The game is set in M.G. road, Bangalore.

And to capture its essence, a lot of reference photographs were taken. And due to the covid pandemic, it became possible to take relatively crowd-free photographs of the city.

Once enough reference photographs were collected, I set out to model the major buildings in a brute-force, straight-forward manner. But this was turning out to be inefficient time-wise, and the visuals were unsatisfatory.
So camera-matching techniques were adopted to quickly model, as well as capture texture data from the images. This turned out to provide visually, exactly what was required, while also being quick.

Filling the city block with buildings was far more challening than I thought. I needed more buildings than what the actual location had to offer, so I went about the city for more references. Once I had references and the models, effort was needed in removing and altering real-world logos and brands. Photoshop had some great tools to help with that.

Coming up with fictional buildings was harder still, for me.

The city in the game is a fusion of fictional and actual buildings from various parts of bangalore.

I am from the Quake school (sorry, Epic) of gaming. The weapons in my games reflect that.

In fact, Quake 2 was the inspiration for the nail gun in BLR80. I liked the rotary mechanism on the weapon and implemented the animation through code. All other weapon animations were animated in 3DS Max and brought in.

Particle effects were a straight forward implementation using Unreal Niagara.

For the rail gun's undulation effect, morph targets were created in 3ds max and imported into Unreal where the effect was manipulated in real-time. Similarly, morph targets were created for the flame thrower particles, since alpha rendering on the Quest would cause a performance drop.

All HUD readouts were implemented using Unreal UMG widgets.

All static assets were lit offline using Vray, with the lighting baked into the diffuse texture.
All dynamic assets were pre-lit to provide shading and then dynamically lit in-game with a single world-space lightmap.

What is a World-space Lightmap? you ask.
Well.. its a lightmap that is projected on to the world using world-space co-ordinates rather than UV coordinates.

All the various glows, strobing, streaking and pulsating effects were achieved through UV animation and a control texture.

This made it easy to rapidly integrate new effects without additional programming.

And since this was all integrated into the main shader, no material changes or additional draw calls were required.

All the videos presented in the game is just one large 8K texture.

Offline, frames were extracted from video clips and then tiled out in photoshop, with a custom script, which was then used as a texture in Unreal and played out as a flipbook animation in real-time.

Each video has 256 frames, which are cycled through, in a loop.

The advantage of using a single texture over separate actual video files was the support for arbitrary display sizes, mipmaps and eliminating any need for run-time decoding of the video stream, plus also reducing material parameter switches.

All animations were made with 3ds max and brought into Unreal Engine.

The sound track for the game was performed and sung by rZee.

The track was provided with and without vocals, so that I could edit and mix as I chose, for the needs of the game.
The audio track was the first component to get done with and was completed in about 3 months, very early on in the games development timeline.

The voice overs in the game were performed by me. The languages featured are english, kannada and malayalam.

Why malayalam? you ask

Except for the audio track, all audio capture was done on my phone and edited and mixed using Audacity.

Audio effects too are a combination of various stock and custom audio sounds.

The city audioscape is actual audio captured on location at both mg road and other parts of bangalore and then layered and mixed with other ambient sounds.

All programming for BLR80 was done in blueprints, even the bot AI code.

The AI in BLR80 is a simple hierarchical finite state machine. For pathfinding and navigation, the built-in AI controller system was used.

The bots in BLR80 come in different flavours, there are the stealth types and the aggressive in-your-face types. The stealth types advance by sneaking, while the aggressive types, make a beeline towards you, the player.

BLR80 is powered by Unreal Engine 4 and was developed entirely with Blueprints.

I love Unreal and without it I would not have been able to release BLR80 anytime in 2022.

10. Conclusion

Work on BLR80 began on July 13th, 2020 and was done with, by September 2022.

3x the time I had originally thought it would take.
It runs on the Quest, Quest2 and Rift and for the most part holds up at 72Hz.

It was NOT all fun and games, making it.

Trudging on for weeks on end was the norm, and then there would be a brief moment of joy - when the various parts came together and interconnected well.

This cycle would continue until the modeling, animations, texturing, gameplay, level design, AI, story, voice-overs, audio-editing, audio effects, visual effects, website design, trailers, teasers, marketing shots, programming were all done.

The game drew inspiration from the movies and games that I grew up on.
And I tried to create the world I'd like to see in VR. I am happy with what I have made, and I imagine in the hands of a better artist, it would've turned out a lot better.

I like BLR80. It is a game I would buy.