Product Owner, Production Manager & Technical Director
- Game Studio title focusing on the use of the Vive system to produce an engaging, action-packed, movement focused, 3D adventure game in Virtual Reality.
- Showcased at Pax East 2017 and 2018
- Winner of NESGD 2018 Challenge for Game Design
- Released Spring of 2019
This title started in my VR/AR Development course for undergraduates in the Spring. One of the teams proposed this title for their final project which I thought was brilliant. The programmer, Anthony Popp, did an absolutely exceptional job, and I asked if he would be interested in bringing the title into Studio for the following Fall and Spring under my mentorship. He agreed and was excited to act as programming lead for the project moving forward. Puzzle Hamster of course relies on a feeling of whimsy and the joy of inhabiting a hamster body, playing with scale and physicality otherwise unobtainable — this is the unique feature set that drew me to want to develop this one week project into a more fleshed out title with Anthony.
I focused on production and design of mechanics, ensuring that the game interactions and overall performance were optimized for the hardware in order to produce the most comfortable and accessible experience for players.
The player is given the perspective of a hamster, comfortably enjoying its freedom of mobility within its ball. The player then uses the Vive’s controllers to push themselves around the level — a large, fiendishly riddle-filled cage! From rolling forward at different rates to stopping the ball solidly with a press of the controllers’ buttons, the player is given full freedom of movement — including the ability to accelerate by pushing with more spread out arm movements.
While there are a number of solutions offered for fun VR mobility, from teleportation, to walking in place, to island movement and the like, our solution is quite unique — move with your hands in a giant hamster ball! And considerations of locomotion were in fact paramount, and interestingly, the action of moving your virtual body via hand movements actively alleviated a lot of the motion sickness — this was at a point where not as much research was available regarding these potential solutions, so our design was a bit serendipitous but also later aligned with external research findings.
Exploring scale and embodiment of unusual avatars is of great interest to me, so this quirky, but clearly novel exploration proved to be a rewarding project for myself and the students. Along with investigations into locomotion, I required the students to play with ways to create timing, feedback, and visual and auditory environmental clues to reinforce the scale of the experience.
Iterative design and agile development allowed us to build and test consistently for play-testing which is critical particularly with VR projects where we monitored resource expenditure in the Profiler and recorded extensive feedback from our target players to ensure a positive physical response to the this action-heavy experience.
Ultimately, our efforts were rewarded with extremely positive feedback both at PAX East and when we took home first place for the NESGD 2018 Challenge for Game Design. This game also passes my success test of whether I would continue to play it — I do and I love having my friends and family play it as a group — this is the type of experience I think the very physical nature of VR can elevate to an ilinx activity!
“Board your impenetrable hamster-ball and escape the evil scientist’s cage by outsmarting his puzzles! This first person VR experience let’s you experience hamster life at its fullest!”