Searching for Atlantis is a singleplayer escape room game in VR. The player is trapped underwater and has to escape the submarine before the water pressure gets too high. The game uses redirected walking techniques to maximize the space in the virtual world.
I was responsible for the storytelling and user experience of our game. This included doing research about atlantis, since this was our mainplot, designing riddles, making objects interactive and setting the overall atmosphere of being stuck underwater.
We first brainstormed some ideas for an escape room game. After thoroughly discussing the ideas and possible scenarios we decided on a storyline, where the player wants to explore Atlantis as a means to fulfill the wishes of his late father. However, the player finds themselves trapped under water and has to escape the submarine in order to survive and explore Atlantis.
We continued brainstorming on a whiteboard to get an understanding of the mechanics we would need to implement and to narrow down our idea to something that we would be able to implement in two months. In addition we wrote down various endings the player could reach.
We also tried to find out how much space the player would be required to have in real life to be able to play the game comfortably at home. We came to the conclusion that a 4m x 4m space would be perfect for our purposes. As it would be small enough for people to play at home, but still big enough so that they could move freely.
This concluded in our final storyline:
We went ahead and organized all our work through Trello, so that we always knew what tasks were still to be completed. We mostly worked in the lab, but at times we had to work remote. We did this through Discord and of course GitHub was used at all times.
As a way of establishing our story, we thought it would be nice to include hints and let the player explore their surroundings and find out what they needed to do in order to escape and suceed. This is the reason why we built in a letter that would explain the reason why they are on this journey in the first place. We placed the letter on top of the desk in which the player would begin their journey, so that it would be visible immediately. In our brainstorming session we included ideas such as the father of the player being a super rich and a scientist. I included all these informations in the letter or at least indications of these ideas.
To further define our story. I did some research about Atlantis. So that the riddles in our game would have references to Atlantis. For this I sketched out some rough ideas that we could use. In order to make the most out of our limited real space we used redirected walking techniques, which for me meant that the the named technique would have to be appliable to the mini games. Unfortunately due to time restrictions we were not able to implement everything and thus had to either simplify the riddles or discard the ideas.
We also sketched out all the rooms in our game to get a better understanding of the flow.
I placed necessarily and distracting objects into Unity and made them interactable. The distracting objects such as the wineglas were placed in the room with the intention of one making the mini games a bit more difficult to solve and two to give the feeling of that this submarine is indeed used by a rich person. We believed that this would make the game play much more enjoyable, than having only the necessarily objects in the room and solving every mini game as fast as possible.
To further elevate the game play I also created an atmosphere of being stuck underwater by adding atmospheric music, pictures of Atlantis as well as an underwater world with fish boids, which was observable from the inside of the submarine. If the player won an animation would play of them escaping into the underwater world.
As a way of not overwhelming the user we decided to not implement all of the wishes that were voiced. However, the ones that we did consider are included in the PACT analysis above.
With our findings we created a wireframe. This may seem redundant as we already tested with a mid-fidelity prototype, but this seemed to be the best option for us since we initially planned to use our sketches for the user testing. Furthermore, we wanted to focus on the functionality and user experience of the app first rather than the aesthetics. I was responsible for designing the translation page for our wireframe. You can interact with the Wireframes here.
We also established a design system and made custom icons for the app. However, we did not want to reinvent the wheel so they do look similar to other apps. This is to avoid the user having a hard time getting accustomed to the navigation. So whenever possible and logical we chose to establish an external consistency. I was responsible for making the smartglasses and pairing icon. All the icons were done in flat design as we wanted our app to look clean.
In the design of the logo we had to chose between a lot of designs we made. Some would been difficult to recognize, when scaled down so we decided against them. The logo we have chosen in the end is supposed to represent the globe. In front of the globe a "U" is placed, which stands for the name of our companion app. So in a sense the logo represents our goal of the app in uniting the world and overcoming language barriers. The logo is simplistic, easily recognizable, scalable and has meaning.
As for the colours we chose; we believed that the mainly blue theme of the app would contribute to the calm atmosphere that we wanted to establish. Giving the user the impression that nothing has to be rushed and everything is on its right place.
The font we chose is not a serif font. The reason being is to provide an optimal flow of reading with the user getting tired.
Due to Covid19 restrictions we were only able to recruit one participant for our testing.
After the testing we iterated on our game and tried to resolve the problems that we faced in our game.
A web-based game that conducts on-the-job training efficiently with the help of a virtual assistant
