Stellar Knight

A melee adventure game built from the ground up with the IWSDK. Embark on a journey through several planets as you scour planets for fuel to get colonist to a new planet after a horrifc cosmic detour.

Comment

Inspiration

With years of experience with building applications using web technologies, and coming off a nomination for game of the year for the 2024 Polys I wanted to push the envelope even more. I was even more excited to take the IWSDK for a spin, it definitely felt like a step in the right direction for vr web development. My goal is to create a web experience that can rival a native app and exceed expectations. As for the inspiration for the game, I have been toying around with activity based games in VR and have always wanted something that didnt have weapon rather fist were all that stood between you and glory.

What it does

Stellar Knight puts you in the shoes of an operator aboard a spaceship headed to a new world. Unfortunately disaster struck and the ship was separated from its pack and into the Starwild. Now far off course it up to the only person capable of piloting a specialized robot called a Knightframe, capable of withstanding the harsh conditions of alien planets and capable of taking many punches. Embark on a journey to fight these creatures to gain resources to keep the ship going, 5 planets and multitudes of creatures standing in the way of you taking these home lost colonist to a place they can once again call home

How we built it

The game was built from the ground up using the new Immersive Web SDK. Using the spatial editor I was able to create scenes quickly. The ability to drop in a mesh and just tag it as a locomotion able plane is a tremendous win for webxr. I actually ended up coding my own terrain editor to take full advantage of this. On top of that the physics engine is also very smooth and allowed me to add very reactive mechanics to make the experience much more immersive.

Challenges we ran into

As great as the IWSDK is, it definetly has it setbacks. Some was learning curve from trying to properly use the ECS structure and other times it was frustration as things broke unexpectedly specially with the spatial editor. One huge challage I ran into was the spatial editor removing all of my ui panels accross all my scenes the day before the deadline. I could not recover them and the project was essentially unusable, but as bad as that was I was able to move the project to another Spatial project space and bring all my game logic, although rebuilding 6 levels overnight took it out of me. Physics also had a fair share of issues but it all got handled even if with some badages.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am most proud of how complete of an experience I was able to create on my own. I have done this before but with the scene editor it was much easier to stage my ideas before putting them into action. I am proud of the combat mechanics, sounds designs, and sense of immersion I was able to achieve, its going to be hard to distinguish this from a native app or at least tricky to do so blindly, so very proud of that. One major note is that I also created a full terrain system outside of this at the same time, a whole other application to create and texture terrains specifically for the use with IWSDK, it came in real handy and could allow me to build a lot more levels faster.

What we learned

I learned a lot, having many years of experience with 3d web dev makes me really appreciate technology like the IWSDK because I personally know the struggle to make games or business applications with other technologies. I learned a great deal over the past few weeks and can say with confidence I am a professional IWSDK developer.

What's next for Stellar Knight

I want to polish it up a bit more, The story is sound and makes it easy to get lost in exploration , adding more worlds, better AI, a player health system, currently under the pretext of super armor you only deal damage and don't take any but, be weary of the water as it may pull you back. This idea is also a subset of another idea i had before of a melee arena game with similar controls. I am really proud of how it turned out but definitely want to give it more love to really give an experience to those seeking a combat driven VR adventure.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates