Back in 2022, WIMO Games was starting to investigate VR games. At the time, my job was to work closely with an outsourcing team in Spain to build a vertical slice of a mobile game called Unnatural Selection (UNS). The object was to get a viable product out there as fast as possible, to put it out for public consumption, and to see how close to expected metrics it was. Most mobile games are failures, but if you can "fail fast," your company is at less risk. When you do find something that works, you can go all in (as they did with our game Dice RPG).
When I got wind that we were transitioning to VR, I instantly wanted to try making our UNS mobile game as a VR game (UNSVR!). To that end, I drew up a PowerPoint pitch deck and presented it to our executives. They were interested and happy I had taken that initiative, but they wanted something a bit less risky and strange for our first VR project. I can't say I blame them!
Below are a few of the slides from that PowerPoint deck:
Later, in 2023, WIMO hosted a game jam internally and encouraged all teams to make VR games. Ryan Chapman and I were co-captains and decided to make UNSVR a reality. To be perfectly clear, the Unnatural Selection base game (whether on PC or Mobile) was originally Ryan's brainchild. Ryan had been dreaming of making a fish breeding game FOR YEARS. This game just wouldn't have happened without Ryan. That said, as the sole VR designer for the team (in this instance), I borrowed from the original pitch deck and created something more manageable for us to create in the span of seven days.
I wrote up both a design document and a less pitch-oriented, design PowerPoint deck that would help us define the boundaries of our scope while keeping the original flavor of the game we wanted to build. Below are a few slides from that Powerpoint.
Unfortunately, we were still very ambitious and a few items had to be cut halfway through our game jam because we realized we wouldn't have time to implement them. For example, we didn't have time to build a way to remove decoration items (only place). We didn't have time to make the final whale that swims through the environment something you can grab onto or "ride," instead, proximity would move the whale along as you swam next to it. The quest cave map couldn't be something that was slowly revealed as you played, instead, it was just a "mall map" on the wall of the quest cave.
If there was to be an update someday to this game, we always envisioned a second saltwater environment and adding in a few of these wanted features. We're pretty happy with how the game turned out and how good the game looks for seven days of work.
As cheesy and obvious as it is, PowerPoint (good ol' PowerPoint) remains a great tool for communicating ideas with your team.
If you're interested in downloading and playing UNSVR on PC, Click here.
Happy Dueling!
