Pandora

Pandora has opened the box of evil and unleashed them all over the world. She goes on a quest to fix her mistake and bring the world back to life.

Platform: Oculus Touch
Team Size: 5
Role: Programmer
Development Period: 2 Weeks
Course: Building Virtual Worlds

Link

Introduction

The theme of this project was to tell a story. This meant that narrative an important element of this game. The Oculus Rift did not allow a large walking area compared to the HTC Vive. However, we wanted a bigger world for the player to explore. Therefore, we decided that the player would be sitting on a carriage and riding a pegasus (because we wanted to fly!). However, this brought in newer challenges to deal such as motion sickness and comperhensibility of the game and story when moving. The following were the features in the game:
  • Adding the pegasus and the power source in front of the user to act as a pivot point. This helped in eliminating the feeling of motion sickness.
  • The speed of the carriage was also adjusted to ease in and out to seem more natural and less jerky. It also stops automatically at places where there are player interactions required.
  • Two levels - one on the ground and the one in the sky. The idea was to leverage the original Pandora fable's magical nature and experiment with player reactions to flying ascend.
  • The game significantly uses a visual reward system to teach player that they are doing the right thing. This includes transitions to color, happier music and finally, a colorful top-down view of the town once all the evil is destroyed before you go to conquer the skies.
  • Navigating huge environments in VR that included space in the sky was a challenging level.


My Contributions

I was a programmer in this project. The theme of the project was, "Tell a story through the game". My responsibilities included :
  • Program the player movement and interactions.
  • Edit Unity shader properties to add transition to color effects to material during runtime.
  • Finetune the gameplay to make it less tiring due to constant arm movement that was required.
  • Adding animations and sounds to the experience.

Get in Touch

Contact Details

  • sudhamr@cmu.edu
  • Sudha M R
    Carnegie Mellon University, Entertainment Technology Center