About

Finger Gun VR was the first VR Action game designed from the ground up for Hand Tracking technology on the Meta Quest platform. Gameplaywise, Finger Gun was a wave shooter with a rogue-like inspired upgrade system to keep runs interesting.

I was brought into the team on a tight schedule, as the deadline for an alpha version was approaching and the team needed to transition from a long period of prototyping to honing in on a product.

Joining the two founders, the new Art Director and I embarked on a two week pre-production to assess the current state of the project, design a shippable product and make a plan to deliver in, like every game production ever, virtually no time. Somehow, we pulled it off.

Contributions

• Preproduction
  • Joined the core team comprised of the two founders and Art Director.
  • Reworked the game's original vision and the team's prototypes into a cohesive product achievable within the tight schedule and limited resources.
  • Helped shape the game's final design pillars that would serve as the basis for the rest of the production.
  • As the only Game Designer, I worked to introduce the team to game design concepts to empower each member's ability to add to the final product.
• Documentation
  • Was in charge of all of the game's design documentation, as well as pitch decks and any marketing or store-page writing needed.
• Combat
  • Worked with the then still in beta, cutting edge technology to design the first real-time, action combat built from the ground up for VR Hand Tracking.
  • Redesigned and iterated the gesture detection system to achieve stable and responsive tracking. In VR (and more so in hand tracking), mechanics that would be a simple button press easily became quite complex systems.
  • Stablished "biofeedback" (can't recall who coined the term) as a requisite for clarity in each input hand pose, the most obvious example being the pressing of the thumb against the middle finger's knuckle to make sure the players "felt" they had successfully performed the shooting action.
  • As the tracking wasn't stable enough, I quickly made the decision to abandon "aiming" as a difficulty vector for the game, giving the player aggressive aim assistance and choosing instead to model the combat around timing windows and enemy attack patterns, more closely resembling a Hack 'N Slash style combat than a shooter (this allowed to define rational design metrics for enemy design and difficulty progression).
  • Hook
    • Also serving as the main movement mechanic, the hook allows players to pick up power-ups and grab enemies during combat.
  • Modules
    • A power-up the play could take from the enemies to steal their weapon types for a limited time, breaking up the pacing of the combat and adding depth to target priority.
  • Card System
    • Rogue-like inspired per-run upgrade system that allows the player to choose a card after each round, making each run different and systematically expanding the replayability of the game.
• Enemies
  • Robot Gallery
    • Defined the philosophy behind and designed every enemy in the game.
    • To create varied gameplay with little resources, each enemy would have a simple, predictable behavior, the combination of enemies at a specific location/time would create the combat challenges.
  • Token Manager
    • To enable a constantly growing number of enemies while authoring difficulty, a token manager regulated who could attack and when. Each enemy attack would have a token cost and the manager would have more tokens to distribute as the game went on.
  • Difficulty, Waves & Rounds
    • Designed a robust round system that allowed authoring the experience of a highly procedural spawn of enemies with an endlessly increasing difficulty.
    • Among its features, it included control over enemy spawn rate distributions per round ranges, pre-defined enemy spawn groups, authored pool of difficulty curves per round ranges, etc.
• Score System & Leaderboards
  • Designed a combo system that fed into a score metric, allowing the players to have an overview of their performance after each run and integrating Meta's leaderboard features to let players compete over the world and amongst their friends (online or locally).
• Game Modes
  • Designed 3 game modes as a part of the game's largest post-launch upgrade.
• Levels
  • Designed and blocked out all levels in the game, including:
  • Hub
    • Also used for the tutorial, the hub served as a landing place when opening the game, and as a diegetic main menu where players could review their progress, practice, redo tutorials or start a new run.
  • Battle Arenas
    • 3 Battle arenas are included in the game, as the player remains almost static during combat, the main difference is the magnitude of the angle from which enemies can attack the player, starting at 90 degrees and ending at almost 360 degrees.
• UI
  • Diegetic Elements
    • To make the most of the platform, a significant amount of would-be HUD elements were implemented as diegetic UI.
      • E.g. the health and remaining bullets, as well as the equipped Module are all shown on the player's glove as steampunk modifications.
    • Some menus were built as in-level machines and interactables, like a workbench that includes every enemy, module and upgrade the player can find in the game in a toy-like version they can grab, inspect and learn from.
  • Non-Diegetic Elements
    • Designed all menus for the game, including standardizing the visual and behavior language of the buttons and other UI elements to stablish a consistent, simple and intuitive interaction throughout the game's menus.
• Tutorials
  • Designed all of the game's tutorials.
  • Probably the hardest challenge in the game's design. Gestures needed to be clear enough so the game was sure of the player's intention, but a player doesn't naturally think about their finger's pose.
  • Two main breakthroughs were key for achieving a successful learning experience for the players:
    • Limit the number of available poses to the system at any given time.
      • E.g. when idle, the only poses the system can detect are the Finger Gun pose and the Hook pose. Only once the Hook pose is detected does the Fist pose to pull the hook becomes available.
      • This makes the inputs for the system cleaner to distinguish and keeps the hand shapes clearly distinct when the player isn't conscious about it (never expect the player to know what their hands are doing!), as the designers can think of a very specific, small set of poses that would be competing at any given moment.
    • Separate the learning from the doing.
      • Players would follow instructions without thinking and procede to forget what they did (since again, they weren't conscious of what their hands were doing).
      • To fix this, players aren't allowed to perform any of the actions while the tutorial prompt is showing. They must read it, close it and then try to perform the action.
        • If they missed it, they can re-open the prompt and try again (the level was designed to allow space to safely do this).
• Playtesting
  • Led playtesting sessions, reviewed video footage, gathered survey and in-game data and translated it into actionable tasks and priorities.
  • Implemented findings into design iterations.
• Writing, Dialog & Subtitle System
  • Wrote all worldbuilding, character sheets, dialogs and plotline for the (short) game tutorial that contextualized the setting and goals.
  • Prepared documentation with dialogs and direction for Doc. Holliday's voice actor.
  • Designed simple dialog system with responses to player behavior and tutorial integrations.
  • Stablished visual and behavioral rules to ensure the subtitle system was VR-friendly.

About

Mortal Kombat 11 was co-developed by Shiver Entertainment for the Nintendo Switch (along with some RGB features for the PC edition, which I wasn't a part of) with the main goal of achieving a consistent 60 fps on the platform.

After originally being brought in as a QA Artist a month before release with a one-month contract, I ended up staying about 6 months and working on some post release support and DLC content.

The following is an overview of my contributions to the game.

Contributions

• The Krypt
  • For the first time in the series, MK11 had a fully open 3D level that housed a few puzzles, cinematic sequences, and served as a progression hub, where players would unlock new areas an open the chests within as they play the game and earn currency.
  • I was tasked with the art side of optimizations for this unique level, working closely with the more veteran programmers assigned to the task to deliver on time.
• Character Mesh Optimization
  • Optimized multiple character's body, face and hair meshes, along with skin variations.
• Level Optimizations
  • Worked on optimizing multiple of the game's battle arena levels to reach the performance targets.
• Bug Fixes
  • Worked with programmers, playtester feedback and bug reports to polish and fix any issues caused by art optimizations throughout the game.
• DLC Support
  • Participated on the optimization of the first few DLC additions to the game's roaster.