Shipwreckers 6

28 Feb, 2025

The Skinny:

Shipwreckers VR is the product of about a month of work between myself and my friend Fintan, the goal being to deliver an easy-to-pick-up VR experience which puts a player through their paces in about 15 minutes. The elevator pitch was "jaunty shooter where you play as a marooned sailor fighting a giant living pirate ship," which is pretty accurate to the final product. My role on the project included building all the core player interaction systems, modeling/implementing the ship and player assets, and co-designing the flow of the boss encounter.

Ethos Elaboration:

I love having this in my portfolio because it's a great demonstrator for the Quest headset and the way I like to develop for it. It's highly physical, it's punchy, it's self-explanatory, it's got a few surprises under the hood, and it sustains the exact amount of playtime most people tend to have patience for when casually messing around with an HMD. Many of the lessons learned and approaches developed while working on this project I also carried over and refined/mutated in later, larger works, namely my arena shooter Worm Punk. While it's accurate to say this is my most conceptually "normal" game (the VR stationary shooter is well-trodden territory), I strive to make unusual choices when given the opportunity and thus our final implementation is weird and playful in all aspects.

EXAMPLE COMPARISONS (with images)

• Tool holstering & deployment, sword -> shotguns
• Threat monitoring, ship jumping behind -> being attacked from behind
• Projectile visibility & predictability, cannonballs -> homing slugs

Player Toolkit & Interaction Rules:

• Arm cannon (basic premise, versatility, and juice)
• Sword (design utility and deployment)
• Catching

Playful Design:

• Dismemberment-based health bar (for the player and the ship)
• Mouth cannonballs and drinkable menu options
• "Everything is ammo"

Combat Animations & Sequencing:

• Calibrating the lifeboat tutorial to intentionally underwhelm players so we can blow their socks off with the main fight.
• My approach to building dodgeable melee attacks which force the player to move differently to how they would when dealing with cannonballs
• Sequencing boss phases to keep the fight gripping (and even replayable) while conserving development resources

Model Development:

• For part of the figurehead, I'm actually using whale bones I made from a previous project called Mercy.

Recycling:

• Whale bones from Mercy in the figurehead
• Cannon sound and Moonlight Shanty from Super Shipwreckers
• Hands end up in Grabbacious Maw, that time with IK rigs