Castle Siege VR
An RTS-style castle siege reimagined for VR — a prototype from an internal jam week at Schell Games.
Overview
This project was part of a Game Jam held at Schell Games — an awesome exploration of a VR castle-siege RTS. The main interaction: placing digital play pieces on a table and watching them show up in the "real" world. Once placed, you can teleport to the different objects and interact with them in VR.
Pulleys, cranks, bows, levers, and so much more were all built out in the one-week jam.
My Role
I designed the game and built it out in Unity, wiring up the Oculus and SteamVR integrations along with the VR interactions that let you reach out and handle everything on the table. A small team of artists jumped in to help with the props and weapons, which went a long way in a one-week jam.
Things Got a Little Insane
The stress tests for Castle Siege were… amazing.
Here you can see thousands of physics-enabled stones being flung toward a dynamic physical wall. I built an efficient system that managed the physics update cycle and the activation of the wall's individual stones.
Destructible Walls (Physics-Based Model)
This is an example of the dynamic physics system mentioned in the stress test above. Blocks dynamically disable themselves from the scene altogether once they're no longer visible to the player. The physics update cycle is entirely dependent on whether a state change will actually affect gameplay or visual fidelity for the player.
SteamVR on Oculus
A big portion of this prototype was working with the (then) latest SteamVR SDK, which introduced its Hands SDK. The system provided more realistic 3D hand models and more dynamic finger positioning — with zero setup required from developers.
I explored its viability for the studio to adopt. Ultimately the preview impressed me so much that the game ended up using this new system for its interactions.