HoloLens First-Person Puzzle Game

PC First-Person Puzzle Game

Role: Programmer, Artist, Sound Designer, Producer.

Skills: C#, Unity, Maya.

Project Time: 2017.03 - 2017.06

​

Description: 

This is a 3-month personal project as my graduation design. Combining the idea of time traveling and room escaping, telling a story of a female scientist Gia who is trying to change the past. In the game, the guest as Gia should interact with things in her room to find clues about who broke into her house. Her goal is to fix an alarm clock which is actually a time machine, and travel back to delete all the important files in her robot hard drive. Round Pace is a game focus more on interactive story telling. One of the goal for me is to create an interest curve by using some subtle imformation.

 

​

​

Interaction:

The basic interaction method in the game is eye focusing, hand gesture “tap” and some simple voice command. Guest can follow the indirect control to interact with the environment step by step. At first, guest can see a watermelon in an oven on the table, and also a blender. Making a cup of watermelon juice can unlock a special view to help guest get more information in parallel universe.

 

​

​

Features:

In the game there is an inventory board hanging on the wall using spatial mapping. Things the guest get will appear on the board and can be used anytime.  The guest should find the board first, click it and start the game, because it is functionally important in the whole process.

There are different items in the game which the guest can use, like keys, pieces of an alarm clock batteries. Watermelon juice is one of the most important things – guest can see what is happening in the parallel universe using watermelon juice view (like seeing through the juice). People’s relationship and their past can be revealed in this special view which can help the guest to understand what is going on.

Different guests would get different amount of information. Three bonuses are hidden in the game which can turn the story into a different direction, even bring the guest to a total different ending. There are two storylines in the game, one is obvious, another one is hidden. The hidden one will lead the guest to make different decisions in the end.

 

​

​

Playtest:

Due to a lot of instruction is added in the game and the interaction method is simple and direct. The game is friendly for naïve guests. Except some of the hidden messages are hard to find. The average finishing time is 23 minutes. I also implemented the game on PC, so that I can spread it to more play testers with a survey about difficulty. The result showed that guests who played through the game successfully thought the game is easy, while those who were stuck in the middle felt the game hard. Also, the hidden story and the bonus are hard to be recognized. Less than 10% guests got the information which is just within my expectation.

​