Make It Home Safe VR
Apparently I need a “trigger warning” on this project, it might be offensive to some audiences, everything here was made for fun though, so enjoy!
This past week, Devlup at UF hosted their Training Grounds game jam in preparation for their War Games jam against FSU. Since I was looking for a project already, I teamed up with a few friends, and worked on a pretty cool VR game for the jam. The theme was decided on based on some submissions and the winner was Impaired.
Game Concept
The first thing that came to mind when hearing the theme was VR Drunk Driving. However, I figured everyone would have a similar idea. So instead we came up with something so much worse.
Make It Home Safe a VR game where the user gets to experience the visual effects of being roofied at a bar and walking home safely without getting too close to creepy men in dark alley ways, or walking into crosswalks while the light is red.
VR Drunkenness Effect
Now, most new VR users already feel the effects of nausea and dizziness when they play VR games, however my goal was to make it ten times worse, making even the most experienced VR users sick in my game. With the encouragement from Devlups founder, I got to work, using post processing effects and a little bit of programming to make my users feel ill.
Using lens distortion I made the camera feel as though it were moving forward and backward, giving a swaying effect. The players hands also slowed in and slowed out to their real-time location, this along with motion blur and chromatic aberration made for some interesting sluggish movement.
Art
With art from my teammates we created a little intro scene of a bar, fit with post processing to make it look gloomy and a bit creepy. We then created the street and the obstacles.
Obstacles
While walking drunk was difficult enough, we wanted to make it worse. Thus we added obstacles to the players route home. The first main ones were creepy men who if you got too close to, would grab you and you would lose. However, lying around on the ground every once in a while are glass bottles which the player can grab and attempt to throw at the creepy men, scaring them away. The more interesting obstacle however were the crosswalks. To get home you would have to cross 3 large streets. At each intersection, a green light would indicate that the user could cross, if the light turned red, the player would be instantly hit by cars as they walked into the road.
Final Notes
The jam was a fun experience, and it was good to be part of a team where I could really focus on the programming and VR interaction portion of the game. You can download and play our game here, and check out the other games in the jam here.