For our final project, we ultimately decided on creating an escape room. In the beginning, we were undecided in the identity and feeling that we were trying to convey and we looked at multiple different assets. After some discussion, we agreed to create an escape room based off an eerily creepy hospital room. We wanted the hospital room to resemble a mental asylum and that you the user, would wake up in. Additionally, we wanted to create an escape room based off of someone in a wheelchair and the disabilities you would face. This also added into the creepy feel because you know that something is wrong with the character. It also adds a sense of curiosity since you do not know how you became disabled. This adds into the entire narrative because you want to escape the room but also find out who you are and what happened to you.
The space is divided into a few different areas. Firstly, there is the ward in which you wake up in. There’s a bed next you with an album, a cart blocking your path, a chair, and a sink.
Once you exit, there’s a hallway that connects to the rest of the space.
From there onwards, the user can explore the space and there’s a room on the right side with a table.
If we go forwards from the hallway (refer to figure 3), we enter the operating room. There’s a bunch of miscellaneous objects, a recycle bin and surgical equipment.
If you turn left, there’s another hallway and it leads to another part of the hospital. If you turn left from that hallway, there is another ward. In this ward, there’s two beds and a drawer.
On the right side from the hallway, there’s an empty room with a box.
The last part of the hospital is the exit where there is a large metal door and a broken screen.
The objective of this escape room (other than to escape the room) is to piece together your past. To create this “storyness” we threw the user directly into a ward with little to no backstory. On the bed next to where you wake up, you notice an album and upon clicking, it displays an image that showcases four missing images (Refer to figure 2). The main mode of interaction is a click and a long click. We designed this with some restrictions in mind: this was designed for a Google Cardboard. This meant that we only had one click to interact or move. The process of this escape room requires one to click certain objects and explore via long click. In figure 9, the user would move the crosshair over the album and click to show an image. From this, the user would understand that the objective was to find photos.
The user then goes around the hospital looking for clues.
On each of the photos, there’s a number on them. These are used in the end when you have to enter a password on the keypad near the exit.
Once you enter the correct password into the keypad, the doors slide open and a cut scene plays.
Through this, we hoped to create an environment that resembled an escape room but in the context of someone trying to leave an abandoned hospital. The motivation for the user to continue exploring to figure out the character’s past. The interactions are simply clicks that would display an image or clicks to enter in the password. Furthermore, we wanted to paint a picture of a futuristic world in which our actions are being watched (hence the final scene with the security camera) and humans were research subjects. However, this is all up to the user’s imagination and how they perceive this.P
The brainstorming process was quite straightforward when we were creating it. The bulk of the planning process was coming up with the idea and what type of feeling we were trying to convey. We had various different types of hospitals (Figure 16), but we felt we wanted one that was creepy but not gory.
While we were play testing (in both the actual and the paper prototype), we received lots of helpful feedback. This included adding a motivation to escape and highlighting the interactions. We tried adding a motivation by discovering your past. The album in the beginning was also to indicate what the user should look for in the game. To increase immersion, we added audio that simulated an eery feeling through baby cries, rolling wheels, distorted radio sounds, and whirling of surgical tools.
Keyin was the creative genius behind most of the design decisions while Ben and I provided our thoughts and feedback. From the beginning, we needed implement a first person view and we decided that we wanted the user to be on a wheelchair. To implement this, we combined the wheelchair asset with the character model (the character looks like a zombie). We then added a character controller script that had the ray-cast, first person camera view, and interactions. If the player is close to an interact-able object and clicks it while the ray-cast is hovering it, an image will display.
I spent the bulk of my time animating the door and writing the script to open the door. I animated it via Unity and incorporated a simple script to test it out in the beginning (press space to open door). These largely adhered to the tutorials that Sarah posted. Once I made sure the animation was working, I added the keypad via GUI. I followed a tutorial on Youtube to complete this part: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne41wItQmdo.
The script can be described as follows: when the user approaches the box collider of the door, it tells the user that if the user clicks one more time, a keypad will appear (this is done via onTriggerEnter and onTriggerExit along with boolean values).
If the user clicks, it opens the keypad (clicking turns a boolean variable keypad to true). The user can then hover and click on the buttons. The password is set in the code (“35296”) and there is a variable called input that is initially “‘. When a user presses a button, input = input + “x” with “x” being what number they press. Once the input is equal to the password, the door opens (another boolean variable is set to true). Pressing the “?” button will prompt a GUI interface to show writing “Enter a 5 digit password.” Pressing the “x” will turn the keypad boolean variable to false, closing it, and allowing the user to move again.
Originally, I had an issue where the user would not be able to click on the keypad because it followed the user’s camera. I resolved this by this line of code:
“Cursor.lockState = CursorLockMode.None;
Cursor.visible = true;”
This allows the user to move the cursor without the camera moving.
Sarah raised an issue where the cursor detracts from the immersion of the story since it wasn’t similar to the crosshair in the game. I tried to resolve this by changing the cursor to be the same as the crosshair, but that wasn’t shown in the build.
Another issue I faced was a nullExceptionError but that was due to me not capitalizing the “s” in void Start().
When animating the door, I had an issue in which the door would slide over the wall. This was resolved by adding another wall over the first wall so that the door would slide in between those two walls.
I felt like we definitely met our expectations in creating an escape room that had a “storyness” to it. I felt like there was also a motivation for the player to explore and try to escape. I am very proud of the work that we produced and I had a lot of fun making this. I was so absorbed in making this that I lost track of time and was 45 minutes late to a class. However, there are definitely some things that we could improve on.
Firstly, in terms of performance, there are some issues with the door. When I was coding it, I used onTriggerEnter and onTriggerExit to create this interaction. This would sometimes lag the user when they entered the box collider. Additionally, it was a bit clunky since you need to click to move and it would interfere with it. If I had more time, I would love to polish this up.
Secondly, in terms of aesthetics, there are some things I would like to improve. The keypad on the door does not really fit the overall feel of the hospital. Additionally, the text is quite small and the size of the keypad should be bigger. I tried to fix it before the deadline, but the changes weren’t big enough. The text on the keypad should also be a bit bigger.
Thirdly, in terms of “storyness”, I felt like this could be improved upon if we had more time. The objective was to explore the hospital, try to find out about your past, and escape, however there wasn’t much background information given to the user. Additionally, when the user went around looking at photos, it doesn’t add much information. Perhaps, some text at the back at the photo would aid in telling the story.
I also felt like there wasn’t much clarity and some controls aren’t that intuitive. One thing that was difficult was identifying what were clues and what we could interact with. We also didn’t know what we were looking for. Adding clarity such as when you hover over an object you can interact with, it lights up, would help.
Lastly, in terms of interactivity, there is a lot more we could improve upon. As of now, the only interaction are with objects that act as clues or the keypad. Adding different interactions such as being able to hold objects and using this interaction as a key component of finding clues would make the entire experience more interactive (and probably more fun).
There are a bunch of things we could spend time on improving, but for the given time frame I am extremely happy with the work that we created. In the summer if time permits, I intend to work on it. I’ve shared this with many of my friends and I’m asking them for feedback. Overall, I loved what we created and I hope to continue working on game projects in the future.