2025
VR PC - Unity
God of Forging
Your friend requests you to forge a variety of magical swords!
Role: Lead Programmer
About The Project
God of Forging is VR Forging experience that tasks players to use their godlike powers to forge swords for their friend.
In the sandbox mode players have a lot more freedom to craft any magical swords that they desire.
Summary of work and contributions
Designed original game concept
Developed prototype for the game
Programmed the main game mechanics such as the punching and crafting
Developed backend for dynamic scalable crafting system
Project Outcomes
This project was a new experience for me as this was my first VR project. It was a great opportunity to learn how game development for VR differs from more conventional platforms. Working within the limitations of the platform forced me to take much more consideration about the player when ideating game ideas.
This project also allowed me to improve my skills with C# as I used the project to test out how I could implement struct variables for more scalable back-end systems.
My team and I did well enough to be invited to QUT's 2025 Immersive Games Festival alongside other other VR projects from my class
Gameplay Video
My Process
Early Development
During early development, my class was tasked to create prototypes for our game ideas based on a chosen theme, before joining groups to work on one collaboratively. When I was Ideating prototype ideas, I spent some time playing other popular VR titles to take note on how they used the various VR affordances.
I decided on a few actions that I wanted to have within my game that were fun to me. The main action I found engaging was punching and hitting things. I also noted that crafting sims seemed common for VR titles and was relatively low scope. My team had also chosen "one with the elements" as a core theme for our game protypes.
From this information I designed Son of Hephaestus, a VR forging games where players would use the various natural elements around them to craft various godly weapons for their customers. Players would perform various actions like punching and throwing to cause events around their workshop to happen.
Prototype Development
For the prototype, I spent most of my time working on the core actions for the player. Due to time constraints, I had to scope down, only choosing 3 core actions for the player. Punching, Grabbing and Crafting.
The punching took the most of my time, as I had to figure out a way to check the velocity of the player's fists when clenched. Because of this, the other two actions were left unpolished. This did not pose as a major issue however as many people seemed to enjoy the punching action the most, even going as far to punch the NPC, something my designer decided to expand upon later.
Further Development
Once the prototype had been submitted and collaborative work could start, my team chose my idea to continue developing. Most of the work just required more aspects of the game to be functional as the core mechanics were already done. For me, this meant I had to continue developing the prototype's crafting system as it was only hard coded to craft a single item.
My goal was to program the crafting manager in a way that would allow my team's designer and other programmer to add new crafting recipes if needed. One of my previous projects Ore Operator, had hard coded crafting recipes, which I wanted to avoid for this project.
To create it, I learnt how to use C# struct variables and created one for a crafting recipe. This initial version of the crafting system proved to be helpful when we made changes to the recipes. However, this version of it lacked the ability to handle recipes with different amounts of steps, with it only being able to handle recipes with two steps. It also did not have functionality for the player to hammer the item to finish it off.
It was also around this time that my team also chose to change the name of the game to one that was easier to say "God of Forging".
Late Development and Showcase
During late development, while my team's other programmer handled the tutorial and dialogue systems, I still had to make major improvements to the crafting manager. Playtesters wanted more customisability with the swords and wanted more feedback when crafting. This meant the crafting manager needed improvements to handle more engaging crafting recipes.
So, I dedicated more time to improve the crafting manager significantly by altering how it searches for possible recipes. With the new crafting manager, it was able to handle recipes of any length, even allowing for diverging recipes seen with the iron and steel swords as they had identical steps in their recipes. The crafting manager was also able to include the last hammering step, which added to the player's engagement with the system.
After an initial showcase to my class and tutors, playtesters suggested adding more customisability for the swords. So my designer added a way to change the rgb values of the swords, while I added a way for VFX to be added.
Because of the major improvements made by my team and I, our game was able to be invited to QUT's Immersive Festival 2025.
