Blade and Sorcery VR

The project started back in january 2016, when we decided to start this project as a final year university work. We wanted to explore the possibilities of VR and the kind of experiences that could be created within it. We spent our last year at uni prototyping and creating all the game features, working our butts off to complete the game.

Blade and Sorcery VR is a VR Hack & Slash Game built exclusively for VR headsets. Blade & Sorcery offers fast paced combat with every weapon type known from medieval times, including Swords, Axes, Bows, Hammers or even magic itself! Imagine using your own hands to swing a massive 2-handed battleaxe and cleave off your enemy's head or using powerful spells to annihilate them from afar.

How to mod blade and sorcery

The game is currently very early in development and we want to get it out there as soon as possible. So we chose to release a demo of the game so you can try it yourself and provide feedback for us. We will be updating the demo on a regular basis, adding new features and content while we work on the full version of the game.

This also means you can already mod the game, as it's still very early in development so there's lots of stuff that we haven't added yet. We have a github page with our code and you're free to do whatever you want with it. As long as you don't steal our assets that is ;)

The github page

The code of the demo can be found here: https://github.com/dbsrvr/Blade-and-Sorcery-VR

The code of the full game will be available once we've released a final version. We're going for an early access model, meaning that you'll get a playable version of the game as soon as we can release it and you'll get updates for free for a limited amount of time. The full version will be released once we have all features working in VR, there's still a lot that needs to be done.

What works in the demo

• You can equip weapons from each weapon type (melee and bows), each class has different weapons available to them.

• You can level up your character, doing so will unlock new abilities for you to use. A basic version of the leveling system is already working. More work needs to be done on this!

• Combat works as a hack & slash, you have a main melee weapon, a secondary melee weapon and a ranged weapon (bow).

The pros and cons of playing the game in virtual reality

Pros

• Using your own hands for the game is awesome! It really feels like you're inside of a scene due to how immersive it all feels.

• Seeing creatures and NPCs in front of you and having them speak with you (if we can get that working) will be amazing! You'll feel like they're actually standing in front of you.

• It's extremely rewarding when you kill a creature in-front of you, especially when it's the first time that happens!

Cons

• We've had players get sick after playing for around 5 minutes, this mostly has to do with them looking all around during these 5 minutes which can make some people feel a bit off. We're still trying to figure out how we can solve this!

• Some people get a headache from playing the game, that's probably because they move their head around too much during gameplay. We're going to add a few settings in the final version of the game which will let you turn up/down the movement scale so you can set it to levels that are comfortable for you.

• The game is not optimized yet, so the FPS rate might be around 15 or so on average (the demo was running at 30fps in the Unity editor, but due to memory leaks and stuff like that we had to turn it down!) We're looking into optimizing the game more, for now try to play sitting down or standing still! :)

• Playing with a controller is not as immersive as playing the game in virtual reality, we're going to add some emulated head tracking (with your keyboard) which will make it feel more like you're actually moving around and interacting with stuff. We'll see how that goes!

Conclusion

We love the concept of VR, but there are still a lot of things that need to be done so people can enjoy it. So far we've had very positive feedback from everyone who's tried the game in virtual reality! :)