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Hattrick the Magician

  • Role: Technical Designer, Visual Effects Artist

  • Platforms: Oculus Quest 2

  • Team Size: 8

  • Duration: 24 Weeks

  • Responsibilities:

    • Designed and documented tricks to be included in the game such as the appearing rabbit, two cup and ball tricks, and a hypnosis trick.

    • Planned and built a functional prototype of our interactive backstage menu area.

    • Researched, tested, and implemented optimization strategies to improve game performance on the Quest.

    • Investigated and incorporated vibration and VR movement alternatives to make tricks more immersive.

    • Programmed and bug-fixed various trick components and systems of the game.

    • Created various visual effect assets.

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Game Summary
Hattrick the Magician is a 3D Oculus VR game where you play as a stage magician performing magic tricks for an audience. Hattrick started my junior year, as a small prototyping project where we worked to develop a vertical slice in three weeks. It was then specially chosen as one of five games to move on to our next class in the minor. We worked over the summer and fall semesters of 2021 to polish it.​

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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 led the charge on the optimization front and worked with our artist to implement them. 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. I learned so much about optimization practices and how much impact it has on games, VR ones especially. 

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Tricks and Performances
Hattrick doesn't have any levels since it's one "level" with multiple tricks to perform, so the tricks were some of the main sources of our design. Hattrick's design was much more challenging than other projects I'd worked on, mostly due to this being our first venture into virtual reality. As a team, we decided we wanted the base of our tricks to revolve around the innate fun of moving around in VR. I was responsible for five of the twelve tricks we designed, but I wasn't familiar with the Oculus Quest's features. I started by doing a lot of research, using what I found as the focus of my tricks. I planned the tricks to utilize features like Oculus vibrations and hand-motion recognition, and detailed the step-by-step instructions for how to accomplish each trick, asset requirements, inspirations, and general feel we wanted to invoke in the player. From there I prototyped the necessary components for the tricks and continued to polish them. 

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