Wizards Chess VR
Solo-developed fan game, player plays a game of wizards chess in the Great Hall of Hogwarts.
In 2017 I decided I wanted to make games so I spent the next 2 years making this game to find what I wanted to do within game development. I found I loved all of it!
With a few small exceptions, I made all the Models, Rigs, Animations, VFX and wrote the shaders, tools, and gameplay/UI behaviors. Below are some cool highlights from research and development.
Try it out on itch (enters 2d mode if VR headset not connected): Itch Link
Technologies
Unity, Blender, Substance Painter, C#, Python
Timeline
Nov 2017 - June 2019
Skills
Interaction design
3D character, environment art and animation
Perseverance
Company
N/A - Personal project
Role
Software Engineer
3D Generalist
Solo Developer
Interaction + Storytelling
My design goals were to stay within the bounds of the Wizarding world’s rules and to make the experience feel like it did in the book and movie.
UI
To setup the context of the experience, I pulled from the tons of existing in-universe material both in terms of presentation and content. On parchment paper with script-like font and disappearing ink (custom shader), I set the player to expect a bit of excitement in the chessmatch before seeing the board.
In practice, most people who I watched try the experience loved the letter presentation and the content if they were already Harry Potter fans.
Some fun interaction design highlights:
At first the letter was resizable by 2-handing it and moving your hands further or closer together. Fun idea in development, terrible feedback from players in practice. I ended up making the letter almost 3ft large and stationary so players could just walk up to it and read. Which was better, except when a pair of 6 year olds tried it and couldn’t get up high enough to read.
Turns out it is hard to navigate a massive chess board to select pieces, but only a handful of people ever got tired of doing it during playtests.
Having graphics settings available pretty much destroys immersion for me personally. This bothers me in games too, but I haven’t found a good answer yet.
Destruction Effect
It’s wizard’s chess, the pieces have to break! This was most players’ favorite part of the experience. To achieve this effect in real time, I wrote a one-button solution to automatically break my chess pieces apart in Blender which loads and explodes on impact in the game engine.
Note on process: Breaking 6 characters apart manually with pure poly modeling would have been faster, but I was trying to learn more about tool-writing and python at the time. Now I’d use Houdini’s destruction tools to get this type of work done.
Board reset Effect
This effect is inspired by the movie representation of Molly Weasley’s cleaning magic. Broken pieces float to their original positions and fuse back together.
Character Art + Rigs + Animations
Fun fact, only 3 animations are shown in the movie: Queen attack, Pawn attack, and King's checkmate animation! I used other movies and medieval combat videos for reference to make the rest of the animations look believable.
Visually I wanted pieces to break only when hit by a weapon instead of a large hitbox for added believability. This forced me to make the attack animations in a way that would hit the knight and the pawn in same move. Not a huge deal but it was fun to discover my way through the problem.
Since my rigs are almost all symmetrical, I wrote a script that combines some existing Blender functionality to mirror bones and skinweights from one side to the other.
Environment Art
Fun fact, for the final 2 movies the Great Hall is almost twice as tall! I found the old design to be to too short in VR and the new design to be too large. I settled on using the same proportions as the new design, with the width and total height of the old design. This allowed players to see the sky effects and floating candles without having to look too far up.
