Project Asylum VR
Project Asylum was a game developed at ETIC_Algarve in collaboration with L'Idem, university in Barcelona.
L'idem and Etic wanted to make a partnership and give their students the opportunity to collaborate on a project where you had to speak a language not native to you, in this case, English.
We formed groups as soon as we met and got to brainstorming what type of game we should make. A lot of suggestions flew left and right, and we ended up making a vote.
We settled on a psychological horror game, and I got lucky, as I was really familiar with and excited to work on it as it was the same genre as my final year project.
The roles were set from the beginning, which helped a lot in assignment distribution, at least from the university side. The Etic would do the development and programming, while the L'idem would provide all the art and 3D assets required for the project.
We had 3 programmers on the Etic side and about 8–9 people on L'idem just on our team.
Development
The teams at each school decide on a leader; on Etic, it ended up being Rafael, and on L'Idem, it was Max. The communications during the development were easily facilitated by the leaders of each team, and we held regular weekly reunions.
We had about three mouths of development, and L'idem even did some live playtesting with visitors they had on school grounds. All in all, it was a smooth ride in terms of development.
As the mechanics were complete and the game could finally be played from start to finish, we had fun making quick cinematic moments in our game and even ended up adding voice lines to one of the characters in the game to make it spooky.
Gameplay
This project consists of an escape room-type game with psychological horror.
You find yourself in a kid's room with a lot of toys scattered around. Your first objective is to clean the toys in the room and put them inside a box next to the door. After doing so, the door of the room will open, showing nothing but a light at the end of the corridor.
While moving toward the light, you start hearing a voice calling for you, telling you to come back. That would be one of the plushies in the kid's room.You keep going toward the light, and you notice something on the ground. What seems to be a plushie arm.
After retrieving the plushie arm and giving it to the plushie, it thanks you. When he does, the light turns off, a new door opens, and a red light presents itself. Entering the room with the red light, you find a power switch, and the door closes before you, leaving you in the darkness with only a small red light. Flickering the switches on seems to reset the system, it has a combination. When you get the combination right, the lights turn on. You have arrived in the main room, where the game can finally begin.
The game contains a hand full of puzzles, each with new features and tips to solve, and an intricate ending full of mistery.