/// Starpong VR
4th year student project - Supinfogame (team of 5)
Sept. 2018 - Feb. 2019 (6 months)
Unity 3D
Starpong is a VR table tennis arcade game for two players. To win, you must destroy the planets of your opponent, placed on their side of the table. There are many bonuses and activable powers, leading to fun turnarounds and intense short games. The game was initially designed with a Steam release in mind.
On this project, I was game designer & game programmer (more details below).
Game designer & programmer
I wanted to challenge myself with this project. I had never done VR nor network games before.
Learning about design problematics in VR was a huge benefit for me, as I learned how to always take a step back regarding "obvious" things (efficiency of sign & feedback, UI design, control layouts).
My focus was to lead Starpong VR towards smart and efficient features. I learned that my design guideline is now "less is more". Thanks to this project, I found my way through elegant simplicity.
As I was both game designer and gameplay programmer on this project, I taught myself how to scope features more efficiently.
In game mock-up
(click to zoom-in)
Starpong VR was a great opportunity to test how adaptative I was on a more technical layer.
Indeed, the programming workflow in VR is quite different from regular programming.
Learning how to use a new dev toolkit (VRTK) and managing to be as efficient as possible was a great achievement on this project.
Playzone overview
(click to zoom-in)
Tool programmer
As I was both gameplay programmer and game designer on this project, I decided to do myself a favor and build a tool for balancing the table's variables.
Although it doesn't seem like much, this was a huge time saver, the whole table could be balanced and tested with a few clicks.
We could iterate much faster thanks to this tool.
The tool was also "game ready", which means we could have easily implemented a table editor in the game (but we didn't, as it wasn't our priority).
Custom editor for the table balancing tool
(click to zoom-in)
Team members:
- Matthieu Alves (game designer)
- Théophile Candelier (network programmer)
- Sofiane Dahmani (game designer)
- Thibault Magrit (game artist)
