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Hattrick the Magician

  • Role: Technical Designer, Visual Effects Artist

  • Status: Published

  • Team Size: 8

  • Duration: 24 Weeks

  • Platforms: Oculus Quest 2

  • Responsibilities:

    • Designing and documenting tricks and systems to be included in the game such as the appearing rabbit trick, two cup and ball tricks, a hypnosis trick, and our teleprompter checklist.

    • Planning and building a functional prototype of our interactive backstage menu area.

    • Researching, testing, and implementing optimization strategies to improve game performance on the Quest system.

    • Investigating and incorporating vibration and VR movement alternatives to make tricks more immersive.

    • Programming and bug-fixing various trick components and systems of the game.

    • Creating various visual effect assets.

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Game Summary
Hattrick the Magician is a 3D virtual reality game on the Oculus Quest where you play as Hattrick the Magician, an aspiring stage magician performing magic tricks for your audience on a quest to become the world's greatest magician. Using the inherent fun that comes from messing around with objects and physics in VR, the player performs tricks using various magical items and directions from a teleprompter. Based on how well they perform the trick, the audience rewards the player with points. Hattrick started as a small prototyping project where my team and I worked to develop a vertical slice in three weeks. It was then specially chosen as one of five games to move on for further development. ​

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Tricks and Performances
Hattrick doesn't have individual levels since it's one "level" with multiple tricks to perform, so the tricks themselves were the main sources for our design. Hattrick being all of our first forays into VR, we decided we wanted the base of our tricks to revolve around the innate fun of interacting in a VR space, that way we could learn the ins and outs as well as experiment as we understood more. I was responsible for five of the twelve tricks we designed, so I started by doing a lot of research on the Quest's features, using what I found as the focus of my tricks, including controller vibrations and hand-motion recognition. I documented detailed step-by-step instructions on how to accomplish each trick, their asset requirements, inspirations, and the general feeling we wanted to invoke in the player. From there I prototyped the necessary components for the tricks and continued to polish them in game. 

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Optimization
Optimization was a crucial part of our game's creation. At the time of our project, the Oculus was the only standalone VR headset that didn't need to be hooked up to external hardware which meant we had to limit a lot of what we could do with the game to make the smoothest experience possible. It was crucial to do this since motion sickness is a huge problem for VR. I took the lead on optimization and worked with our artist to implement optimization strategies to help on that front. Some of the strategies we used were to limit the poly-counts of all our art assets to reduce the Oculus' graphics processing load, implement occlusion culling to further limit the impact of our art, and analyze Unity's frame debugger and profiler to uncover areas with excessive drawcalls. 

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