Official website: Steam Store Page
Developers: Hammerhead in collaboration with Sky VR
Role: Remote Contract Programmer
Shipped: Yes
Platform: VR (via SteamVR)

Based on the smash TV series, Britannia VR: Out of Your Mind is a virtual reality experience developed in UE4 by Hammerhead in collaboration with Sky VR to support the second season of Sky Atlantic’s Britannia.

A story told in two parts, you step into the world of Druid magic and mysticism, and then later enter the realm of Roman imperialism and power. Along the way, you meet Veran (Mackenzie Crook) and Ania (Liana Cornell), brought to life in incredible photo-realistic detail, recreated with volumetric capture.

The experience was selected to take part in the Venice Film Festival 2019’s VR showcase where it received a lot of praise.

As a remote contract programmer on the project, I assisted in bringing the team’s vision to (virtual) reality. Working closely with the developers at Hammerhead over the course of 3 months, I played a key role in implementing gameplay mechanics and interactions.

Throughout my time on the project, some of my core feature areas included the tutorial level, and activities on the Roman branch of the experience. The team also utilised my skills to assist on improving other aspects of the experience including optimisation of in house tools (plugins), experience flow, bug fixing, general systems optimisation, and assisting the audio engineer with exposing variables for data driven audio.

Working with a mixture of C++ and Blueprint, not only did I create entirely new features for the experience, but also reviewed and edited multiple pre-existing systems for greater performance, and flexibility (especially later in the dev cycle).

During my time with Hammerhead, I was also able to introduce new practices to the team that have now become an integral part of their workflow. The team were extremely welcoming to new ideas, and my experience of working with other small studios allowed for a new perspective to assist in their day-to-day workings.

NOTE: More details to follow in the coming months.