A Dangerous Mind VR
A Dangerous Mind VR is the continuation of my previous project made in the first year of the video game course at ETIC_Algarve.
In the first year of the course, everyone was assigned to make a project of their own, and in the beginning of the second year, we created four teams of four to five members each and voted on which projects should be developed as a team.
A Dangerous Mind ended up being one of those projects, and as a team, we decided we wanted to make it in VR without having any prior experience on the matter before hand, which made for quite a fun and difficult adventure.
My team was composed of four members:
- Miguel Lampreia - Programmer & Leader;
- Arthur Monteiro - 3D Prop & Environment Artist;
- Leandro Silva - 3D Character Designer;
- Tomás Reis - 2D UI Designer and 3D Artist;
In this project my responsibilities were:
- Setting up the project for VR;
- Feature adaptation for VR;
- Creation of new features;
- Lead the team and manage the project and overall decisions.
Development
This project was definitely a challenge. Having no previous VR experience and being the main programmer working inside the engine, I knew from the start I was in for a challenging project. Not that it made me less excited to work on it; quite the contrary, exploring VR development has always interested me in some way, so this was a great opportunity since the team was so excited to turn this seemingly simple horror game into a bone-chilling VR experience.
While working on the project, I found, quite expectedly, some roadblocks: some of the physics in VR work differently from a normal game, the interactions had a specific setup or they would most certainly break, and overall interaction had to be worked around as most triggers for event completion had to be checked in different ways compared to normal, and the restrictions that needed to be applied for certain puzzles were definitely a journey to find a good middle ground.
After getting used to all the differences in the development and functionality of VR, it was quite a smooth ride. I was able to complete almost all tasks and even experiment with new puzzle ideas.
In the end, we worked pretty well as a team, having no problems with communication between members and being able to help each other when needed. I enjoyed taking this project to the next stage, and I'm glad people also saw potential in it and gave it a shot to help me make it bigger.
Gameplay
In A Dangerous Mind VR, you wake up chained to a bed, and your first objective is to find a way to free yourself. You are presented with a box with a numerical code, and the walls around you seem to have numbers. Reading the numbers on the walls clockwise gives you the code for the box containing the key to freedom. After that, your new objective is to get out of the room and, finally, to get out of the apartment.
The game has 5-7 puzzles that the player needs to walk through the apartment to find and solve. Ingame, we got: a sliding puzzle, a numerical lock puzzle, a book organizing puzzle, a clock time puzzle, and more.
This project has psychological horror elements. Which means that during the playthrough, the player will not have an active threat on his life, but the atmosphere and certain events were made specifically to spooke the player. There is one enemy in the game called the entity, whose job it is to be the main spooking factor for the player. She appears during pre-programmed events and during the ending of the game to create more tension and to give the player the sensation that he is not alone.
You are only able to interact with important objects, making the experience less frustrating as you always know what might come in handy.