Intro
In July 2023 we had an opportunity to demonstrate Stage at a education event in Warwick Castle. As a company we only had a week’s notice for this event so everyone pooled together to ensure we could deliver something special. For this demo we wanted to show off upcoming functionalities that could be used to enhance the learning experience.
To do this, I directed the development of a custom game mode. This was a situation where I knew I wouldn’t have the time to implement everything myself so instead I worked through three other developers. By taking on this more director focused role, my team were able to produce a great piece of work with very little friction. Using this approach allowed me to teach the less experienced developers in my team how to implement new networked features, and it also gave me the opportunity to grow in confidence as a leader.
The game mode we built had to show that we supported arbitrary tracked controllers and that we could create dynamic presentations that weren’t just static VR PowerPoints. The demo users would be coming in off the back of a long day of teaching based presentations, so what we really wanted to do was produce something fun that would stick in their minds. Due to the location of the demo being the historical Warwick Castle, we chose to make the game a target practice style experience in which the users would shoot crossbows (the custom tracked controllers) at balloons and scarecrows from the walls of the castle.
As an attempt at making the event even more fun, we also added a top score tracking system that’d render on a large display to attract more people to come in and play.
This event was a huge success, we had a very long queue and there was a lot of happy faces by the end of the day which helped to drive more sales.
My contributions:
- Directed the development of the game mode ensuring the team stayed on task and kept the scope simple.
- Implemented the system for tracking the crossbows.
- Assisted with the implementation of the state machine which managed the game.
- Assisted with the implementation of very simple networked physics and hit registration.
- Taught team members more about implementing networked logic.
- Implemented custom GLTF extension to manage target path finding.
- Worked with the art team to create a work flow for iterating on the game mode.
- Assisted with the implementation of a wave based spawn system for the targets to appear.
- Assisted with creating a system in which users could collaborate to reload the crossbows, which we scrapped because it was too complicated to teach users how to do
- Reused the collaboration system to allow users to equip hats.