Uncle’s House
For the Art in VR class at UT Austin, we needed to research a particular type of experience and develop a game to showcase our research. My partner and I researched what makes people scared. And then we created a horror game!
Roles
- VR Game Designer
- VR Game Developer
Design Challenge
What’s Scary?
We researched what makes things scary. The information that a player was receiving or wasn’t receiving would make them the most scared. We round that there were multiple ways to provide the player with information and also how to obscure information and add suspense.
The way we made people scared was by using darkness to obscure what people saw and only having a small source of light. So the player didn’t know what was around them. We also found that audio was useful — not just as a scary sound — but use as distraction.
Design Challenge
Use of resource scarcity
We knew we wanted to use the flashlight as the main resource for the game. We wanted to have it run out — but we wanted to manage that so the game play worked. How we designed it was that while it was on, the battery would slowly drain. The player had to turn it off before it totally ran out or it would take longer to come back on. The longer the player was in the dark, the more danger they were in of getting jump-scared.
What I would have done differently is that we kind of abandoned the on/off flashlight in second part due to time limitations. I would have tried to incorporate in 2nd half of the game.
Design Challenge
Weeping angels design
We had weeping angel statues that would move at you at alarming speeds if you were not using your flashlight to look at them. All the player would hear is the grinding noise of the statue moving closer unless you shined a light on them and it would stop.
While that worked fine I would have changed some things. There were too many angels and I didn’t know how to implement path-finding correctly so the angels would bug-out or get stuck on things in the room. I had too many twists and turns. I would have liked to have made it more straight so that it would have been easier to work with the angels. And we should have had it darker so the angels weren’t as impactful as they could have been.