C.L.O.U.D. Hunters

C.L.O.U.D. Hunters is a fast-paced single-player VR action-adventure game. Play as Veles, a young Cloud Hunter in this post-utopian city. Use your disk to destroy the aggressive drones whilst exploring, climbing, and ziplining to the main factory to free the people of Block 36.

Concept & Vision

C.L.O.U.D. Hunters propel players into the boots of Veles, a child opposition leader and emerging member of the CLOUD Hunters, tasked with liberating Block 36. Veles is armed with a Bouncy Disk, a rechargeable Energy Shield, and a protective energy suit, navigating the oppressive Blocks to counteract the CLOUD AI System, once designed to maintain order and starvation by food supply regulation but has since devolved into a tool of widespread oppression.

Disk

Veles' primary weapon, the Hunter Disk, is a customizable tool that can be thrown in various ways. This recallable weapon, crafted by Veles' father, bounces within the environment, dismantling the CLOUD's drones. Each successful hit recharges Veles' energy suit, while destroying drones replenishes the Energy Shield, with these abilities activating upon the Disk's return to the player.

C.L.O.U.D AI

C.L.O.U.D. Drones were designed to protect all 50 Blocks of the Beehive, in the midst of a world food crisis. However, corruption and mismanagement have led to starvation and imprisonment. Destroy the drones and their factory in Block 36 to stop the terror & fear! 

The C.L.O.U.D. AI system in our game is embodied by multi-state drones, creating a dynamic and engaging challenge for the player. These drones operate in four states: patrol, attack, search, and destroyed. In the patrol state, drones non-aggressively traverse set paths, signified by a green glow. However, upon player detection, drones shift into an attack state, indicated by a red glow, and move towards the player, triggering an area lockdown and initiating combat. If a drone loses sight of the player, it enters a search state, resuming patrol with an amber glow. Finally, upon player-inflicted destruction, the drone enters its final state, breaking into pieces and ceasing function, providing a multifaceted challenge and enhancing the strategic depth of C.L.O.U.D. Hunters.

Shield & UI

The Energy Shield serves as the player's defence, facilitating fluid movement during combat scenarios. Its health is replenished by eliminating enemy drones. The user interface, integrated into Veles' hands, displays health and shield statuses, demonstrating energy consumption as power is funnelled from the Disk to the suit and shield.

Exploration

The gameplay emphasizes exploration, with climbing features and ziplines spread throughout the city, providing a swift escape from precarious situations. The cityscape is laden with interactable objects and collectables that shed light on the game's narrative. A Resident Evil-inspired backpack offers the ability to store items for future use.

Art Style

The game's art style presents a semi-stylized fusion of VR's technical constraints and a comic book style, inspired by Dredd, Blame!, and Borderlands. The city's brutalist architecture and claustrophobic, hard angles manifest a concrete and metallic dystopian atmosphere.

Audio

The game's auditory landscape complements its visual aesthetics. Using a specially-designed "Feel Map", the music and sound effects adapt to the game events' intensity through FMOD parameters. Each unique location features its own soundtrack, inspired by the Judge Dredd movie and the effects of sounds reverberating within concrete rooms. In this dialogue-free world, every in-game asset holds a narrative purpose, deepening the gameplay experience and immersing players in the dystopian reality of C.L.O.U.D. Hunters.

Development Process

C.L.O.U.D. Hunters is the brainchild of a diverse student team, each bringing their unique specialisms to the table to create an engaging and distinct virtual reality experience. Many team members had previously contributed to the development of "Whitefall", which formed a foundational knowledge of virtual reality from the previous academic year.

Our initial development phase was characterized by a vibrant exchange of game ideas. Interestingly, our team was split evenly between two propositions. One concept was akin to Tron, a disk-based game where players would hurl disks to dismantle drones in a virtual reality arena. The second idea was an exploratory adventure set in a post-dystopian city, with players hunting "CLOUDS" through puzzle-solving.

Recognizing the potential in both concepts - one emphasizing mechanics, the other world-building and setting - we decided to amalgamate the two ideas. To enrich the exploratory component, we sought to innovate within the realm of VR traversal. This quest led us to conceive the climbing and zip-wire mechanics, which have since come to define our game's identity. The resulting blend of these diverse ideas created the engaging and immersive world of C.L.O.U.D. Hunters.

Challenges we faced during the development

In developing C.L.O.U.D. Hunters, we faced numerous challenges that informed the direction and execution of the project. From the start, we set out to cater to experienced VR users, implementing VR movement systems that may require acclimatization for newcomers to the platform. Balancing the expansive cityscape and the technical constraints of virtual reality presented its own set of obstacles, which led to a significant transformation in our artistic direction.

Initially, we had envisioned a realistic art style. However, to more subtly conceal the low-poly nature of our assets, we were compelled to switch to a comic book aesthetic. In a bid to optimize resource allocation, we took a modular approach to constructing the cityscape, utilizing a mere 18 assets for all buildings. This approach naturally lent itself to the brutalist art style that now defines our game, as the recurring sections and modular pieces avoid creating a sense of redundancy in the city's architectural design.

Efficiency and performance were also key considerations. We utilized texture sheets and shared materials across assets to conserve performance, a technique especially beneficial for larger scenes. To enhance the illusion of city scale, we used simple blocks with building textures to depict distant structures, creating the impression of a sprawling city that far surpasses its actual confines. These adjustments and solutions were not without their trials, but ultimately, they helped shape C.L.O.U.D. Hunters into the immersive, expansive VR experience that it is today.

Download The Game:

The game's demo version takes between 15-30 minutes, but if you have time and want to experience the world of CLOUD Hunters to its fullest, download the full version of the game which takes around 1-2 hours! 

Both versions can be found here!

Special thanks

In the creation of C.L.O.U.D. Hunters, the dedication, passion, and ingenuity of our diverse team have been instrumental. The mesmerizing art of the game was brought to life by Tamsin Page, Mirka Koutná, Toby Oliver, David da Silva Pereira, and Kore Lakin. The intricate and engaging design was the result of the tireless work of Alise Cukova, Hal Barwick, and Jack Myrick. The seamless and immersive programming was helmed by Daniel Tyson, Sam Harris, and Juan Jose Jaimes Camargo. Finally, the immersive audio experience was crafted by Toby Sadgrove and Shannon Barnett. Each team member has left an indelible mark on C.L.O.U.D. Hunters, contributing to its unique and captivating virtual reality experience.