Motivation

We wanted to create an immersive and thrilling horror experience in virtual reality. To accomplish this we wanted to combine scripted events to create “jump-scares” with great sound effects to create a spooky atmosphere.

Technologies

• Unity is a free 3D engine that is very popular among indie developers. We chose to work with Unity3D since most of the members in this project have worked with it before. We actually chose to work with Unreal Engine 4 when we first got together but changed that since a couple team members had compatibility issues with their laptops and UE4.
• We got the advice to learn and use VRTK when developing VR games. This framework was created so that a developer dosen’t have to “reinvent the wheel” when it comes to interactions mechanics in VR. It took a lot of work to learn how VRTK works and how to use it’s premade scripts in a way that suited our needs. Since a lot of mechanics wasn’t already premade we needed to learn how it works “under the hood” to be able to write our own scripts that utilizes the VRTK events.
• SabreCSG is a level design toolkit for Unity. We chose to use this to simplify the level design process.
• The Oculus Rift is a Virtual Reality Head-Mounted Display. We chose to work with the Rift since several members in the team have worked with the HTC Vive before and wanted to try to develop to the Rift. One member owns a Rift HMD along with the Touch controllers. We wanted to be able to use our hands for the interaction in VR so the Touch controllers was a must have for us.

Challenges

• The creation of a quality game takes time and requires a lot of testing. Lesson learned from this are, Start development early, test with non-developers BEFORE displaying it to the public and account for more development time than you think.
• People experiences motion sickness in VR from differents mechanics and there are many mitigations techniques.

Lessons learned

• To create an immersive Virtual Reality experience.
• Non-teleport movement without causing cyber sickness.
• Believable and frightening atmosphere.

Acknowledgements and Inspirations

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes