PT VR
My Role: Researcher, Production Management & Game Designer
Platform: HTC Vive
Game: Atmospheric Horror
Developed by:
Adaptation of a Game as Research Tool
Walking in endless circles
Besides adjusting the design of P.T. for room-scale VR in terms of level geometry, we also modified the sequence of events and the type of content. In the original version, the game has a total of 14 loops; our version has 9. After careful analysis of all game events in the source material, it was evident to us that we needed to make decisions about what to include and exclude in our version. Not only as a result of practical constraints in VR development, but also due to the goals we had set for ourselves in our research design.
The main guidelines we set for our adaptation were to exclude sudden scare effects, avoid narrative confusion, and having most of our test participants complete the game scenario in between ten to fifteen minutes.
Locomotion and Level Design for room-scale VR
We chose to design the levels of the game world in such a way that the player would move through the playable VR area with a corresponding one-to-one ratio with their avatar movement in the game world, meaning that the size of the playable VR area correlates exactly with the size of the game world. The simplicity of the level design and architecture in our source material lent itself well for this room-scale VR adaptation, where the game world is confined to the play-area space.
We modified the level design (geometry and size of the corridor) to fit the virtual space in a 3.15m by 3.3m playable area. These measures were chosen because that was the size of our available development space (i.e. our kitchen), and well within the recommended configuration for play-area dimensions by different best practices documentation for developers, as well as the official documentation from HTC Vive setup guide.
We reconfigured the architecture of the game world to fit our needs, and devised our own non-euclidean solution to create the illusion of the virtual space being bigger on the inside. This can be best described as a ‘TARDIS’ effect of sorts.
This decision made the experience more accessible to all kinds of players, and it ensured that the majority of participants would complete all nine loops of the game within a reasonable time frame, resulting in more data points for our study.
In order to pace players through the game, we gated progress by player-triggered scripted events. An example of this is the event sequence during loop 3, where the transition-door slams and locks when the player approaches it, and it only opens again after the player walks back to the bathroom door, where the cries of the baby are coming from.