Intro (Shantanu):

Our project is a Virtual Reality experience with the goal of creating a unique environment to complement our gameplay. We developed this project for the Oculus Rift & used Unity to build the game. When we created the game, we decided on a central mechanic of scaring an NPC with surrounding objects. We decided to build our environment around this concept.  

The game takes place in a house with a single room & a lot of furniture lying around, the player is meant to interact with the surrounding objects in order to scare the NPC.  The player can interact with most objects present in the game and they have the ability to throw them around. Anytime the player interacts with an object, the NPC turns red.

In terms of what the group did, Michelle did the house modeling, environment and concept art, Shantanu modeled the furniture and other objects in the house, David did the main programming for the game and Cindy did the character modeling and assisted with the programming.

What went right (Michelle):

It’s hard to talk about our goals that went right since a lot of our initial ideas from our concept changed, and thus, so did many of our goals. But I still feel like we were successful in reaching the particular bar of what a game was in the two weeks we were actually able to work on the game.

Although coding the player movement and their spooky grabbing mechanic, which we called the force, had taken up a large duration of the game development, I believe that still found success in that our two coders, Cindy and David, were able to build code wasn't from the demos, since it was the only way to accomplish what we wanted to do. Despite all the frustration and stress they went through, in the end, we were able to achieve the results we wanted. In fact, one of our classmates even commented on how smooth the grabbing was. If we had more time, we would definitely add some clarity in what the player is going to grab.

In the first week, we had a solid idea of what we were going to have to do and model, but it was only about a week later that we realized extreme changes needed to be pushed forward. Especially because of the pace in which we were progressing and issues we were encountering; there was no way we would enough time to make three models and all the animations for them, along with all the assets that were still in progress. In addition to that, we were trying to figure out an efficient way to texture everything and, eventually, we found a solution to that when a pair of game devs, who worked on a VR experience meant for art galleries, came in and introduced ProBuilder, which substantially increased our progress by allowing us to easily built an environment and texture it. And to be quite honest, the environment we have currently looks much better than what we had originally planned.

Adding on to the introduction of ProBuilder and how it immensely helped us in texturing, we were able to get the asset models made by Shantanu into the game quickly and it was even more helpful since we were on a tight schedule for the formal Demo Presentation the very next day. The only step after that was finding good colors to match the style of the environment. The one drawback to this was that I couldn’t place any complicated textures on the objects since there’s was no way to edit the UV texture if it wasn’t built with Probuilder. However, this ended up satisfying the theme of a low-poly, simple and clean style we were aiming for.

Building the house and environment with Probuilder took a while to get the hang of but after a couple of instances of recreating several objects like fences, the floating sidewalk and the foundation of the house itself, I was able to work on building the entirety of the house and remake the flat plane beneath it into stylized blocks. The concept I was going for was an imaginative tiny plane that was built on a grid system and formed with cube blocks. Since this was the only area the player could interact with, I worked extensively to perfect its look. Another aspect that required a lot of remaking to fit this appearance was the “low poly” textures of the house floor and walkway and porch, fences, floating sidewalk and checkered-like grass textures that were inspired by the grass ground in the VR game, SwingStar. Despite the many reiterations I had to go through to get the perfect texture, it was all worth it to achieve the peaceful effect of the environment.

In fact, the reason why we wanted the environment to appear as soft as possible was so that the player would be able to see every detail when in VR facefirst while still maintaining a comfortable experience with as little nausea as possible. Hence the decision for low-poly graphics as well as the choice to turn off shadows for our game and, instead, opting to place lights around the front yard, on the porch and a faint cyan light within the house. We focused on what we wanted the player to see and the clarity of it but manipulated the space so what they saw wasn’t glaringly in the player’s face.

What went wrong (Cindy):

• Game Control
• Since we had zero experience with VR coding, we spent about two weeks just trying to figure out why our control didn’t work properly. Every time we fixed an issue, another appeared. It became very stressful and took up too much time that we could have spent on other aspects like modeling or texturing.
• Game Mechanism of Possessing Objects
• We originally wanted to have a function where the player can possess pieces of furniture and therefore threaten the NPC. Eventually, we ran out of time and lost the energy to figure out raycasting from fingertip to furniture and used another function of utilizing the force to grab furniture from far away. Even though the new function worked, it is still a shame for us to give up the original idea because we don’t have enough time.
• NPC Patrol
• We wanted the NPC to patrol in the room and therefore make it harder for players to threaten him. In the end, we didn’t have enough time to figure out Nav Mesh Agent in Unity. Even though we tried for a few days, something with it just didn’t work. As a result, we had to have the NPC in the sitting pose during the entire gameplay.
• Sound Effect
• We planned to have different sound effects for different objects hitting the ground and the NPC. The collider on the NPC didn’t work out that well because sometimes objects thrown at him would be bounced off without even touching him. As a result, we set the collider on the NPC to isTrigger and cut the sound effects for hitting the NPC. Since we spent too much time on trying to get the basic game mechanism working, we then ran out of time to add sound effects to our game.
• Storytelling
• We wanted to have the NPC walk into the house to guide the player in there, but since we didn’t figure out the patrol of him, we failed to do so. Instead, we used cardboard boxes in the room to imply that the NPC just moved in. Another thing about the storytelling is that we do not have an ending to the game. We didn’t get time to figure out the menu in VR.

What we learned (David):

As our first VR project, we’ve learned a lot about VR game design and making. We were able to understand some fundamental concept and techniques of VR game making by using online resources and utilized them into our own project. This learning method has really pushed us to our limit and had constantly challenged us in terms of our programming abilities throughout the entire production process. The difficulties of this projects has also helped us to re-defined our team works and team composition. We’ve evolved our team works into a more free form where team members were able to assist each other and take on different tasks that were not related to their assigned role at the planning phase of the project. Besides that, we’ve learned how to plan each step of the process based on our progress in a more realistic way. We’ve learned how to evaluate our individual abilities and changing our focus and goals based on the time we had for the development. Although making compromise can be very discouraging sometimes, the changes are able to make us finish our project on time. The failures we had in this project has re-taught the importance of planning and time managing, especially for the projects that is unique like this one, where the team’s resource (both equipment and knowledge) was limited.