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The Abyss - 2021
VR - Puzzle/Horror game
The Abyss, the dark sea floor. You have to repair the pipes... but is that something you can hear out in the darkness?
In The Abyss the Player's goal is to repair the pipes before they run out of oxygen. But there seems to be something in the darkness that has become curious from all the noise, clattering and light coming from your efforts. Get the pipes fixed and make sure to stay quite if you attract too much attention then who knows what'll happen.
Self Analysis
Overview
The Abyss was a 6 week VR game project. The group consisted of 2 programmers, 2 designers from week 1-4 and another programmer and 2 artists for the remaining 2 weeks.
We were making a game for the Oculus-Go, which is a VR headset with only 3 Degrees of Freedom or DOF. This means it only has the capability to rotate but not move in its environment(rotational only, no positional).
The most I gained from the project is seeing a game from a VR prosepctive instead of a screen prospective due to the limited time for the project.
There was also the requirement of making sure the Player doesn't sense any discomfort since motion sickness isn't the aim we are looking for.
Team work analysis
You could say that this isn't my first rodeo when it comes to working in a team, but it was interesting to work with different people as well as having new members come in part way through.
Most of the time we had everything working quite well when it came to teamwork. With people each working on their part of the project like a designer on sound, a designer on the level and us programmers working on the AI and puzzle elements.
We did have a bit of an issue trying to make sure the art was all working at the end of the project since we didn't have any art to put in until the last week.
But it was a valuable experience in learning to work with a project that had changed its flow part of the way through, but still keeping a consistent steady flow.
Code analysis
During this project I worked on the AI, this was the first time I had worked on AI within Unity. The plan for how the monster would operate in the game was to have it go towards you if you made a noise, shined your light at it or if you had the light on for too long.
The sound was easy since Unity's 3D sound allows for you to determine the radius the sound has and with anything beyond that not being able to hear it. Essentially meaning I just had to determine if it is within the radius and if yes start to go towards the player for a little while.
The light although was a bit of an issue, I ended up created my own cone collider with the help of my teacher which would basically replicate the radius and length of the Unity light which you can find the values easily within Unity.
This project was useful in teaching me to not limit myself to what Unity has and if I need to, I can just make my own colliders or whatever else I need. It was also useful to get a better understanding on making AIs for games and how they react to the Player's influence on the game's world.
Screenshots
Play Now
(Needs VR)
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