Connor Hasson
Portfolio
Cast VR by Humble Sage Games was the first game I worked on that was released to the public (excluding the things I made in uni). While it wasn’t exactly a commercial success, it was a valuable learning opportunity as it taught me both the ins and outs of game development, as well as the differences in how normal and VR programs are developed.I was focused on the gameplay systems and I was exceptionally proud of the spellcasting system that I made, though sadly, half of it was scrapped in favour of a substantially simpler system. There were two components to it. Firstly, when the player wanted to cast a spell, they would need to draw the spell’s rune in the air. This would then load the spell onto the player’s wand, which they could fire whenever they chose. After firing, it would be unloaded and they would need to draw the rune again. This was the part which was scrapped which honestly makes me sad as it was a lot of work and a lot of fun to use.The second part of the spellcasting system was once a spell had been cast. This is all behind the scenes and is simply how the code was structured. The system was completely modular, allowing any kind of spell you could think of to be used. Once a spell was cast, it would create a simple object that handled the spell for its entire lifetime. This object would connect itself to the player’s controllers so that, no matter what the developers wanted the spell to do, it would be able to access any input required. This allowed us to create spells which rather complex functionality without having to make any glaring changes to the base code.
The Evolving Forest (EF) was a game that Humble Sage Games was contracted to create by the creator of the Evolving Forest Genesis NFT collection. These NFTs are 3d alien plants and there are thousands of them. I’m not familiar with what led to this partnership, but I was heavily involved in the project’s development.EF was meant to be a game where those who have purchased one or more of the NFTs could take care of it in a gardening game. The player could water their plant, watch it grow from a seed and then, assuming they did well, harvest their plant and create a brand-new plant from its seeds. The idea was for players to be able to then export these new plants as NFTs which they could then do with as they wished.Sadly, this project was never finished. About 18 months into its development, the client decided to cut funding. We spent the last few weeks of development polishing what we had done before we handed off the project.Nevertheless, the store page on Epic Games remains up so you can see some screenshots, though I highly doubt that downloading it would let you access anything.