Development process 

Phase1 (April 13, 2022 - April 19, 2022)

Get familiar with Oculus Quest 2 and set up developer accounts.

Phase2 (April 20, 2022 - April 26, 2022)

We researched different types of VR games, and finally, we decided to make an escape-room style horror game with a traditional Chinese theme. We had group discussions on the game flow and organized the game plots. Then we started to build up the foundation of the game in Unity. The first thing we did was to set up the PlayerController in Unity. After that, we put great effort into finding the best match 3D model assets for our game’s theme.

Phase3 (April 27, 2022 - May 3, 2022)

We focused on realizing various interactions in the game. Such as using candles to light up the room, opening the door, firing Fulu, etc. We added specific audio to each interaction to make these interactions more immersive. 

Phase4 (May 4, 2022 - May 11, 2022)

We added some UI canvas to give instructions to the player so the player won’t be confused when enjoying the exploration of the game.

Playtesting notes 

• Play testers generally experienced shocking and surprising moments and the result met what we expected.
• Some testers mentioned that we could employ floor creaking sounds as the player moves to create a sense of real walking feeling. 
• Many of them were shocked by the jump scare, but there are some that missed the part due to moving speed. We had to slow down the speed and re-organized the room display to make sure players don’t miss anything. 

Postmortem

Successes 

1. Audio. We used audio for each interaction in the game. For example, there will be a spooky friction sound of an aging wooden door when opening a door. If the player uses candles to fire Fulu,  when the candle's flame collides with Fulu, there will be the audio of paper burning. Using audio created an immersive experience for players to enjoy the process of exploring the game. Besides, there is always a tiny eerie wind sound existing throughout the whole game, making the player feel like being stuck in a grim place.
2. Lighting. To create an immersive experience of being trapped in a dark room, we only used some lanterns and candles to create a dim lighting effect intentionally.
3. Various Interactions. Light up the candle, read the text from the wedding invitation, break the mirror, open the door, talk to the bride, unveil the bride, etc.
4. Jump scares. These Jump scares set up in the game are very successful. In the playtest, almost every first-time player was frightened by these tricks.
5. Text. We arranged some text to guide the player to proceed with the game so that the player won’t be confused with the process.
6. Storylines(Multiple Endings). In the current version, we have two endings. One is that the player leaves the room via the window but fails; another is that the player goes back to reality and helps the bride free her soul. We provide different endings to let the player make the personal choice.

Struggle

1. The canvas in Unity VR is quite different from general 2D/3D builds. We eventually figured out that we need to attach the UI canvas to the player camera as a child, and adjust plane distance in order to make the canvas function properly. But there is still one issue with the book opening canvas where the image is too big for the screen.
2. There are a lot of dialogues and hand gestures that require the Oculus console’s hand inputs. However, we struggled a lot at first when trying to make the player “collide” with certain objects and then input buttons. They all failed. We eventually figured out how to use the bool leans to set conditions instead of only using if statements. 
3. As above, at first we had too many if statements collapse all together and caused an infinite loop. And this led to a crush everytime when running the game. But we fixed it at the end.
4. After the suggestions given during play testing, we wanted to employ the floor creaking sounds as the player moves around. However, we did not figure this out in the end. Perhaps movements in VR do not work the same as other environments.

Lessons Learned 

1. Using IEnumerators to spawn multiple objects.
2. The audio type should be WAC in Unity.
3. How a door open in VR game mode.
4. How UI and Canvas gameobjects work in VR mode.
5. If statements for hand inputs cannot be attached directly to On Trigger Enter/Exit.

Next steps

In the future iterations, we are planning to finish the ending 3 (open ending) to provide more storylines for the players to explore. In the open ending, the player successfully escapes the room with the ghost bride in the game. But the player still hasn’t found the way back to the real world. The future is unknown.

Also, the UI and dialogue system needs more improvement to be integrated naturally in the interactions.