Internship at RecoveryVR

Virtual Reality games for players with special physical needs & restrictions

Game genre: Virtual Reality.

Platform: Various VR headsets.

Engine: Unity.

Time spent on project: Dec 2021 ~ April 2022. (Future mods may occur depending on playtesting results)

My job role(s): Level Designer. 3D Artist. Texture artist.

Software used: Unity. Photoshop. Blender. ProBuilder. PolyBrush.

Project details:

RecoveryVR approached my school offering several open internship positions to any students willing to take on extra work concurrent to their studies, and so I put my hand up, as I felt I had enough high priority work completed on my school project to take this on without overburdening myself. I volunteered for the level design gig and was stoked when I was accepted, as it's a great opportunity to show your skills in a real world gig.

Working with the team at RecoveryVR to deliver these golf courses was a challenging but ultimately rewarding process. I learned a lot of new things and improved my work as I went along to fit this new unique role.

I had very little experience in level design or terrain building / sculpting, especially for a VR sport or rehab based game, but I jumped at the chance to develop my skills into new areas even if it was out of my comfort zone initially. I'm glad I did as it's very valuable work experience with a great team. 😄 But it was hard, man! I have much more respect for 3D artists who create terrain from scratch after having now done it myself.

Review of my work after completion:
Christian Doran - Founder & CEO at RecoveryVR. (Posted publicly on my LinkedIn - April 6, 2022)
- Jason completed a 3D Art/Level design project for me and I can't recommend him enough. One of his major strengths is communication, there was enough checkins and meetings to properly guide him to the finished product. His skills as a designer were adaptive and efficient and the final product was exactly what I was after. I've seen some of his other work and it's even more impressive than what I required of him so I know I didn't use all of his talents. Highly recommended.

My contributions to this project:

Design.
- I designed 9 golf courses specifically made to adhere to the required physical needs & restrictions of the target users / players.
- Delivering these designs for team approval before proceeding.
- In my course designs I put a focus on fun, varied and engaging levels that slowly progress through several biome theme changes. Such as Forest, Desert, Island.
Art.
- I created all the terrain you see, sculpted every last bit, which was quite difficult and I felt in over my head at first, but the more I persevered the better I got at it, and now I quite enjoy level design & creation.
- To accomplish this what I did first was test various methods for terrain sculpting (and texturing) before I committed to any. I tested using Unitys terrain tools, greyscale height maps, Probuilder/polybrush, sculpting in Blender etc. In the end it was a combination of several of these that worked best, but I learned a lot in this early exploration.
- I sculpted the terrain of each course, keeping it as low poly as possible to fit the VR performance budget.
- I followed my previously approved level map designs and built the levels.
- Occasionally modified existing textures. Such as the skybox background to fit different biomes and avoid repetition.
- I created several new VR friendly custom seamless textures for the several different grass types, desert dirt and sand bunkers etc. Even though this technically wasn't part of my job I was happy to lend my art skills to the project.
- Added some of my own low poly models when needed, and also modified existing models using ProBuilder to vary them up and avoid obvious repetition.