An Ant’s Life is a storytelling journey where you lead your fellow ants to find food by steering. It combines VR with physical props to immerse players in the ant’s life.

Summary:

Given our scope and constraints, we developed this game to tell a compelling, meaningful interactive story with a well-defined climax and ending. To take full advantage of the VR space:

• We went with an ant theme to portray an extreme sense of scale and size, providing a new perspective through VR
• We opted for a 2.5D perspective to stand out amongst the crowd, allowing our artists to create the highest quality assets possible and providing players with a creative world to interact in
• Finally, we placed players in a slow, lazy-river-like experience to make controls/movement intuitive and natural to prevent motion-sickness.

Scope:

4 weeks | 5 person team | C#, Unity

My Contributions:

1. Manipulated PS Move’s rotational input to simulate natural steering
2. Implemented billboarding - always rotating 2D sprites to face the player (like in Paper Mario)
3. Implemented fluid group movement through autonomous AI steering
4. Utilized Unity’s particle systems to simulate rolling fog and falling raindrops

Results:

1. Selected as Adobe Design Achievement Awards 2015 Semifinalist
2. ACM CHIPLAY published our extended abstract!
3. Selected as a CREATE 2015 Finalist
4. Invited to present at ACM’s CHIPLAY London
5. Invited to present at Maker’s Faire Pittsburgh.