When building the space, it was quite difficult without a VR headset available. Once they were at a size that felt right, they were turned to dark and headphones were put on to imagine how it would feel with a VR headset. The problem with this is that without a proper VR headset, it was hard to gauge if the assumptions about size were correct. For instance, the height of the projectile shooter seems reasonable in Unity, but may not be reflected in reality. Additionally, the space itself is hard to understand because it cannot be physically traversed for comparison. Idealistically, if the size of each level could be scaled appropriately with the physical room it is inside by the cameras, that would be best.
Building a completely dark space was something fun and unique. The colors of the space had to constantly be re-colored from black so properly see what how much space it looked like a player should have, and then removed to actually test.
When play testing, it was interesting to see how the effects of just a black space affects the psyche. Firing sound waves really gave a good sense of how close or far walls were from the player. The compass was very important for re-orienting, and was utilized a lot starting from the second dark level. It gave a very strong sense of connection to sound and suspense, especially on the levels with moving walls.
One issue of how the game is set up is that the player will reset their initial position if they hit a wall. The design reason for this is so that the player does not have to keep pressing a "Play Again" button after colliding with a wall and continue even after making mistakes. However, this would cause a problem in VR since you would need to move back to your original position to match this. Alternatives that should be explored are to wait for the player to move back to their original position before moving forward with the game again, or completely doing a game-over when they hit a wall.
The goal was originally set up to be that when the projectile shooter contacts a certain part of wall or object, that would be the way to get to the next level. This was dropped in favor of a goal zone you walk onto. This felt like it made more sense since you are primarily walking around, and that in the chance a player did not pick up the projectile shooter, they still had opportunity to get to the goal, although unlikely.
Moving walls were added onto the last 2 levels. This was originally going to be objects that moved toward the player, but this was removed on the premise that if a player needs to use sound waves to identify how close or far walls are, it would not be fair if they had to run away from enclosing objects and avoid walls at the same time. Alternatives could have been so that the projectile shooter could also eliminate these enclosing objects, but this was not built into the project at this time.
From a player perspective, even if all the surrounding objects are black, you will still see light if there is no light that directly avoids you. This was an interesting result, since I thought that if everything was black, you shouldn't see anything from outside those bounds. To fix this, a directional light that was oppositely pointed was added to fix this.
This game can help complement some of the papers that have been reviewed in class, provided some tuning. One of the most recent papers includes DHH people and that they can have equipment that augments their hearing, while also providing the normal user some new experiences. This can be extended to this project, where a visually impaired person can play this game without any issue, and still provide a unique experience to the normal user.