Border Bots VR, published by Team17 and built in Unity is a comedic slice-of-life, narrative-driven puzzle game where players use physical interactions, deduction and brute force to identify malfunctioning robots whilst keeping their job safe and their mechanical companions happy. The game features a roster of unique characters with full voice-acting, light player customisation options, and a shop allowing players to buy upgrades and trinkets to flesh out their apartment.
As Technical Director at vTime, I was responsible for leading the development team throughout implementation, designing and building core gameplay systems, ensuring each target platform was supported and performance remained stable.
Key Contributions
Core Architecture
Border Bots VR features a day / night cycle and a ‘morning / workday / evening’ segment for each in-game day, each with narrative hooks, key events and gameplay systems. I built the game’s base architecture, core loop, and associated development tools, allowing developers and designers to easily launch the game at any point in the narrative directly from within the editor.
A clean resource management system allowed the game to load all required assets, characters, audio and gameplay data, and configure levels dynamically for time-of-day and narrative context, whilst ensuring unused resources were seamlessly unloaded.
Build & Deploy Pipeline
As the game targeted PSVR2, SteamVR, and Meta Quest, it was critical that the development team could build and test for each platform easily. I implemented the CI pipeline allowing developers to compile and deploy to target machines within minutes with a variety of build configurations.
Automated uploads to each target distribution platform ensured that partners (publishing team, external QA, localisation team, and play-testers) could retrieve nightly builds or preview feature-branches as and when required.
Puzzle Design Tooling
The core of each in-game workday revolves around a set of rules and restrictions that the robots visiting the player’s booth must adhere to.
These rules may incorporate restrictions on physical attributes of the robots themselves, actions the player must take, contraband items which must be confiscated or destroyed, amongst others.
In order to achieve maximum flexibility, I built the tooling that allowed the design team to implement each day’s rules in a no-code, data-centric format which retained the ability to chain rules and logic together.
Platform Support
Each target platform required specific functionality for compliance, platform integration (Achievements / Trophies etc), peripheral support, storage and more.
I led support for each platform, building the game’s core systems to ensure that platform-specific functionality and behaviour was an implementation detail rather than a project in and of itself.
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Steam
Meta Quest
PlayStation VR2
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