Shards

Introduction

Shards is an arcade VR game for the HTC Vive. It was developed during my first year of master game design (ICAN, Paris) as one of my three year project.

Pitch

Shards is a VR arcade game in which the player has to score as much as possible by driving his avatar throughout a field full of obstacles, the shards. To move his avatar and score, the player has the move himself and his arm inside the the play area to draw virtual trail, the avatar will follow those trails, collecting every collectibles it crosses.

Game concept

Shards was developed with one major idea in mind, exploiting the room scale play area provided by the Vive, in all dimensions.

So, we came up with a concept in which an entity follow a path drew by the player using his controller. Couple with certain kinds of level design it makes the player move in most of the space.

So to match our intentions we push the level design with obstacles and collectibles to create a need of movement in the player’s actions.

Game mechanics & elements

Trails
By holding the trigger button of his controller, the player draws lines that will be followed by the avatar as soon as a line cross the avatar.

The entity following a trail

Shards
The shards are the main threat in the game, if the avatar collide with one, it will be destroyed and the player will lose one of his life. If he reaches 0 life, the game is over.

The shards can be static or moving in a scripted way following paths.

A shard

Collectibles & scoring system
The score is based on the collectibles gathered, each collectible gives a fixed amount of score and add to the score multiplier, this multiplier is reseted if no collectible is gathered.

The collectibles and the avatar

My roles

I workes as a game designer and level designer on this project.