Cosmic Origins

A soothing multiplayer collaborative art experience where 2 players lie down and place abstract objects on the spinning planet and its moons in between them. [Made as part of the course Building Virtual Worlds]

Team Size : 4 [Programmers – 1 | Artists – 2 | Sound Designer – 1]
Duration : 3 weeks
My Role : Programmer (Solo), Co-producer, Designer

Theme : Festival-worthy
Platform : Oculus Rift S (2 headsets connected over network)
Constraints : None. Should be a polished product.

Development Summary :

As the time limit was 3 weeks for this project, we didn’t exercise restraint. We decided we wanted to experiment by making a Virtual Reality multiplayer game. We had set ourselves very ambitious goals as I was the only programmer and also needed to test networking behavior. After many pitfalls, we managed to create an artistic experience in which guests would play lying down. This was done because we wanted to provide a soothing experience.

My Contributions:

As the only programmer, I was responsible for everything starting from coding to dev testing and playtesting. I did receive a bit of help with testing from my teammates from time to time. But it was definitely a worthy learning experience in terms of scope. These are the major tasks I performed:

Create a multiplayer networking framework that supports 2 VR players in the same space (using Unity’s legacy networking package).
Program the interactions of both players.
Manage object lifecycle and state synchronization.
Integrate art assets into the experience.