This prototype of a game makes use of stationary portals as a means of redirected walking within a non-euclidean environment. That is to say: all movement in virtual reality is real-world movement. To play this game you require a 4x4 meter space free of obstacles.
Work your way around this space altering environment to roll back changes made to scale, time, and perspective. Each of these aspects represents a puzzle branch. Each team meber had one puzzle branch assigned. I was personally in charge of the scale puzzle branch. I also worked on other important systems like the interaction with props and the out of bounts system, along with tools to easily map our scenes to the real world play space, and a culling system to load and unload rooms.
The Merge Conflict
Course Project ~ Open Project in Interaction Design
Summary
Details
Start date:
2024-03-13
End date:
2024-05-28
Team size: 3
Status:
Closed
Keywords
- Unity
- VR
- Portals
- Level/Puzzle/Game Design
Contributions
- Scale Portal Puzzle Branch
- Out-of-bounds System
- Interaction System
Project Overview
This page is a Work In Progress
We didn't fully finish the game as we were quite ambitious with the time we were given (2 months full time). The time branch did manage to provide a full gameplay experience but the two other branches were unfinished. While the perspective branch missed the implementation of a few puzzles, the scale branch faced major technical complications due to the implementation of portals we were using, which had to undergo severe changes to adapt to our needs. While in the scale branch you can explore all the rooms, most of the puzzles and room navigation lack guidance and visual and auditory cues. With that in mind, you can find and download the game in the following link.
→ Click here to see the game on Itch.io
You can also see a full playthrough of every branch in the following videos:
Here you can see a few behind-the-scenes screenshots on how all the rooms were distributed spatially. We used a single scene where we placed everything, and then implemented a system to load and unload 'portal adjacent' rooms. All the rooms were placed close to the origin of the coordinate system to avoid floating point precission errors, which is quite drastic in VR systems. Additionally, to visually understand how rooms connected to each other we implemented a custom Unity gizmos view that draws a line between connected portals.
To analize our results during playtests we used a system to measure how players moved across the rooms. With these images you can see how everything connects and understand the nature of the player space. Each color represents a different game room.
Level Design
This page is a Work In Progress
Here are a few pictures of the original design diagrams, and a cleaned version for the puzzle branch I was personally involved with.
Here are several rooms I designed. On the first figure you can find 3 rooms contained within a larger one. The second figure shows how we used the blue and yellow lines to have a representation of the real-life player space to the in-game rooms we designed.
Tools Implementation
This page is a Work In Progress