Kryo is a Virtual Reality Base-­Jumping Game played with the Oculus Rift on custom-made flight board.

Your goal is to maneuver your way across the map using just your body to control the movement.

Duration: 3 weeks
Team Size: 3 people
Technology: Unreal Editor 4,Blueprints , Oculus Rift DK2, 
I worked on: All the Visuals, Level Design, Sound

This project was quite the challenge, not just because of the strict time restriction but also working with the Oculus Rift.

Since immersion is one of VRs strong suits we chose to do away with a controller entirely and make the game about moving your body intuitively.

VR also poses a challenge when coming up with an artstyle given the lens distortion, low resolution and performance requirements.

Virtual Reality is still seen as gimmicky by many, which has a lot to do with the fact that most games are not tailormade to be played in VR. Sitting up in a chair while holding a controller is not the most immersive way to experience VR games so we tried out various ways to use input capabilities of the Oculus to our advantage.

At first I tried to make the level as realistic as possible but that turned out to be rather boring and players had a hard time orienting themselves and got severely motion sick.

High value contrast also made the lens distortion very obvious so instead I focused on creating strong colour contrast and smooth gradients to distinguish between objects that a far away and close up. During this project I learned that designing games for VR is fundamentally different both in therms of gameplay and art style to your average PC or console game.

In order to create the landscape I used real world sattelite height maps and edited them in World Machine to create a highly detailed height map that can be imported to Unreal 4. I also baked out various world masks to blend between different materials to make sure the terrain looks good from far away and close up.