Royal Caribbean / Groove Jones:
Swashbuckler
Project Snapshot
Swashbuckler is a 1-4 person installation-specific VR game where players experience a steampunk pirate adventure over the course of 12 minutes. Players take on the role of one of four unique pirate robots to seek out and battle the mechanical kraken to retrieve an inter-dimensional treasure.
​
Engine: Unity
​
Platform: VivePro + Wearable Haptics + Virtually Integrated Real-World Props
Only available onsite at Virtual Adventure Zone: Zone Zero by Royal Caribbean
Roles and Responsibilities
The talented team at Groove Jones incorporated a variety of multi-disciplinary developers at different stages of the project. My direct teammates included 3 engineers, 4 artists, 2 producers, and 2 designers including myself. This is an incomplete list of the full staff of the project, as there were other developers involved in earlier stages that were no longer assigned to it full-time by the time I started working on it not included in this list.
My Title: Sound Designer / Implementation Expert
My Team Size: 11 full-time developers with part-time support from approximately 6 more.
Responsibilities
- Design audio environments for 5+ unique settings based on pre-constructed virtual environments, including ambiance and specific environmental sound effects.
​
- Implement audio in Unity including positioning, spatialization, ducking hierarchies, and environmental effects such as reverb.
​
- Program all sound for the project in C#, including ambience, gameplay sound, enemy sound, and animation-paired sound. Real-world props such as the ship wheel and rigging rope utilized sensor data on how the props were being used to affect the sounds in the game.
​
- Collaborate with the in-house Sound Designer who had never worked on game sound before on soundtrack and effects, including recording, mixing, and mastering VO & foley. Provide insight and training on the difference between broadcast/movie sound and game sound.
​
- Implement level & audio design techniques to improve the player experience by clarifying objectives, drawing player attention to important setpieces, and increasing immersion and fun.
​
- Respond to creative and technical feedback from stakeholders and resolve issues in code and design.
Work Analysis
Real-World Props as Non-Traditional "Controllers"
Game Development with a Talented, Green Team
It was a unique privilege to join the Groove Jones team. At the time, Swashbuckler was their first and only foray into the world of game development. The team came with a background of world-class, award-winning VR expertise but lacked any experience or training in the realm of game design. This contrasted with the previous teams I had worked with, and created interesting challenges in the final push towards polishing from "experience" to "game."
​
Throughout my time on the project I had the opportunity to teach and learn in equal measure. They were new to games, I was new to VR. Combining our knowledge led to breakthroughs in immersion, functionality, player engagement, and fun. I developed a deeper respect for and understanding of VR and how to create environments, interactions, and sequences that utterly engulf the player inside it. Along the way, I was able to share the expertise I had gained from my Masters program at SMU to elevate the gaming experience of the project, including strategies for challenging and rewarding the player, conveyance mechanisms to organically guide players through spaces, and multiplayer suggestions to improve accessibility and fun for players of varying skill levels.
​
Our multi-faceted approach resulted in an imperfect (what isn't?) but wholehearted VR game fully tailored to its installation and audience with a unique, compelling thrill and deep atmosphere. It was a pleasure to help Groove Jones take their first dive into the wonderful world of games, and take my own plunge into VR.
Swashbuckler was an installation piece from its inception. To increase immersion, the project included not only haptic feedback via a 22-point vibration vest and hand and foot haptics, but incorporated real, physical props built into the space into the virtual environment experienced in the game.
​
Each of these props, including a pulley rope, ship's wheel, and joystick-trigger prop, were used throughout the game for steering the ship, aiming and firing the cannons, raising and lowering the sails, and doing battle with the kraken. Sensors on each of these real-world props reported data live to the game, essentially functioning as non-traditional controllers. They required strong engineering effort to always be in-sync with the position and state of their real-world counterparts, presenting unique challenges to myself and other teammates. It was really great to return to experimental/non-traditional controllers after Mauk!
Project Post-Mortem
What Went Well?
What Went Wrong?
What I Learned?
- Successfully adapting to working in VR for the first time, including all of the foibles of both hardware and required scripting adjustments.
​
- Iterating constantly on feedback for design, audio, and scripting implementation throughout the project.
​
- Sharing expertise with teammates with very different industry experience and training created a positive dialogue of ideas that wouldn't have come from a strictly-games or strictly-VR team.
​
- Ambitiously tackling tricky physical immersion elements (haptics, multiplayer VR, physical props as controllers) and overcoming associated technical difficulties.
​
- Adjusting to stakeholder requirements became a productive back-and-forth: with each prototype presentation to stakeholders we adjusted and compromised to keep versions of our best ideas in the game and in-line with requirements and feedback.
​
- Creating a fully ADA-compliant VR game, including considerations for wheelchair accessibility and the player experience for a wheelchair user.
- There was initially a learning-curve to VR. I initially required support from engineering working with the hardware.
​
- Due to the timing of my joining the project, many elements that may have needed adjustment for game-feel were already locked and unchangeable, even when team members agreed the change would have improved the experience.
​
- Due to COVID-19, only a smaller subset of team members were able to visit the actual installation location. This meant that not all team members were able to support adjustments that needed to be made on-site when the project was actually being installed.
​
- With multiple concurrent projects, some team members were required to bounce back and forth between projects which contributed to knowledge gaps across the team.
​
- This was my first project using Git as a source control platform, and I lost some work due to hiccups in pulling, committing, and pushing.
- Communication strategies for inter-disciplinary teams with varying degrees of gaming knowledge.
​
- Skills with several technologies I hadn't worked with before, including Git, VR, haptics, and accelerometer sensors.
- Prioritization strategies when absorbing stakeholder feedback to ensure the most impactful feedback was addressed first.
​
- Compromising strategies when stakeholder feedback conflicted with developer goals, including critical analysis skills to extract the motivations behind both stakeholder feedback and developer goals.
​
- Strategies for adapting to a project already deep into development and meshing with a team that had participated in the development since the beginning.
​
- Greater degree of expertise in environmental audio design & implementation in Unity/C#
​
- Foley & VO recording techniques and best practices, including VO direction and take selection.
