Aaron Moseley
Panto-puppets development portfolio
Panto-puppets
October 2023 - January 2024
Engine - Unreal Engine 5.2.1
Platform - Oculus quest 2
Role - Game developer / designer working in a team of 4. I came up with the concept of a VR game where the player controls a puppet
(Game currently work in progress)
My areas of development:
Concept
Puppet
Conveyor belt
Hitboxes
Concept:
When prompted with the task of coming up with a unique and experimental design idea that experiments with control mechanics, the idea of a game where you use VR hands to control a puppet came to me after some deliberation. A game where you manually control a puppet's cross has rarely, if ever, been seen before as controlling a rag-dolling puppet with a cross would not work with controller or mouse and keyboard controls. Thus, having the game be a VR title made the most sense for immersion and controls.
Puppet:
This puppet consists of a cross mesh, which is two static meshes combined, the skeletal mesh of the puppet and four physics constraints with cables to visualize their positions and behaviors. The puppet mesh and cross mesh have grab components, allowing the player to grab and move the meshes freely within their hands. The meshes also have physics enabled to allow them to fall and move naturally much like a marionette.
Conveyor belt:
The conveyor belt uses a flat rectangular mesh as its base, which acts as the track that the player must guide the puppet along. In order to make the conveyor belt move, use of a box collision tied with an arrow component forces objects in the box's hitbox to move towards the arrow component. The arrow component is invisible, so as to not interrupt the player's immersion.
Hitboxes:
The hitboxes act as the base for the puppet's health function. If the puppet mesh collides with the obstacle hitboxes, or the big hitbox at the back of the track where the "wolf" cutout stands, the puppet will take damage. This is to punish the player for not controlling the puppet according to the narrative the game sets.
Spawning and de-spawning:
Spawning is done using a timeline and target points. In the timeline, an event chart is created which has values every couple of seconds. That timeline is the connected to a node that spawns the obstacles. Furthermore, the "random integer in range" node is used both before the timeline to randomly choose which target point the obstacles are spawned from, and after the timeline to randomly choose which obstacle is spawned.
