In Depth

Paper Pants Plunderers - VR Project

  •  Technical Designer
  •  9 people
  •  2 weeks
  •  Unreal Engine 4

Overview

    Within Paper Pants Plunderers the player must survive against waves of animals with hairy human legs. These animals are out for your pants, so to defend yourself you shoot all kinds of underwear towards them to keep them at bay.

    Role(s): Technical Designer, Producer
    Engine: Unreal Engine 4
    Platform(s): MS Windows > Gear VR | Oculus Rift (S) | HTC Vive | Valve Index
    Duration: 2 weeks
    Team Size: 9 members
    Released: -
    Context: Academic project created at BUas

Trailer

Summary

Project Description: "Paper Pants Plunderers" is a wave-based survival shooter originally made for the Samsung Gear VR. The core game was created within 8 days of active development and was focused on optimization for the mobile platform (Gear VR). Currently, this game is being reworked for PC-based VR and will be released on Itch.io in Q3 2020.

Paper Pants Plunderers is orginally developed during the Marmalades, these are two-week-long game jams taking place within my education at Breda University of Applied Sciences. During Marmalades teams need to deliver different projects with different requirements within the given two weeks.

My contributions

Within the Marmalades I spent 60% as technical designer and 40% as producer. The producer role was shared between two persons.

During the development as technical designer and producer:

  • My main focus was on designing the core gameplay while taking the hardware limitations of the Samsung Gear VR into account.
  • I worked on our original prototypes and contributed to the original setup of our core system for the Samsung Gear VR.
  • Working on the profiling of the performance and making sure our target FPS was being maintained was one of my responsibilities.
  • For the creation of our PC based version, we had to recreate and optimize our original game. I was responsible for porting a large section of our core game into visual scripting in Unreal Engine 4.
Image showing the shader complexity of pppProfiling the shader complexity of our assets.
tNew system where the player can interact with the gun rather than HMD direction mounted.
  • I ensured multidisciplinary communication by leading the team and maintaining development velocity to reach our deadlines within the short amount of time given.
  • I represented the project within school events. I also ensured integrating user feedback from players as well as the involved stakeholders.
  • Extra notes: From this project, I learned about the importance of understanding your hardware and its capabilities. Optimization of art and code as well as designing with these constraints in mind were a great learning experience and challenge for me.

Gear VR - Gameplay footage