The games were designed to teach the visiting public about desalination and water management, explaining processes and the reasons behind them in an entertaining and easy to understand manner.

After finalising the game design during collaborative workshops with SA Water, Monkeystack then took on the creative direction of the project. The team created the still and animated components and produced the games for multiple platforms; putting them through focused audience testing before final delivery.

Monkeystack was brought onboard to populate highly detailed, photogrammetrically created scenes with believable soldiers with the final product processed to work in a real-time VR environment.

First, we tackled character modelling to create a set of believable CG soldiers using captures of the original uniforms, hats, backpacks and boots, bringing the soldiers to life with realistic, real-time animated actions. By using a mix of motion capture for more generic movements and hand keyed animations for more specific actions, we streamlined the animation process while still delivering a quality outcome suitable for VR. We then processed complex photogrammetry assets to recreate realistic, real-time CG representations of the battle fields from 1942.

There was significant volume of processing work required to optimise the scenes as the photogrammetry assets ran in the hundreds of millions of polygons and needed to be significantly reduced to run in a real-time environment. The final result is an immersive and powerful educational in both a VR and AR App experience.

We took a cinematic approach to the visual styling and edited fast and furiously to engage an audience with heart-stopping racing scenes set in a fictional, yet familiar cityscape.

With a gear grinding sound design and composition from local composer, Justin Pounsett from The Audio Embassy, Midnight Revolution would be one awesome game to play.

The Vault game is a journey into history, an immersion into the experiences and emotions of those whose lives were very different from our own. There, we discover unfamiliar feelings, uncanny characters who are like us and yet unlike. It is also a journey into the human condition, into a metaphoric space in which being truly, richly human is the only way to survive-provoking us to consider not only our past but our future.

The Vault won the Best Console / PC Hardcore Console and Best Indie Game categories at the Game Connection Development Awards at Game Connection Europe 2018.

See more at The Vault website.

 

The viewer is placed within a highly detailed apartment, complete with cinematic lighting and sound design, where they can move within the environment and interact with a series of objects.

This approach to building interactive worlds in XR is one that we are constantly refining and employing within other VR projects. From an industry training and education perspective, we want to enable people to better navigate environments and objects and familiarise themselves with their function or specification while in an immersive, low-risk environment.