onto the Kessler Syndrome team half-way through its development. I was brought on because the team wanted to bring the game into the VR environment and they felt that I would be able to accomplish this. I am happy to say that I was able to do just that for them. I developed a way for the game to determine, at runtime, whether or not a HMD device is being run and so spawn an appropriate character, first-person or VR. I also needed to re-engineer several existing systems to work well in the VR environment, including interaction, locomotion, and UI. Developing an entirely new version of a game still being developed, with new systems and features, was indeed a challenge, but I was able to ensure that none of my work impacted the work of those on the main game version, as that was always the priority for the team.
Locomotion
One of the main features of the original build, was the 6-degrees of motion that the game provided, allowing the user to traverse all 3-dimension of translation. Bringing this into VR was simple enough, but the real challenge comes from mitigating issues with motion sickness. My key method to prevent motion sickness was to make the game run as smoothly as it can at a constant rate of 90 fps and keep the player moving as slow as possible without making it feel like the game was dragging on. Constant QA was vital to ensuring smooth gameplay with minimal motion sickness instances. As long as the player does not feel as though they are being accelerated too quickly at once, their brain is better able to process information and not cause nausea.
Interaction
Object interaction is another vital system that helps create our core gameplay loop. Players need to be able to interact with and use specific objects found throughout the levels. Amusingly enough, this system is simplified in the VR game version. Interaction is one of the most well architectured systems to exist in VR. Being able to grab and use objects is a very basic interface to implement in VR and that is no exception to this game.
