Conceptual Statement
The concept for "Rift Temple" was to be an immersive first person Oculus Rift experience with a focus on story, characters and uncovering a mystery. The player was to explore the environment, discovering more of the narrative whilst witnessing strange, and sometimes disturbing, events. I worked on this project with Jareth MacArthur because we felt our talents would complement each other and make it easier to create a feature complete game. Jareth was to work on more of the coding side and I was to work on the design and art side although we wanted to share work as well.
The Idea came from a few days of brainstorming at the beginning of the DIY project in Semester 2 with Jareth. Our original ideas were different in setting and style but at the core, were always focused on immersion and story. Our idea took shape and became Rift Temple. The next evolution of the idea was a turn more into a Thriller/Horror experience, over just the feeling of wearing the Oculus Rift.
We decided to create our game for the Oculus Rift because of the capability to truly immerse the player in a setting and game environment. Jareth had bought a DK2 a few weeks prior meaning he could test and see how performance and in general, how it played.
We decided to use Unreal Engine 4 to create this game because it was more advanced and capable compared to Unity, and it had excellent Oculus Rift support. This meant that me and Jareth had to get through a quite a learning curve.
We learnt along the way that we would need to present our game with a powerful desktop with Oculus Rift and Headphones because of performance (maintaining a steady 75fps for immersive gameplay). My desktop was able to run it only just but we knew that further optimizations would be made to run it for Studio and Vernissage marking.