HTC Vive First-Person Adventure Game

Role: Programmer, Game Designer.

Skills: C#, Unity.

Project Time: 2017.09 (two weeks)

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Description: 

This is a 2-week team project for bvw round 2. The goal of this round is to make a game in which a guest feels free, and another requirement is we should make it naïve guest friendly which means anyone can play the game without much instruction. We achieve both goals successfully. In the game, the guest is a hamster in a zorbing ball. He has to roll all the way to invite his hamster friends to a party. There is a counter to record how many friends the player invited and is shown everytime when he collected a new friend. The interaction is to roll the ball with the controller with a gesture just like a hamster in a ball. 

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Interaction:

This arms-rolling interaction is a brand-new interaction in VR. I was in charge of the basic mechanics and the physics of the zorbing ball, like let it fall on the ground and apply inertia. To make it feels better, My partner and I have tried several ways and chose the best one in the final version. And it worked really well in VR.

·Arms-rolling interaction

This is one of the most important parts of the game. Since the moving track of the controller is an arc, I decided to check it with a set of triggers posited in arc. If three triggers were hit, I consider it as a full movement and the ball will move forward. This turned out to be fluent and I faked inertia with a loop which slowed down the speed slowly after the player stopped moving.

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·physics of the zorbing ball

I locked the movement while the ball is falling from the desk: the wheel will still rotate but there is no movement. I also added a drag force on a slope when the guest wants to climb. There are also springs and catapults in the room to help guests to explore higher places.
 

 

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Features:

For festival version, we added up to 30 friends in the room for the player to invite. We also showed how many friends they have collected once they get a new one. The counter helped a lot, and this part makes the game more enjoyable. We also cut the game from 5 min to 3 min in order to make it available to more guests. The background music in this game is faster and faster, which is helpful in making the guest know he has ran out of time.

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All the team members put their photo with father as the ending credit. It is also turned out to be a brilliant idea because it is really touching and made people think of their father.

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Festival Themeing:

We set up two vives in the room, and we used a white board to record the highest score. This idea made the guests much more competitive than our expectations: the roll like crazy to break the record, which is so surprising to us all. We themed the room as a hamster party, two of our teammates dress up like hamster and we also placed a tube at the entrance, made carboard wheel, hamster photo booth and sunflower seed pillows. We light up the room with a disco ball and place two sofa for guests to watch the game while others are playing, since it is even funnier watch others behave like a hamster.

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Playtest:

Since we have two vives in the room, during the festival, we have twice as many guests as other teams. They all played game in different ways and the game runs perfectly. Some rolled fast like crazy, some explore the room in a low pace, some would collide with different furniture, some would go to springs and catapults again and again. There is no information about the interaction method, we used the knowledge of indirect control to let guests know what to do. For example, we made hamster friends as guest’s size and made the controller as hamster claws to let guest know he is a hamster, we place the wheel around the guest to create a feeling that he is in a ball, and should move in the way as a hamster in a ball. Those design worked perfectly and guests had a lot of fun during the festival.

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