Gameplay Footage

Goal

Our goal with Into the Dark was to create an experience where a player would use echolocation to visualize an environment they are attempting to navigate. We originally started development on the EyeGaze, an eye tracker. However, due to difficulties calibrating the platform and discomfort during play we switched to an Oculus DK2. At the time, most of the VR experiences we had seen were fairly stationary, generally meant to be played sitting, or standing still. We wanted something a bit more active. The player needed to navigate a cave and dodge obstacles, we mapped this to head tracking and made the player have to crouch and shift their whole body left or right. To see the environment, the player needed to make noise into a microphone which would trigger the echolocation visualization of the cave. After a second or so the visualization disappears and the player needs to make another noise to see their environment again. The game became a spectacle; players moving left, right, and ducking quickly while making bizarre screeches. We also added a sonic attack moment where the player attacks bugs by shouting at them.

Echolocation Design

Echolocation was a tricky design challenge. We wanted people to make small bursts of noise, similar to how you hear a dolphin's click (small repeated sounds). However, during testing we found that people tend to hold sustained, long noises. This was a problem and we needed a way to move players away from this behavior. I started trying to imagine echolocation, a bit strange, but it leads to an interesting answer.

This effect worked really well for getting people to not hold the same louder sound. But it did not solve the problem entirely. Since this effect is based on both time and decibels, it will blow out the world much more slowly if the sound is quieter. We noticed players only changed their strategy to become quieter. They still held long noises, but when the world started distorting they would stop. We needed a way to disrupt this strategy and force the player to make small bursts of sound. Our answer lied in (for lack of a better term) object permanence and distance. Our echolocation system already worked with a distance parameter. Where if an object is too far away your sounds will not reveal them to you. This was done to help simplify the world, we found that if you lit up everything then the players had a lot of trouble distinguishing the outlines of obstacles because there were just too many and they all overlapped.

This distance parameter combined with the object permanence, or rather, giving the player bad object permanence, solved the sustained note problem for echolocation. Since the distance of your echo will only reveal things so far away based on the time you first make a sound, you do not get to see the rest of the world. If the player holds a long note, the obstacles they have revealed will remain visible for as long as they hold the sound. But, obstacles outside of their distance from the starting position of that sound are not revealed. This means that the player only has object permanence on objects they can see. The rest exist, but the player is unaware of them until there is a collision. This forces the player to make shorter noises, if they want to clear the game without collisions.

Level Design For Tunnel Games

Designing an environment which encourages players to move more than just their head was very important for this game. Since we were going for a more active play style, I decided to break the world into stages. As the game progresses each stage gets more difficult and the indirect control on the player increases. Each stage is broken into two different spaces, active play and break. This was done to account for player fatigue.

In a tunnel game the goal of each obstacle should be to guide the player into a space which makes for the most interesting movement to avoid the next obstacle. Each piece sets up the ones that come after. There are two strategies for obstacle positioning which I have found particularly effective at creating indirect control to guide the player down the path I wanted them to go.

1. Funnels

2. "Safer" Paths

A “safer” path is one where the player makes a choice about positioning based only on the current obstacle. That choice is the safest way to get around that obstacle, but it leads them into a more dangerous path, thus causing them to make more exciting movements to avoid the rest of the obstacles. I prefer to use “safer” paths as I feel funnels can become too repetitive quickly. These paths also allow for great variation while achieving more moments of choice for the player. An easy way to do this is to put obstacles slightly off center, creating two general spaces the player can move past the obstacle. One of them will be slightly larger and thus most players will fall into its trap and begin down your “safer” path.