Some of my contributions to
Border Bots VR
Animation systems
It was initially suggested that we wanted some variation in the “companion robots” talking animations during the apartment levels of the game. The animator created some gestures, emotion and talking animations for each apartment bot, they all have rather different body shapes and appendages, so different animations were set up for each.
I layered these together to create the final dynamic result. The video (should start at 28:34) shows off some of the talking emotions of the Home drone called Max, and then the Toaster called Bernie. Later after the news he also talks to the Vacuum Robot called Dusty.
A couple of them were directly made by the animator at my request as I didn’t think we could get across the required feeling otherwise. But most were layered together, I sped up some animations to create a more hectic feel and combined with a gesture every few seconds to add variation to the talking loops.
I also created the flying movement systems Max uses in the video.
Rival Day
When concepting some ideas early on for a day in the booth where you go against the rival I suggested, to get the player really annoyed at him, we could have the rival “reverse” the days rules. The designers quite liked this and pursued it. When implementing we wanted to create a feel of competitiveness and tension, so I added some code that had the Rival slow down or speed up with the players processing speed. This happened to play out quite well in the video (should start at 21:21).
Initial Sequence
I worked with the designers to prototype this initial section and then worked quite a lot on the final implementation. At one point the user has to get a bottle and hand it over, but they can smash it, and the sequence plays out differently with different animations and voice clips. The clamp section can vary similarly depending on when the player destroys it. The video shows the sequence in question(should start at 1:48).
Bonus - Dev Diary
We recorded a dev diary video before release that features me! And describes my accidental contribution to the Medi-bots character.