Strings
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Strings is a VR game for HTC VIVE, which hands the player a Marionette, that they use to play through a few short stories with.

Fact Sheet

​Role: Team Lead, Gameplay Designer
Date: September, 2016 - November, 2016
Type: (VR) Game
Engine: Cryengine 5, Unreal Engine 4
Platform: PC, HTC VIVE

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My Experience

This was the start of the 3rd Year at NHTV, which is the Capstone Project year. 18 Projects were allowed 7 weeks of Pre-Production, 10 of which would be allowed to continue development into Production for the rest of the year. 

Our original Pitch was greenlit due to the uniqueness of the concept. Upon developing the prototypes, we learned that Marionetting in VR can spark a toy-like sense of play within people, which seemed very interesting to develop a game around.

At this point, NHTV had started working together with Crytech, so we decided to use this engine to develop the game. This slowed down development quite a bit though, so we assigned 1 programmer to develop the project in Unreal Engine 4, so we could still get to testing, early on. In the end, nothing happened with this project and it, unfortunately, died in the prototype stage. 

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Cryengine Demo

Our main problem with the project was, that even though the core mechanic was interesting, building the game around it was quite difficult. 

In the end, we were redlit for production, because the supervisors felt we didn’t have a good enough grip on what the game would be. We were told that we should continue development on it, because the concept itself was so strong. We were also asked to join a student project sponsored by Ubisoft, which could have used the help of our mechanic, but we declined. It definitely showed the strength of the concept though.

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​Gameplay Design

Here follow a few documents which described the first levels of the game. These 5 feature documents were meant to be handed out to the team, if we had gotten past the prototype phase. With the imprecise controls of puppetry, we wanted to create an experience along the lines of Octodad, where the player is doing varying tasks which would be simplistic in other games, but difficult with this control style.

Everything in these documents was designed by me and my Co-Team Lead.

​Feature Document - Level 1

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​Feature Document - Level 2

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​Feature Document - Level 3

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Feature Document - Level 4

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​Feature Document - Level 5