The Draft

The Draft is a virtual reality, strategy, sports game where the units are also the ball that you guide into a “goalpost”. The idea behind The Draft is giving the player complete control of all aspects of the game. A traditional RTS game lets the player control the strategy and micro manage units but the actual combat itself is not under player’s control and they are a battle of stats and rules. In a full combat game, the player doesn’t have the control of unit movements like that of an RTS. The Draft is a unique blend of real time strategy, turn based action and VR combat.

The map also features varying topography and spots of interests which activates various effects on the map to influencing map control including temporarily transforming to an archer giving control over a wider area.

The game is built using Unreal Engine 4.15, with a team of 20 including 7 programmers, 7 producers and 6 artists. The project closed its beta phase on July 1st, 2017.

I primarily worked as a Gameplay Programmer on the project, but I also acted as a Tools Programmer, Systems Programmer and Animation Programmer when the project demanded the work. Some of my highlights on this project are:

• I worked on building the system to transition from strategy to combat and back again.
• I built the archer gameplay from scratch, with help from two other designers and an artist.
• I created a system to improve the sword combat by implementing realistic blocking for the enemy AI. I did this by tracking whether the player is attacking and then, utilizing the animation system of Unreal Engine, I blended the block animation to trigger at the correct height.
• Towards the end of the project, my main focus on the project was play-testing and bug fixing.

The full final presentation of the game can be found in the following video.