All content in this course uses:

Explore the Escape Room

Generate ideas for a VR experience you would like to create

VRBeginner_9.5_ExperienceEvaluationGrid.pdf

VRBeginner_9.5_ExperienceEvaluationGrid.docx

VRBeginner_9.9_IdeaGenerationGrid.pdf

VRBeginner_9.9_IdeaGenerationGrid.docx

In this tutorial, you'll explore the immersive Escape Room VR experience designed for this learning project. You'll evaluate how the experience made you feel, learn more about the design process and consider the kind of experience you would like to make in VR.

Overview

In this tutorial, you’ll use the VR Beginner Unity Project and your VR hardware. Before you begin:

 Check that your hardware is ready. If you’re using Oculus Link with the Oculus Quest, enable and connect this now through the Oculus app.

Before you begin

Before you find out more about how it was made, it's time to try out the Escape Room VR experience!


You'll find the information you need to escape in the room itself; the purpose of the experience is to escape using the information available to you.

If something goes wrong and you want to reset the room, look at the watch on your right wrist


Once you've had a go on your own or with friends, you can move on to the next step for an overview of the escape process.

If you need more guidance on how to escape the room, you can use the following process:


When you enter the room, pick up the key and open the desk drawer.

  Remove the book from the drawer and place it on the lectern. This unlocks the teleporter system.

Teleport to the fireplace and find the potion recipe.

Teleport to the bookcase and collect your wand.

Teleport to the cauldron and unlock it with your wand.

Teleport to the worktable and collect the ingredients for the potion.

 Add the potions to the cauldron and set it correctly.

 Teleport to the front door and pour the potion into the lock mechanism.

Here's a video of a streamlined play-through of the experience:

 Although this is the basic process to escape, there's plenty to explore along the way!

How to escape

Now that you've completed the Escape Room, let’s take a moment to evaluate the experience. It can be very helpful to reflect on interactive experiences, to connect how design choices related to your experience as a user. 

 You can complete the grid or just use it to guide your evaluation. It includes examples to help you get started.

As you evaluate your experience, try to also consider:

How your familiarity with VR influenced the experience

How your external environment influenced the experience

Evaluate your experience

The Escape Room design process was an iterative and collaborative process involving a range of technical and artistic contributors experienced in fast prototyping. 

The technical requirements for the VR experience included:

Using the XR Interaction Toolkit as the basis for all interactions in the experience


Showcasing common interactions in existing VR experiences, driven by physics, to demonstrate useful and familiar gameplay elements


Demonstrating a range of visual effects in VR


Including a dashboard so that players could try more mechanical interactions (this became the cauldron)


Lightweight Assets which would run easily on the Oculus Quest, which is essentially a mobile device

Designing the Escape Room: Technical scoping

The artistic team worked in close collaboration with technical scoping and gameplay design, to make sure that the experience felt engaging and cohesive. They knew from the start that the style had to work well with lightweight Assets, and that it had to invite players to engage with the world around them in VR.

The team established their requirements as:

A simplistic low-poly art style with just a few textures, to convey an engaging world but maintain good performance and optimization


Creating the majority of the shaders for the environment in 

, so they would be easily accessible to more advanced users who want to customize them


 which the technical artist used to integrate effects (like the cauldron) into the Project


They also decided to set different lighting and shadow preferences for PC and mobile platforms, which meant limiting these effects on mobile wouldn’t affect the outcome of the PC build.

Designing the Escape Room: Style and environment

Important considerations for the gameplay design included:

Integrating magic (with associated visual effects) into the environment and key gameplay moments, to immerse and engage players in the environment and experience


Identifying the range of possible interactions and how they could be matched to both objects and the defined aesthetics
 

Locating the major gameplay moments for escape at workstations around the environment, to encourage exploration but also to provide logical places for players to look for guidance if they were unsure what to do


Balancing challenge (common in escape room activities) with an inviting and non-pressured environment

Designing the Escape Room: Gameplay

If you were going to make your own VR experience, what design choices would you make?

It can be really useful to identify the kind of experience you’re interested in creating, even if you don’t begin the design and development process. This can help you to decide how to continue your learning journey, and identify any areas you’re interested in exploring further.

. You can complete the grid or just use it to guide your idea generation. It includes examples to help you get started.

As you think about the kind of experience you’d like to create, consider:

What differences would a VR environment make to the experience compared to the real world?

How will the aesthetic style you choose inform the experience?

Challenge: Generate ideas for your own escape room

Generated ideas for the type of escape experience you would like to design yourself

Unity Version 2020.3