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As soon as the player hits play, he will be immersed in a virtual plateau among high and rocky mountains. What a weird place. The player will be standing on a grassy and muddy ground and in front of him there will be the entrance to a stone made maze. Will the player be brave enough to walk in?
Before walking in, the player should turn right and teleport to the "Settings Wall": an interactable wall that allows him to change some settings. On the left of the wall, three different buttons can be touched to switch the maze theme. From a mountain-themed maze, the user can switch to a desert/Egyptian-themed scene. He will be surrounded by pyramids and other Egyptian sculptures like obelisks, a sphinx, an Egyptian door, and some sand dunes. The ground is now made of sand. The maze walls have changed to Egyptian sculptured ancient walls. By touching the third button the theme can be switched to a Medieval castle theme. The surroundings are now characterized by a castle with towers that could either be protecting the user or forcing him to face the maze adventure. The ground is now made of a short cut cured grass, while the inside of the maze is characterized by a gravel ground. The maze walls are precisely cut bushes. The three different themes have something in common: the Settings wall, made by black bricks, its buttons, but also the starting and finishing chessboard-like signs and the green and red steps. On the right of the settings wall another choice can be made by selecting the game mode. The player can either choose "Free Mode" if he wants to play a relaxed and easier version of the game or "Normal Mode" if he feels brave enough to try the full maze experience. As soon as he touches "Free Mode" the player is automatically teleported to the maze entrance and "The Entertainer" is played and looped all along the game to help creating a relaxing ambient for the user to play. Also the user has no timer so he can just enter the maze and find the way out without rushing. He is able to teleport through walls, interact with the helpers/distracting object along the maze as in the Normal Mode but there is not a real way to win/loose. I think this game modality could be useful to check the correct way out after trying out several times the normal mode without success. Being in Italy, I was not able to test my project with the correct hardware therefore I was not able to implement the functionality to move the player through the maze with the analog buttons on the controller and the functionality to stop the player from walking through walls. The user still moves as in Project 2 by teleporting himself, therefore I tried to find a way around to stop the user from teleporting from one side to the other of a wall without actually trying to find a way out. What I came up with is that in the "Normal" game mode, the walls are interactable and when accidentally touched the entire lighting system is turned off and a spot light is turned on and connected to the right controller for 20 seconds, an evil laugh will play as well. It is really hard to move around having limited visibility and this will slow down the player for 20 seconds out of the total 200 seconds that he has to get out of the maze. This should stop the user teleporting around the maze since he might teleport within a wall and activate this function. Also the player will find out that it's safer to follow some path while playing instead of teleporting around since it might get really hard to orient himself around the maze if he continuously teleports around. Both the 200 seconds timer and the 20 seconds timer when specific functions like the latter are shown as canvas both on the Simulated Camera Rig and UnityXRCameraRig, so the user will be able to see the time remaining while playing. The 200 seconds choice was made by letting other people try out the application, but it can be easily changed since it was declared as a public variable on the script that controls the general timer. When touching "normal mode", besides the timer getting activated and shown, a more creepy ambient song starts playing which turns the experience into a more anxious one. The user is again automatically teleported to the maze entrance. The normal mode button was scripted so that every time it is touched the timer restarts from 200. This enables the button to be touched several times. The user will be teleported to the entrance just after having touched the Free mode button so that one could keep touching the button until he's ready to play, then when he wants to teleport to the entrance he just needs to touch the free mode button and then the normal button again. After walking in the maze, some interactables characterized by a question mark texture can be found. There are a total of four, 2 will help the user, 2 will slow him down. The first one can be found taking the "wrong way" so going straight from the entrance and then turning right at the second turn. The interactable is animated and has a particle system showing. When touched, the user starts to fly and will be able to see the maze from a high perspective. He has 20 seconds to see the maze and try to solve it at least partially. He will surely notice he is taking the wrong way. After 20 seconds, the user is brought back to its normal size and can continue playing. The player will go back to the entrance and take the first turn to the right. If he makes the correct turns, he will find the second interactable. When touched, the ambient light will slightly decrease turning the maze a little bit creepier. Attached to the right controller, a sword will appear. The sword is part of the controller itself, so it can be used to interact with the world since it has a box collider. Therefore, be sure not to touch the walls with the sword! To do so, the sword 3D model was added as a child of the collider container of the RightController Alias. Two scary and animated characters will appear. One is SlanderMan, who is slowly moving forward and backwards and and evil 3D laugh can be heard. When stabbing him with the sword, he will slowly disappear and some blood stains will appear around the maze walls and the ground. Going straight and turning left, PennyWise will be found. He has an evil laugh 3D sound as well and a light source illuminating him from below which makes it creepier and as with SlanderMan he can be stabbed and "killed" with the sword. Some more blood stains will appear. After the 20 seconds have ended, the sword will disappear. The killing of both is represented by them scaling down to zero after being touched. When touched with the swords, both of them play a stabbing sound. The third interactable can be found around halfway through the maze. This is the second "helper" during the game (first one was the one that let the user see the maze from a higher perspective). When touched, the entrance to the path next to it catches on fire. Some colorful and animated fires appear with a 3D sound associated to them. Along with that, an invisible interactable wall appears so it is important not to cross the fire or we will be slowed down by the lights turning off and the spot light turning on for 20 seconds. This interactable is however helping us, since the player shouldn't take that path since it is not the correct path to get out. Along with the fire, the interactable will animate with some explosions and also some fireworks will be shot in the sky. A 3D sound is associated to fireworks and they will keep shooting all along the game. But there's not time to enjoy them! Time is running out! The player will then take the correct path and after some turns he should find himself in front of the last interactable of the game. This one, when touched, will slow down the user by making an interactable wall appear in front of him. The wall is a Simon-themed wall, which means that after some seconds to let the user move to the wall, it will start playing a tune with lights turning on depending on which "cube" is playing (each one associated to a note). After the tune has finished, the user can start interacting with the 6 different cubes and will notice that each time one is touched the note is played and its light is turned on. The user can play with them as long as he wants, but the only way to make the wall disappear is by touching the correct cubes in the correct order and one after the other. When the combination is found, the wall will disappear and the user will be able to continue towards the end of the maze. The solution appears on the screenshots on the left. The correct way to get out rid of the wall is Do - Re - Mi - La - Fa (Purple - Yellow - Blue - Red - White). As you can see from the last screenshot on the slide on the left, as soon as the white is touched the wall disappears. As the user walks in the maze, the time decreases and can easily reach 0. The last 10 seconds are accompanied by a countdown sound that will inform the user that just 10 seconds are left. When the timer gets to 0, either the player is out of the maze and can consider himself a winner, or he's still in the maze which means he has lost. Give it a try! Let's see if you can win. |