Rift City
Project by Erin
Background
Learn about Rift City and the origin of this idea!
Characters
Meet the vast cast of characters that extend beyond this project!
Project
Here I talk a bit about my process with "A Day in Rift City."
About Rift City
The original story behind Rift City followed a main protagonist named Arbino who is trying to be the best Beat Saber player in the entire League that was founded in the city's center. Beat Saber is obviously not an IP I own, so the story will have to be altered to be more original, but this is where the idea stemmed from.
The city itself was inspired by other VR works such as Beat Saber and the variety of art found in VRChat and was meant to reflect elements of both music and VR technology. I've been working on this world since June of 2024 and plan to eventually develop some sort of animated project with it. Much of the worldbuilding has involved exploring common themes of cyberpunk and figuring out how to put a more colorful twist to it that can then also lean into the genre of solarpunk- a more eco-friendly counterpart. A common characteristic of the cyberpunk genre is having dark (both literally and figuratively) themes, yet I wanted to add more cartoony characteristics.
The main story falls on Arbino. Living paycheck-to-paycheck in an expensive world, they find themselves fighting to ear a living playing in bi-weekly tournaments and winning prize money. Along the way, they run into a mysterious cyborg called "The Master" who claims to be the best player in the League. As they start learning from him, they get caught up in fighting gang members, the League's own top players, and even the League's head director, all because they JUST want to play the dang game.
The Characters
While "A Day in Rift City" only features Arbino and The Master, the cast associated with this world is much larger, with at least 23 other characters. This includes other players of the League Arbino is in, the board members of said League, members of Rift City's infamous gang, The Hellraizers, and supporting side characters. If you'd like to see any of the other characters, you can follow this link to where I store them and their information. Not all characters have profiles built out yet, but the majority of them do.
The VR Project
As my IMD capstone project, I chose to make a virtual reality game of this world as I felt it fitting to the theme of the story. I took this on as a solo project, which, while it was certainly not easy by any means, it helped me learn a lot about each process of game design and how it all blends to make a project work. My area of "expertise" is 2D art, so creating a 3D game was a massive challenge, but I wanted to see how I could translate 2D designs to a 3D space. I created this game using Unity's OpenXR features as well as Meta's Interaction SDK and used Autodesk MAYA for modeling everything. I learned how to work with IMD's motion capture equipment to make all of the in-game animations, and then how to edit them within MAYA. I learned how to get a better grasp at the C# programming language as well as how to accommodate assets for a VR experience.
Unity also only crashed on me once, so I think that's a win.