Escape Room: Watching
Documented by: Keyin
Group Member: Ben, Chris
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
— This project is basically an escape room designed for Google Cardboard environment. The game begins in a hospital and our protagonist will be restricted on a wheelchair while moving around and seeking clues. As the user explores our world, he/she is supposed to feel the anomalies and get into our story that it’s essentially an AI/machine-dominated world. Our character, as a human, is only a research object and is monitored all the time. We have a few designs based on this setting which I’ll explain more in the next session.
— But also, since we didn’t describe the background obviously by words, users are welcome to relate different things during in-person experience and we are also open to other possible interpretations if any. I believe after polishing up our indicative designs, different understandings can also add to the depth of our work.
— Based on the story we have in mind, we go with the psychological horror style to build the space. There’s no screams or ghost faces to scare people. But we do have multiple sound effects to create the skeptical and tense atmosphere. To meet the conditions of using a Google Cardboard, the main interaction in our project is only clicking as well as long clicking, the former for interaction and the latter for movement. The wheelchair setting was also made to fit how Google cardboard works, because we were intended to let the user sit on a chair and use Google Cardboard to play. At the same time, the wheelchair restriction can give the user different experience on moving around the space and pushing or interacting with objects.
PROCESS & IMPLEMENTATION
— When building the space, we made a basic hospital structure with a few sections. At first, our mood board chose some horror style, but later we went with psychological horror and tried to create a creepy clean style. That’s why we mostly used white, grey and red. As we were searching for assets, we didn’t find any that was very suitable. So we just chose a zombie hospital asset as it has a complete set of hospital stuff. And we set the light in a sense that it looks like psychological horror.
In order to construct our story, we’ve made effort on a few designs.
1. Player Setting
— The player is sitting on the wheelchair where he can only rotate his head to look around or move the wheelchair to move around. The movement is controller by character controller. When he moves, there will also be animation of his hands moving as he’s pushing the wheels. The angle the user can look up and down is also limited (delta y from -90 to 90) so that it composes a reasonable field of view for the person. The speed of the movement is also set as a relatively low value considering the situation, and it also turned out appropriate during the play testing.
2. Scenes/Objects Consistency
— To match the body model style, the clue photos of the character are also made in the similar low poly style. The elements of red circles and red rectangles are also applied in photo collection interface and the ending scene.
— The photos were made as if taken by CCTV. If you notice the dates on them, you may realize all of the four photos are about the same person, our protagonist, from young to old. Connected with the space the player is locked in, we are trying to convey that the player is undergoing monitor the whole time which may raise questions to the player. Who stands behind the monitor? What’s the relationship between the space and the player? What is he doing here or who locks him here for purposes? And the player could possibly have some answers by the end of the game.
3. Sound Effects Design
— We specially included some sound effects to make our scenes more expressive and immersive and also gives the player some motivation to get out instead of only idling in the space.
— Besides the basic wheelchair sound effect, there’re sounds only played once, sounds within a range of area, and sounds that will be triggered if the user enters certain space. The broadcasting sound at the beginning is cut off abruptly. The combination of unknown footsteps and baby cries near the mortuary is meant to create some tension and indicate something undesired may happen. There’s also one moment when the sound of moving beds is left-panned to make the user feel something is on the left. But when he steps out of the trigger area, the sound will stop suddenly as if what he heard is only his illusion. Generally the sound effects are designed to strengthen our “storyness” as well as improving the user experience.
4. Ending Scene
— After the player gather all of four photos and notice the dates on them, he could open the door by connecting all the dates as the password. The game is ended at that moment. However, we connect the door animation with another ending scene to make our story more complete.
— Instead of the first perspective, this ending scene is a third perspective from a CCTV screen. There also includes the audio of computer talking which can help with our illustration of the story idea. It echos with the previous four photos which are taken by CCTV and indicates that the player is still under monitor. What we want to convey is that it seems the player has escaped successfully. But does he really escape?
5. Other details
— We’ve turned the player to face the album on the bed at the very beginning of the game because it’s an important clue in the whole process. We also have a glowing effect on the album to highlight it. By the way, if the player doesn’t interact with the album at the beginning, he’s still able to go through the process and whenever he comes back, he can get the clue that there’re four photos in total. And although we refer to it as an album for convenience, in the story it’s more like some archives or records about our character.
— At the keypad interface, we’ve provided an indication that there’re five digits in total if the user clicks “?” at the right bottom. The player could thus more easily think of the highlighted dates which are right five digits in total on all the photos.
EVALUATION
— Generally I think we did a great job in composing all the stuff together to build the scenes and making effort on constructing a relative solid story background. Meanwhile it’s also very playable and can make sense to people who play it. In terms of Google Cardboard environment, it can also fit very well and the use of Google Cardboard would definitely be a plus to our project.
— The only thing is that due to time constraint, we did not add intuitive word/visual descriptions of our story. On the one hand, it can be a style that we leave some space for users to imagine the whole story by themselves depending on what they get. On the other hand, for users who are eager to know what the exact story is, what we’ve presented may not be enough for them. If we have more time, we could add some introductory animation at the beginning or conclusive words in the end to reveal what the whole story is like. Also we could add more ways of interaction the user can experience. One last little thing is that in the ending scene, we forgot to show time at the corner, because a CCTV monitor should always record time.