Week 13

2020-04-23 00:00:00 -0700

This is our final week, we are working on bugs fixing and game’s ending implementation. In the meanwhile, we are working on building our website. We planed putting our design goc and all of our blogs in our game website. Also, we will have multiple game play test and record walkthrough video.

We are excited and hope that players could like our game!

Week 12

2020-04-16 00:00:00 -0700

This week, we worked on finishing level 2. Level 2 contains these puzzles: The phone call will tell players that their favorite family activity was sitting together and talking about a book. So the players need to find a book and a photo of hostess, then put them on the table (there will be a highlighted outline telling players where to put).

Also the final submission is approching, we needs more play tests to make sure there is no

We currently use a robot-like hand, professors gave us a VR hands asset to replace. Also, our level indicator - digital clock looks like a TV, therefore, we designed a new level inidcator: Wall lamps. If player solve puzzles in level 1, the wall lamp on left side will be turned on. If players solve level 2, all the wall lamps will be turned on. This looks better than a digital clock.

Week 11

2020-04-09 00:00:00 -0700

This week we focus on polishing level 2 and tried to integrated level 1 and level 2. We also designed the end of the game, once players solve puzzles in level 2, the teleport system will stop working and player will go outside of the house. After players go outside, the final screen will show up and tell players the information about our team.

Week 10

2020-04-02 00:00:00 -0700

This week we focused on implementation of level 2. The basic story of level 2 is : The wife of the man (ghost) is going to have a phone call after the player enters the second room. And she will tell the player their favorite familty activity. Players can get hint of the puzzles and solve these puzzles.

We needed to implement a phone calling system in our game and make the voice from wife spatial so that players can have a real phone calling experience. We also integrated “light flashing” event into level 2.

We also implemented a “digital clock” which indicates players which level they are currently in. Currently, it can only display one digit number, 0 means level 1 and 1 means level 2.

Week 9

2020-03-26 00:00:00 -0700

This week, we mainly worked on polishing our level 1 and designed level 2. We added better textures into level 1 and reduced the lightness of level 1. We thought that darker environment can help improve horror experience. Also some users say that lowering the brightness can help players reduce the sickness level. (https://filmora.wondershare.com/virtual-reality/10-ways-to-prevent-oculus-rift-vr-motion-sickness.html)

Level 2 will focus on horror experience in VR instead of puzzles. We designed some new features for level 2: A foggy loop between level 1 and level 2, since the player will walk in a foggy environment, palyer can see nothing clearly. We will add an event where the ghost can walk around inside the foggy environment. The second feature is “flashing light”. Once player walk through an area, the light will keep flashing.

Week 8

2020-03-19 00:00:00 -0700

This week, we just ended our spring break and started development level 2. Also, we received feedback for our midterm submissions. There are some important suggestions from feedback:

We need to figure out a system that could tell players if the items can be interacted or not.
We need to make sure that every element has a purpose and that everything is connected to each other.
Our current scene is basic (half-greybox scene).
The sound is ok but doesn’t seem well curated, we need to polish it in the future.
We need to implement the end goal of our game and make it clear for players.
Probably we need to implement a narrative system and introduce our story to players.

Week 7

2020-03-12 00:00:00 -0700

Due to coronavirus, USC started online courses to avoid spread of coronavirus. Our presentation was changed to submitting a gamplay video. And this week was spring break week, so we did not assign any development assignments to our team members. We had online meeting to talk about our production plan.

Week 6

2020-03-05 00:00:00 -0800

This week we continued implementation of midterm tasks. We already got our story framework and our theme — helping to find happy memories in life. Therefore, we designed a detailed story for loop 1 (level 1). Also, we implemented a classical horror scene: While player enters a specific room, a terrifying ghost will appear outside of this room. The ghost will walk around this room and player can see it through windows. As the ghost walking around, all furnitures will fall down. At the meanwhile, we will also switch our ambience sound to a tensed one.

Our current scene still needs some regulation, the door looks too high for player and the table is too small for player.

Week 5

2020-02-27 00:00:00 -0800

Our current scene still needs some regulation, the door looks too high for player and the table is too small for player.

Week 4

2020-02-20 00:00:00 -0800

At the beginning of this week, we wanted to start implementation of some game mechanics. However, we realized that we should decide our game art design and story design first. Because, our game will mainly focus on storytelling, therefore, our game mechanics will highly couple with our art assets and story design.

Then we decided to find more environment art assets and find more horror stories as reference. At Monday (02/24), we found three type of environment assets: Hospital, Haunted House and Subway station. Accordingly, we find horror stories for these three scenes. Finally, we decided to use haunted house as our main scene and use some horror stories as our shorytelling reference.

And we still partitioned our team into 3 sub-teams. One team will focus on programming, one team will focus on building environment and the last one will focus on sound effect.

Week 3

2020-02-13 00:00:00 -0800

This week, some of us were continuing learing Unreal Engine. Since three of us have experience about Unreal, we divided our group into 3 sub-groups with 1 experienced unreal engineer.

This week, our main purpose focused on basic functionalities such as controlling system and teleporting system. During the development, we met with one big problem. Unreal Engine cannot map Windows Mixed Reality controller joystick with built-in input system. After a long time research, we found that SteamVR driver disabled it. According to the solution in this website: https://www.windowscentral.com/how-enable-windows-mixed-reality-joysticks-any-steamvr-game

We changed some setting veriables in SteamVR driver files.

Week 2

2020-02-06 00:00:00 -0800

This week, we just got our devices (2 HTC Vives and 1 Samsung HMD Odyssey), and we tried several games in VR mode such as Resident Evil 7, which can provide us with some good ideas about br horror game.

We decided to make an infinite loop inside our horror game since infinite can save us art assets which were difficult to find. And we decided that everyone in our team should find some good art assets for horror game. We will choose some perfect assets and report to professor next week.

Week 1

2020-01-30 00:00:00 -0800

This week we just formed our team, we totally have 9 people in our team and 3 of us had experience on unreal. We decided to watch some horror game gamepley videos or play some horror games and vr games.

This can provide us with good conception about horror game or vr game. Also we encouraged all of us to watch some horror movies.