VR Puzzler

Ameya’s VR Puzzler Project

As a part of the VR nanodegree course with Udacity, I created a mobile VR experience for the Google Cardboard called the puzzler. I carefully designed the project using continuous tests and iterations. In this game, the player enters a medieval dungeon with some surreal looking orbs floating in front of them. They are intuitively guided towards the objective of the game, which is to solve a 3D Simon says puzzle to get out of the dungeon.

Special Considerations

The experience was carefully designed to guide the users so they could intuitively figure out the objective of the game without many instructions.

Persona

For this project, I created a user persona called Brojan.

Age: 20

One of Brojan’s quotes: "Always keep learning"

Brojan is an undergrad student learning computer science. He loves playing games and is considering game development as a career option. He is starting to learn Unity and is considering buying a Google Cardboard. Brojan enjoys RPG’s and strategy games on steam and his playstation, but is always up for fun and challenging games on his smartphone.

VR Experience: He has just tried on the Oculus a couple of times to play half-life in on of the labs at his university and watched a few videos on his friend’s cardboard.

Sketches

I drew some conceptual sketches for this project before creating it.

Here are some of the sketches:

The Concept

A view from inside the Dungeon

The UI

How that looks

Here is how those sketches look in the game:

Entering the Dungeon

Inside the Dungeon

The UI

User Testing

Test 1

How big do you think you are?

Slightly taller than my real height.

Mood of the scene?

Scary, weird, unknown

Trouble looking at something?

Only whatever is outside.

Based on the first user test. I decreased the height of my camera. The mood worked out to be in my favor and I only made some adjustments along the way.

Test 2

How does the movement speed feel? Fast? Slow?

Slightly fast.

Are you feeling sick during the experience of are you okay?

Not feeling sick. I feel okay.

Is the experience disorienting in any way? Sudden height changes?

No, it feels fine. But now I feel shorter than my original height.

I changed the movement speed so it felt more comfortable. I readjusted the height to make it closer to the user height.

Test 3

I tested if everything worked well. Asked about the lighting, what the user thought about the app and any suggestions the user had.

Based on the user input,

• • I reduced the lighting

  • Changed the color of the orbs and the color when they light up.

  • Added a particle effect to simulate smoke covering the exit so they could not see what was beyond and to make it more mysterious

The Final Product

Start

The player starts the game in the middle of an unknown barren landscape. There is a screen in front of the player which is the start screen of the game. This screen has a button “Play” on it. When the player clicks this button the user is moved to the dungeon room with a smooth comfortable motion.

Play

The player now finds himself in the play area, which is a medieval dungeon with torches, barrels and chains. There is a fog covering the exit and five spheres floating in front of the users. These balls light up is a pattern making a sound. The player has to select the spheres in the given order. If the player gets the order wrong, a sound is played and the pattern repeats again till the player solves it. When the player solves it, he starts slowly moving towards the exit and the fog gradually disappears.

Victory

The player moves out of the door and escapes the dungeon. On escaping, the player is greeted by a screen which congratulates the player and gives an option to restart the game.

The final version of the game is shown below:

Conclusions

With the help of the iterative process and frequent user tests, I have designed a simple but fun immersive VR Puzzle game. I learnt about the power of early and frequent testing, especially for VR, I also learned about motion sickness and how the iterative process can be used to avoid it. I would like to use my experience in any cool VR projects I do in the future.

What is Next?

• • Include a point system in the game

  • Implement a loss mechanic which would take one life away from the user (The user will start with 3 lives).

  • Integrate this with a VR maze which will also include other puzzles and objectives.