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INCANTLAS Reimagined
Year
2024
Project Type
Platform
Personal
Quest
I learned so much about intuitive hand tracking and its potential from creating Incantlas. After my thesis year, I experimented with newer and more immersive magic casting mechanics. I also consumed large amounts of fantasy media at the time that directly inspired me.
MECHANICS REDESIGN
Mechanics Video
After finishing up the Incantlas demo I found some mechanics to be lackluster, and so I redesigned some of them. On top of the redesigns I added a new spell that can be altered with voice incantations using Meta's Wit AI SDK and service.
Design Breakdown
One spell that I wanted to overhaul was the shoot spell. In the old design, the player shoots out an auto tracking projectile by flicking out their index finger. The issue is that this is the most common spell used by the player and having to spam their index finger in and out is simply annoying. Another problem is that there is much less control in the directions of the projectiles. Players often see that the projectiles are tracking targets that they did not intend to hit. With these pain points in mind, I redesiged the spell to be simpler in a way. I made it continuous with a static gesture and scratched the target tracking. This gave the player more control and also made it much more fun to use.
Old Spell
New Spell
Crawler Redesign
The old crawler had a very simple design with an unanimated body. The new design I made doesn't really fit into Incantlas, but I wanted to make it a more threatening enemy to deal with by making it semi invincible. Right now you can only slow it down by shooting off its feet as it will constantly come after you. The only way to truly kill it is by casting a fire based spell to char it. For future updates I want to put it in a level design where the player needs to learn how to cast fire spells as they slow down the Crawlers; A good mix of intense pressure and problem solving.
The legs of the new crawlers are inspired by the living armors from episode 3 of Dungeon Meshi. When body parts are knocked off they can all be picked up and reattached. The moment I saw them a light bulb popped up on my head and I knew I had to try this concept.
SWORDS CONCEPT
Video
After graduating I consumed so much fantasy content that I had an overdose of ideas for magic casting in VR. I settled on the concept of using a pool of floating swords that can be controlled in varying ways. I only ever tested with specific gestures, but this time I focused on the simple action of checking if each finger is extended or retracted. This system is very intuitive and works fluidly with hand tracking.
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