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For Concordia grad, winning is just the beginning

After earning a prize at last year’s Quebec-wide video game competition, Eric Provencher worked to commercialize his team’s game
June 5, 2017
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By Lucas Napier-Macdonald


For many, when a competition ends, it’s time to move on. The effort is done. The hill has been climbed.

Yet Eric Provencher, BCSc 16, lead developer of Radiant Crusade, kept on pushing after his team’s game took home Best Quality of the 3C (camera, characters and controls) at the 2016 Ubisoft Game Lab Competition. He wanted to update the game and bring it to market.

Radiant Crusade A rendering of all the vegetation models in Radiance Games’ Radiant Crusade, a stunning example of a collaboration between Concordia students in the Faculty of Fine Arts and Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science.

“Winning was kind of like a starting point,” says Provencher, who graduated from Concordia’s Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering with a computer games option.

“It showed me we could actually make something worthwhile, and it hinted to me that I needed to push it forward and take it to the next level.”

For a year after the competition, the young developer and about half of the original team of eight students — made up in equal parts from Concordia’s Faculty of Fine Arts and Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science — toiled in a design studio creating a virtual reality (VR) version of Crusade.

Eric Provencher Eric Provencher, lead developer of virtual reality video game Radiant Crusade, earned his BCSc in computer games at Concordia in 2016.

The shift presented an unexpected challenge for Radiance Games, the company they formed after the competition.

“We had to completely redesign the way users interacted with the game,” Provencher reports.

In the original version of the game, users had a third-party view of the action. From above, they controlled the hero’s vehicle, navigating the shadowy “ocean of darkness” and protecting the life-sustaining tower at its centre. (“Ocean” was the theme of the Ubisoft competition).

In the switch to VR, the Radiance Games team scrapped all the third-person perspective, placing the user right in the vehicle’s cockpit.

They did this because third-person perspectives, which frequently swivel and re-adjust on a dime, tend to nauseate virtual reality players. First-person perspectives are a little steadier, and reduce seasickness provoked by the discrepancy of what the eyes see and what the balance system feels.

“It took a lot of experimenting and trial and error with the way the camera moved and its stabilization,” Provencher says. “It could still probably improve a little, but there’s now a night-and-day difference from what it would’ve been in third person.”

The trailer for Radiant Crusade, the virtual reality update of the game Eric Provencher and his team made for the Ubisoft Game Lab competition.

New horizons

The team of software developers and graphic designers didn’t stop with a VR Crusade, which came out on April 5. They’re now going back and perfecting the initial version of the game for people who don’t own virtual reality headsets, complete with all the redesigned weapons and novel upgrade packages.

Furthermore, the project that the team had originally wanted to design for the competition, a multiplayer racing game, is now in its embryonic phase. Provencher has just finished recruiting new team members.

“I approached connections I’ve made over the years,” he says. “The good thing about being in a university program is you make a lot of friends who have similar goals and passions.”

Indeed, Eric Philippona, the artificial intelligence developer at Radiance who has just left to pursue an opportunity in British Columbia, was a former classmate of Provencher’s. They met in one of their earliest game designer classes, when they were put into teams to make a “procedural” game where the player runs through levels, collecting upgrades and taking out enemies.

“We built that game in a few weeks for our first game development class,” Provencher recalls. “And that really gave us that itch for developing and fleshing out larger projects.”

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