[DISCLAIMER] This post was made to only provide informations about the Gameplay Mechanics and Programming parts of this project.

Forbidden Still is a PC VR Escape Game made in about three months by four students in their first year of the L3DI bachelor’s degree. Nominee for the Revolution Students-Demo contest of Laval Virtual 2023, this experience puts you in the shoes of an English detective in the late XIXth century, who wants to discover the truth about the smuggling rumors of the Octopure Distillery. I'm Rémi ANSEL and I was in charge of the Gameplay Mechanics and Programming part of this VR Experience.

At the beginning of the project, we had some constraints to respect : our class had to do a VR Environment in a closed factory (with only one room) by using the XR Interaction Toolkit plugin on Unity. In our team, we’ve decided to impose ourselves some new ideas to respect : we wanted to make a VR Escape Game based on user’s accessibility. That’s why I worked on multiple features to entertain as many players as possible.

Teleportation & Navigation : 

At the beginning of the project, we decided to create an old distillery from the end of the XIXth century. However, most of the distillery was very imposing at the time so, for a user who just has a physical narrow space, it will be very difficult to move in this virtual environment. That’s why I was thinking about a locomotion system that allows the player to teleport through different places in the experience, and, in those areas, he can move around physically and interact with several virtual elements.

Unfortunately, I encountered a problem for this system : if the user wants to teleport and if this one is not at the center of his playground, he will be completely decentered in relation to this space and some virtual elements or parts of the distillery will be not accessible anymore. As a result, I fixed it by teleporting the virtual play area instead of the player’s avatar itself.

I also had the idea to put a fade transition during the teleportation to make it smoother. Noneless, with my team, we didn’t know if It was a viable feature, so we made some playtests (with and without the fade) to check this information and, from the results of those tests, we’ve made the decision to implement this feature.

Interactions :

After finishing the locomotion system, I thought about how to make our interactions more attractive and accessible. At the start of the game, the user is directly introduced by some simple tutorials disguised in an enigma where he needs to look around to find a key and grab it to open a door.

Those tutorials explain the basic interactions in our VR Experience. They are pretty similar to other VR experiences, but also quite intuitive for a new user, because they rely on almost a single action : to press one of the grip buttons from one of the two controllers. The hand’s movement made to achieve this action is the same as grabbing an object in real life. So that’s why I set up a drawing system, a breaking bottle system and a buffer system in our experience in order to accustom the player to this type of action.

Furthermore, to help the user better understand those differents interactions, I worked a lot on cognitive feedbacks : I implemented many sound effects and the spatial audio feature too, thanks to Steam Audio plugin ; the haptic feedbacks on controller (when user touch or interact with an important object) and an outline feature to understand if an object is interactable or not (thanks to the Quick Outline plugin).

Specific Accessibility  : 

When all of the interactions were developed, we wanted to add new features to make it more and more accessible. In this way, we took into account the localization part of the project and we’ve decided to make two translations for the demo. For this reason, I translated this english project in french and implemented this into a choice at the start of the main menu and, also, in the option menu. To keep a certain accuracy in this project, the only part that was not translated is the english voice lines, but a subtitles option is available (in english and french) to understand what the protagonist is saying.

Nevertheless, to totally answer our problematic, Forbidden Still needed to be adapted to users with one or multiple disabilities : it can be the motion sickness problem or a motor disability for example. That’s why I was in charge of integrating an “Accessibility Mod” :  a system that allows us to play sitting and to target a specific point of the physical playground, converted into a virtual one, in order to teleport in a short distance (instead of walking around in real life).

Plan for a possible future :

We’ve still got a lot of enhancements in the future : first, we’ve planned to make some improvements in terms of software optimization, but also fix gameplay mechanics and overall project thanks to the future players' feedback. We were also thinking of translating this project in other languages and making this experience compatible with other kinds of VR headset, including the standalone version. Finally, we were thinking about the possibilities to make a multiplayer mod, but also add some new “Accessibility Mod” for other disabilities.

To conclude, we believe in our project, that’s why we wanted to bring it as far as possible to give people what they deserve : a whole experience accessible for everyone.

This … is Forbidden Still !

Forbidden Still - A project made by ANSEL Rémi, CHATELET Roman, GUILLON Orlane and FRANCESCHINI Jade