Vitruv

Players take control of a little robot. Lacking any combat skills, they must rely on stealth and the environment to escape the view of the giant robot in the midle of the level.

Our goal was to create a game that is both visually appealing and an immersive gameplay experience. We aimed to use many of the functionalities provided by Unreal Engine 5 to build a compelling atmospheric experience. The systems we wanted to explore included Nanite, Lumen and Metasounds. Using them, we planned to make a relatively big and complex environment within the time span of four months.

Development Background

Initially we wanted to create a game that used controller gestures with a fixed and game controlled camera. We aimed for a fast paced game feel. This protoype shown below was made within the first week. We wanted to get our movement under control and make it feel good before venturing into what exactly the progression mechanics are going to be.

However we were cut back on that front and instead told to focus on visuals as that was the major constraint the task was about. “The game doesn’t need mechanics”, was a widely disturbing statement that also took wind out of my sails. The newfound expectation just didn’t work with our time structure of two programmers, two artists, and one sound designer and helping hand. After all this left me with few tasks as the other programmer had more experience in Unreal. I didn’t work on game code because there was not much and just on our camera system but because of the missing variety, I was really slow and I am not happy how it turned out to be another artsy game without backing systems to provide game play. Other tasks were managing our self hosted perforce instance, jenkins instance, build server, and creating and mainting our build pipeline itself.