Frostpoint VR: Proving Grounds

Partner studio: Puny Human

Concept

A large-scale VR team shooter set in an abandoned Antarctic research base, pitting two ten-player squads against each other and against a third faction of biomechanical creatures that spawn dynamically in response to player activity.

Requirement

Ten-versus-ten VR with a dynamic AI faction is an unusually heavy target, and the title had to build and validate reliably across Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Valve Index while sharing a studio and a pipeline with two other concurrent projects. The requirement was to extend the existing CI/CD platform to cover VR platform requirements and to keep stable, certifiable multi-platform builds flowing to a fixed release date.

Approach

The build engineering practice already running the partner's pipeline extended it to handle VR platform targets and their packaging and validation requirements, on Unreal tooling with Perforce and Jenkins.

Build stability was maintained across the concurrent project load, with platform and systems programming support provided where VR-specific requirements crossed into game code.

Delivery scope

• Build engineering
• CI/CD extension for VR platforms
• DevOps and cloud engineering
• Multi-platform build validation
• Platform and systems programming support
• Release support

Results

• Released 1 December 2020 across Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Valve Index
• Delivered inside the same January 2017 – December 2019 build engineering engagement that covered two further client titles, at marginal incremental cost to the partner
• 6–12 person-months delivered, across 1–2 engineers
• The partner's final non-first-party release before transitioning fully to Xbox Game Studios

Engine: Unreal Engine 4.