After many years of flat-screen game development, I started tinkering with VR in 2023. My first game prototype, “Officer Of The Hole”, turned the player into a civil servant responsible for all kinds of tasks, from repair jobs to assassinations. But they didn’t roam freely in a regular city; instead, they navigated a dolly along an energy pipe system inside of a vertical tube which made up the city.

Here’s the service dolly in action. When I started building this, the VR player rig on the hovering and moving platform gave my a lot of headaches. I went as far as rotating the world around a stationary dolly but that gave me tons of other problems, so I discarded the approach.

I collected several Synty Studio assets over the years which enabled me to experiment with many different game ideas and genres, and for this prototype, I chose the then newly released Sci-Fi Cyber City art pack as a starting point to build a level.

I also had to choose a VR framework and went for VR Interaction Framework.

As a middleware to quickly iterate on game logic, interactions, and quests, I chose Game Creator 2. In the video above, I am using GC2 e.g. to trigger the dialogue with the guard. I had to make quite a few changes, though, in order to get the dialogue UI running in world space.

I also used the project to play around with the then newly released Emerald AI 2024. In the video above, the homeless guy attacking the player is an Emerald AI controlled character. (I have since dropped Emerald AI and use GC2’s Melee 2 module for melee and the Behavior 2 module and regular triggers for AI instead.)

You can already see some elements of “Beneath The Order” in this very first published screen recording, that’s why I keep referring to it as “devlog #1”. But the truth is, I never really got used to the bright and colorful style of the Sci-Fi Cyber City assets. The tri-planar dirt shader helped a bit, but all in all, I felt that the world was still way too bright and noisy. I didn’t dare to play with lighting either, being worried about the performance on my first headset, a Quest 2. That’s why I put the project aside after a while, and another art pack and a spark of inspiration was needed before I finally settled on a style.