Portfolio | jackerskine

2022 - The Chronosphere Chronicles

Virtual Reality Escape Room

Game Antagonist - Yendor, Evil Wizard

Most of the animation was completed through a custom motion capture system created to use the VR rigs themselves to record the performance, so we had information from the "head" and "hands" of the character using the headset and controllers. Everything else had to be additively animated on top of the performance using Blender, so some elements were traditionally animated to work with the actors performance, such as the fingers.

Motion capture rigs are incredibly complex, and the clothing and this particular character's "facial" rig added additional complexity on top of that. This part of the project taught me a great deal to take into future projects.

Customisable Player Hands

As a VR experience the player's hands are a very important part of the project.

Using morph targets and a number of different textures, players are able to customise their hands along a spectrum of "maleness" to "femaleness" and between a number of different skin tones. As the experience progresses the hands also begin to rot away, showing how close the player is to failing the escape room and falling to the dark necromancer, Yendor's influence.

Roomspace Explorable Dungeon

This game was designed for VR rooms that are 6 meters by 6 meters. The beginning of the experience is a free roaming dungeon, with players lost inside a subterranean labyrinth. By locking rooms behind the player and loading rooms in front of them you can turn this relatively small area into an infinite maze, looping the player back over themselves and using clever tricks like baloneys and elevators to make the room feel much larger than it actually is.

Magical Masks

To make it easy for players to tell the difference between each other, early in Chronosphere they will need to select and put on a magical mask. These masks were designed to reference Melpomene and Thalia, the classic representations of Tragedy and Comedy respectively, though with up to six players more emotional ground needed to be explored. I really enjoyed working with these abstractions of human emotion and the gaps in the masks allowed for some very fun interactions with the games lighting systems.

Puzzle Element - Magical Tomes

These magical tomes were used for a number of puzzles within the game and needed to represent many different magical tropes and fantasy archetypes, while still being quite low poly with very simple colliders.

Evergreen

Chill, Tree Growing PC Game

Pocket Bonsai

Tree Growing Simulator for Mobile

Speed Sculpts

Contract Work