Development InfoRole: Game Designer, Level Designer, Scripting Team Size: 11 Time: 5 Days Tech: Unity, SteamVR Platform: Windows PC - HTC Vive Genre: VR Horror/Puzzle |
Responsibilities
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Game Overview
Peppy's Pizza is a VR puzzle-horror game where you play as a pizza delivery person that must successfully deliver a pizza to "Mr. Murderson" at the top floor of his house of horrors. Each floor contains a unique set of challenges and puzzles that you must overcome in order to reach the top floor of the building, with a few scares along the way.
My team and I at Deloitte Digital created this VR game as part of a 5-day long Halloween themed game jam. The game is centered around the elevator mechanic, which requires the player to use fuses to power up the elevator and move to another floor. Each fuse has only enough power to move the player to one floor of their choosing, so once they reach that floor the player must find a new fuse in order to continue. This structure paved the way for us to create game levels with one central goal: find the fuse and escape the room. With that central goal in mind, we could then divide and conquer the levels as a team. Each designer would be responsible for one room (for my room there were 2 designers), and the artists would support each room with assets as necessary.
My team and I at Deloitte Digital created this VR game as part of a 5-day long Halloween themed game jam. The game is centered around the elevator mechanic, which requires the player to use fuses to power up the elevator and move to another floor. Each fuse has only enough power to move the player to one floor of their choosing, so once they reach that floor the player must find a new fuse in order to continue. This structure paved the way for us to create game levels with one central goal: find the fuse and escape the room. With that central goal in mind, we could then divide and conquer the levels as a team. Each designer would be responsible for one room (for my room there were 2 designers), and the artists would support each room with assets as necessary.
Design Process
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Elevator Movement System
A technical challenge that we ran into early on was in regards to the large number of objects active in the scene at once. With a total of 11 floors, this was causing the game to run at a low frame rate. To solve this issue, I scripted a system that would detect when the elevator was approaching a new floor, which would then activate the new floor and deactivate the previous floor. We had already organized the hierarchy in a way that each floor was a separate prefab, so all I had to do was activate and deactivate the root object of each prefab. |
In-editor view of elevator moving between floors
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"Personnel Storage" Level
One thing that I haven't mentioned yet, and is probably one of the coolest things about this game, is we designed it specifically to work in our VR demo room in the studio. The VR demo room contains a Vive Pro with 4 base stations synced up and a 12ft x 12ft play area, which gave us a ton of space to work with. This also heavily influenced the design and layout of our rooms, as we didn't want to include teleportation or any other virtual movement system. The goal was to get players to physically walk around and explore, even if they were a little scared to do so. For this room that I worked on, it is mostly filled with clutter and "red herrings." There are many objects you can pick up, such as mannequin pieces and surgical tools, but none of them are going to help the player escape the room. The single puzzle in this room involves a fingerprint scanner which is used to unlock the cabinet that the fuse is sitting in. The player has to figure out that they need somebody else's hand for the scanner, and then they need to find that hand (or they might find the hand first, and then figure out what they need it for afterwards). |
In-editor view of personnel storage level
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Upon entering the room, most players would notice the glowing fuse in the corner of the room first and walk over to it. The red light on the scanner is on at this point and if the player tries to interact with it, it simply blinks twice and plays an error sound effect. The physics on the door and fuse are currently disabled, so they can't simply reach in and try to grab it.
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Once the player locates the hand, they'll have to turn around to go back to the fingerprint scanner. This was a good opportunity to insert a jump scare, as it was very likely at this point that players would turn back around. When the player turns around, they see one of the mannequins has suddenly changed positions to be directly behind them.
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When the player is holding the severed hand close enough to the scanner, a blue outline appears, indicating that they can place the hand here. Once they do that, the scanner light turns green and the cabinet door can now be opened to retrieve the fuse.
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Lobby Level Layout
Another area in the game that I worked on was the layout and lighting of the Lobby, which is the starting point of the game. While this level was not going to have a puzzle or many interactions, we did need to get the player's attention towards the elevator at this point. We used light to draw attention towards the pizza box, the elevator button, and the elevator itself. While there is some ambient lighting on the sides of the room as well, overall we kept the back half of the room much darker than the front in order to de-emphasize it and prevent the player from wanting to walk in that direction. |
In-editor view of Lobby layout
In-editor view of Lobby lighting
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