Fostering Innovation Through Personal Improvement Time
A peak into the awesome projects our team created during our PIT initiative!
As a company specializing in a rapidly developing technology (XR), we are constantly looking for ways to better foster innovation, design, and creativity. Personal Improvement Time (PIT) has been our secret sauce to staying on top of a quickly evolving industry and empowering our team. 🌠
So how does PIT work? All Breachers (“Breachers” is not officially approved but I think it sounds awesome and i’m hoping it’ll catch on 🤞) have 3 hours a week they can set aside to work on a project designed to help them level up a new skill or develop something their interested in. It’s a fantastic program that has resulted in a TON of really cool projects. Some PIT projects have even gone on to turn into official Breach products!
Once a quarter the team presents their PIT projects internally before selecting a handful and showing them off to the world in a public PIT Stop event. This blog is a peak into those projects! Sit back, relax, and enjoy this teaser of nine projects from our talented team. 🍵
Block Builder 🧊
Creator: Andreas, Tech Lead
Block Builder is a cozy game where you place blocks of various shapes and colors to build small dioramas. It’s built using an Entity Component System (ECS) with a focus on interaction design. The beautiful sunrise, music, sound effects, and colors all work together to create a calming environment to unleash your creativity in.
Hide & Seek 🥷
Creator: Killian, Developer
Hide & Seek takes the classic game and gives it an exciting VR twist! Put on your VR headset and wonder through real life environments while hiding from a hunter that can travel around the world at super speed. Playing this immediately brought me back to the adrenaline rush i’d feel as a child while hiding from my friends. I tested it in our local city Trondheim, but next time i’m definitely hiding near the Eiffel tower.
The Old Barn 🏚️
Creator: Adam, Design Lead
The Old Barn is an exploration of environment building and narrative design. Explore a warm, messy, and strangely familiar environment that immerses you in a narrative about everything and nothing; about life, experience, dreams, and memories we carry within ourselves. The Old Barn is designed as an evocative space which the player can interpret freely, stimulated by pleasant and calming visuals, and associations formed while listening to the narrative. The experience includes voice acting by Tara Fraser and uses Quixel Megascans in combination with self-produced 3D scans of items found across several different real-world locations -- including old barns.
Bubblewrap Mine Sweeper🫧
Creator: Inge, Design Lead
Bubblewrap Minesweeper takes a favorite pastime - popping bubble wrap - and combines it with a beloved game: Mine Sweeper!
Unreal Skiing ⛷️
Creator: Ståle, Design Lead
Unreal Skiing follows Ståle’s previous breakout hit, Unreal Biking! By donning a VR headset and mimicking a skiing motion you can ski alongside the Spuds from our beloved VR game Kartoffl. If it’s a sport, Ståle can make a VR version of it in Unreal. What will he make next? Unreal Football? Unreal Tennis? Guess we’ll just have to wait and see. My vote is Unreal Breakdancing. Let’s see you put that in VR Ståle 👀.
Heksespillet 🪴
Creator: Ólöf, Director of Art & Design
Heksespillet (roughly translates to Witch Game in English), is an idea for a game that lets you become a modern day witch through exploring the magical intersection between your device (phone / VR headset) and XR technologies (AR/XR/MR). It seeks to answer if you can create an incentive to play a VR game more frequently if you spend part of your time outside VR. Imagine collecting digital plants in AR while exploring the real world, then donning your VR headset at home to create potions and decorate your room in XR!
Substance Designer World 🎨
Creator: Connie, Art Lead
Substance Designer World was a project by Connie that focused on leveling up her skills with Substance Designer. Her goal was to create a new material every week and setup a showcase scene using Unity HDRP. As you can see from the insanely beautiful photos above, Connie nailed it!
Laser Matrix 🟩
Creator: Daniel, IT Development Apprentice
Laser Matrix is an MR game being developed by our first Breach apprentice! The goal of the game is to press all the green panels as quickly as possible while avoiding the red zones. It’s a physically demanding game that excels at reminding you of just how inflexible you really are.
Falling Sands ⌛
Creator: Martin, Tech Lead
Falling Sands is a 3D Cellular Automata game. Martin’s main goal was to remake the Powder Game in VR while skilling up in game and data oriented design. He also used a DOTS implementation so that the simulation runs on the CPU, resulting in blazing fast performance.
Come to The PIT Stop!
All the PIT projects listed in this blog will be playable during our PIT Stop event on August 22nd! Remember to book a ticket 🎟️ (it’s free). Come meet the devs behind the projects and nerd out over XR innovation 🍻. See a PIT project your interested in but can’t make it to the event? No worries! Head over to our Discord and we’ll be happy to nerd out with you there too 👋.
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