Holo-Cars

ROLE

Handiwork, Programming

DESCRIPTION

Holo-Cars is a game is Rocket League lite where 4 players control a car, hit a ball with their cars and try to score in the opponents goal. The difference is the cars can’t jump, have no boost and the maps have walls as well as bumper in the way to allow different strategies. The goal of the project wasn’t to create an original game as more so as it was to create an unconventional an creative way to play the game

The game is displayed by a screen or a projector onto a pyramid of plexiglass. By doing so, we can display four different points of view of the game and create the illusion of playing while looking at a hologram. We were able to make the game playable with a remote control car controller to inject the player with a feeling of nostalgia if they ever had one in their youth or currently have one still.

YEAR

2019

GENRE

Racing

PLATFORM

Steam

MADE WITH

Unity

Handiwork

The hologram effect works by having 4 cameras in the game that are filming the 4 different sides of the game. We then show these 4 different points of view on 1 screen but rotated to be the right side if you were to turn the screen. We also had to make a horizontal flip on these points of view so when looking at the reflection on the plexiglass, the controls for the left and the right aren’t inverted.During this project, I was in charge of making the plexiglass pyramid as well as a screen holder to allow the screen to be over the pyramid and not under it. That way, the game looked as if it was trapped under a pyramid of glass and the players couldn’t see in between the plexiglass to break the illusion of the hologram.

The hardest part of this project was to make it work with a projector. As fun as it was to be able to project the screen on the pyramid, it was also pretty obvious to anybody playing the game what was happening by just looking at the screen. It also limited us as if we wanted to upscale the project and make a bigger pyramid, we would need to buy a giant screen to make the game bigger and have a bigger screen holder. We then tried our best to try and reflect the light of the projectors with a film from Rear Projection Films, but sadly the light was simply too strong and we could get the reflection, but it would also go through and be shown on the floor. As the project was only one session, we didn’t have the time to find another solution in time for the end of the project.

Unusual controller

Another challenge for this game was to find and make work a remote control car controller. We could find a lot of controllers, but not the one we were looking for. Most of the controllers we found were only a trigger to go forward and a wheel allowing the car to turn right or left. We wanted to find one that would also allow the player to head back because, compared to real life, if the car got stock, the player could go pick up their cars to put them back on the good path. We ended up finding a company in France who made the controller shown in the image and had around ten of these controllers still in stock, by the time we received this one and made it work, all the others were already both and we sadly couldn't find any more at the time.

The controller was still plugged in by USB so it was easy to connect, but we still had to find the right driver to make it work with Unity. We also wanted to make the game work with a wireless version of the controller, but the issues with the projector’s projection on the plexiglass took too much of our time and we had to put the idea away.

If I could do it again

As we were more focused on making the hologram and the pyramid work in time, we didn’t want to make a game too complicated that would take time away from making the effect work. Because of that, the game in the end wasn’t deep enough to keep the interest of the players for more than one or two games. If we could do it again, I would like to change a bit of the gameplay and the effects so they can take advantage of the hologram effect.

I would also like to find a way to make the reflection of the projector work on the pyramid and make the wireless controllers connect and work with the game so we could finally have the experience we desired at the beginning of the production.

Rokurokubi