Burden of Bravery was developed by a team of 13 over six weeks and submitted for an educational brief about creating a virtual reality experience. The project was also showcased as part of the campus' end-of-term event night, receiving a hugely positive response, hence the poster and trailer. More info on that here.
The team was comprised of the entire class and followed a heirarchical chain of command, with a Project Lead and Producer, then Team Leads in charge of smaller sub-groups responsible for each level. Team Leads were decided by asking volunteers to pitch level concepts following ideation of the overarching game concept.
I pitched a "Spooky Forest" level and was chosen as one of the Team Leads, then asked to take charge of a programmer and artist to assist in developing the level.
The concept was to serve as the first level, where the player would be introduced to the narrative and mechanics/controls in a no-pressure (but still high tension) environment. A dark, eerie forest with a rough path leading to a small graveyard containing a mausoleum - the entrance to the second level. Along the path, various points of interest were placed which triggered certain events such as audio cues or movement in the deeper forest.
After landing Team Lead, I fleshed out the level concept a bit more and delegated tasks to my sub-group to create a more detailed pitch and player progression path to deliver to the Producer and rest of the team.
This was the first VR project the team had worked on, so I started things off with a super simple blockout (based on the initial, super simple layout diagram) that we could test with a headset to determine the proper scale and distancing of objects in the scene.
Process TLDR:
Ideation & research/references
Layout sketch/diagram
Blockout & POI placeholders
Headset testing
Layout iteration
Replace blockout
POI triggers/events & audio
Playtesting & feedback-based iteration
Final pass replacing placeholders
Optimisation & final environment details
As I said, super simple. For reference, the level was originally going to be split into three areas roughly the size of the physical room players would be in while playing. This would allow them to move around freely without the VR controls and hopefully avoid motion-sickness for new VR users. Eventually though, after a lot of discussion and testing, we decided not to worry about it and simply allow players to decide their preferred control scheme. It was also partly to help with performance, however I quickly found this wouldn't be necessary when we decided to bake lighting (excepting the player's torch), and I learned we could implement other optimisation techniques such as occlusion culling to help further.
Anyway, satisfied with the scale in the blockout, I held a scrum with the team where we planned exactly what the POIs would be and made the path a little more interesting. One of my team did a new rough sketch (right) of the level path featuring the planned POIs and I used this to create an updated diagram, then adjusted the blockout to match.
To replace the blockout, I used the Synty Studios POLYGON Nature Pack. The other levels also used POLYGON packs, making it the most practical. It was decided early on that we would be using low-poly assets due to the performance limitations of the VR headset hardware.
I had the artist on my team work on some custom assets while my programmer set up the scripts for the POI triggers and events. Meanwhile, I replaced the blockout assets at a basic level to prepare the level for playtesting.
Because of the "horror" theme, achieving a dark, tense atmosphere was a necessity. As the first level, it was really important that it set the mood appropriately. We were quite limited by the hardware we wanted to build for however, and had to settle for Unity's fog. To make it look as good as possible, I spent some time tweaking lighting and object positions to ensure they complemented the fog.
Our playtesting sessions served to gather feedback from potential audiences. Using that feedback and an agile methodology, I cycled between iterating and testing on the hardware until I was happy with the environment and the feel of the atmosphere.
Another reason for the playtesting was to gauge players' sense of direction in the forest and see what grabbed attention versus what was missed. Although the path is linear, I intentionally left just enough space for players to get turned around in the dark, adding to the tension and fear. Of course, they still needed to clear the level, so some POIs and other features of the environment were used to grab or direct attention through the use of framing/borders, leading lines, movement, sound, and lighting. Furthermore, invisible walls are in place just past the inner tree-line to ensure the over-adventurous player doesn't wander too far. To complement (hide) these walls, the tree-line and supporting flora is thick enough to imply the outer forest is not traversable.
Following are some more detailed images of the level and its compositional elements.