Based in Los Angeles, studying at Santa Monica College, learning about creative coding, 3D modeling, and speculative design.
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Based in Los Angeles, studying at Santa Monica College, learning about creative coding, 3D modeling, and speculative design.
Read more->
CASE STUDY
TIMELINE16 weeks (Spring 2024)
ROLEDesign
Development
TOOLSBlender
Unity
Procreate
Illustrator
Arduino
Electronic Components
Spod uses an asymmetric experience to connect a person using a VR headset with a person without a headset. Rotate a knob in real life to see elements of a puzzle rotate in VR.
LINK TO THE GRADUATE SHOW LIVESTREAM RECORDING
THE GAME & HOW IT WORKS
You and your friend play as a trapped space traveler and voice-controlled AI to work together to escape from a mysterious alien puzzle box.
The player wearing a VR headset plays the role of a voice-controlled AI. They have a control board in front of them with various knobs and sensors. When they manipulate the control board, it changes the VR space in real time.
The other player is wearing a VR headset and they play the trapped space traveler. They are inside an alien puzzle box. However, they cannot control their environment on their own. Using each of their unique perspectives, both players have to talk to each other to solve the puzzle.
MOTIVATION & SECONDARY RESEARCH
WHY VIRTUAL REALITY?
Virtual reality can be a powerful tool to connect the physical and digital worlds and connect people in different locations. However, many VR experiences today are limited to the digital world. Many multi-user VR experiences place all users into the same digital world and people in the VR headset are cut off from the physical world.
It is also great for creating an immersive, fictional world that people can enter into, much like the holodeck! As a sci-fi fan, virtual reality became my tool of choice to connect people in a unique, fantasy world.
WHY A VIDEO GAME?
Play is a very good way to teach new concepts so I decided to frame my world in the context of a game. As players progress through the experience, they learn more about the rules of this world and how to use them to their advantage.
WHY TWO PLAYERS?
For these reasons, I decided to do a twist on the couch co-op genre, which is a game you can play with friends without an internet connection, in the same room, on the same screen.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE PLAYED BY A HUMAN
Finally, I’m fascinated by our relationship with AI. Sometimes it feels like just a magic trick where real people and their work are hiding behind the curtain. This becomes more relevant when I explain the game to you.
My main point of reference is the VR game Keep Talking & Nobody Explodes. It’s an asymmetrical game meaning one person is in VR defusing a bomb and the other is not in VR looking at a manual to tell the VR player which color wire to cut.
Also, I drew on an art piece called SOMEONE by Lauren Lee McCarthy that asks people to play the role of a home assistant like Alexa to a set of IoT-connected or “smart” homes as they ask for “Someone” to turn the lights on. This points back to the idea that AI is driven by real people behind the curtain.
EXPERIMENTS & RESEARCH
I knew I wanted the game to rely on communication so I created a simple visual association game where one player secretly picks some shapes and tries to get the other player to guess them. The trick is that the shapes are very abstract and require some creative descriptions to pinpoint. This was based on the game Codenames.
LEARNING HOW TO DEVELOP FOR VIRTUAL REALITY IN UNITY
Then, as VR was a completely new medium for me, I completed a VR game tutorial in Unity.
A timer instantly creates urgency.
Even if a particular task is not very fun, having to complete it in a certain amount of time makes it fun.
Technical constraints are an opportunity for creativity and unexpected interactions.
It’s both efficient and generative to let technology and mechanics lead the way when creating puzzles because I’ve had to change my vision a few times already because what I imagined wasn’t possible.
MAKING & PROCESS
DESIGNING THE GAME BOARD
I knew I wanted the VR experience to be stationary and seated so the VR space had to be rotationally symmetrical and interesting to look at. With this In mind, I came up with the dodecahedron room which is a 12-sided shape, often seen as die in Dungeons and Dragons. I tried this out on my wall with foam core to start:
Then I found the primary aesthetic I wanted to emulate and started sketching in Procreate to create the designs of each of the panels in the VR dodecahedron.
To make the board, I took some matte board to the laser cutter.
SERIAL COMMUNICATION WITH ARDUINO
To start understanding how to build the control board and have it “talk” to Unity, I connected a dial to change the size of a cube using an ESP32 microcontroller and Arduino. Getting this to work in VR has proven to be quite challenging and it’s something I’m still working on.
GRAD SHOW
Following the livestream grad show
- I plan to introduce rogue AI gameplay by giving the AI player a secret ulterior motive to complete in parallel to solve the puzzle with the trapped space traveler, a la Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
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Then I’d like to create and publish a version with a mobile companion to replace the physical controller so that it’s possible for anyone to play it.
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And finally, it would be cool if I could find an investor or other funding and hire a team to make this game as perfect as possible.
REFLECTION
So many new skills!
This was my first time taking on such a big project on my own, from idea conception to execution and presentation. It was an enormous undertaking that involved coming up with a compelling concept, learning Unity, learning how to code in C# (or effectively borrow code), connecting physical switches to Unity, and project managing the whole thing.
Proactive not reactive project management.
By the time I presented this, I did not have a working demo or a completed game design. From a project management perspective, I would focus on developing the gameplay before even touching Unity or Arduino. A timeline would also have been very helpful in organizing the various moving parts.