Beware of the Phog

The player's wrist mounted compass that always points to the nearest golden egg.
Rock-wall obstacle. The player has to scale this cliff to gather the first egg.
Another obstacle, this time the player must swing from tree to tree to get to the objective.
The bird creature that hunts the player. He will run away if the player manages to climb a tree before he can reach them.
One of the golden eggs the player must steal.
Another view of the tree-swinging obstacle course.

Inspiration

We wanted to make something involving VR, and if it wasn't obvious, our rough inspiration came from KU itself, the bird creature is supposed to be a twist on Big Jay, the fog was also inspired by Phog Allen. Originally we were going to include Baby Jay but it didn't make sense story-wise.

What it does

It's a horror game. The player spawns in a forest with lots of fog. On their wrist is a compass that points to various golden eggs on the map that they must collect. Climbing is a huge aspect of the game, as the player has to climb trees in order to avoid the bird's attacks and to obtain the eggs. While the player tries to do this, a large bird prowls around trying to kill the player, and the only way to escape their attacks is to climb trees. There's a lot in the game that we didn't have time to record for the video! There's rock climbing, tree swinging, and many other fun mechanics that the player has to overcome in order to beat the game, all while they avoid the bird chasing them from below. We'd strongly recommend coming to our demo if you want to see more!

How we built it

We built the game using the Unity Engine, specifically with the SteamVR toolkit. The models and animations were done primarily through Blender. Since it was done in Unity all code was written in C#.

Challenges we ran into

We are all beginners. Our team had little to no experience with VR going into the project, and most of the team also had little to no experience with C#. We had to do literally everything to produce the game, from 3D modelling to sound design to pathfinding. Some aspects of the project required complex math using lots of vectors. It took over 12 hours just to get VR climbing working.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Honestly we're just proud we got the game finished. There's so many aspects to making a game, from modelling all the way to playtesting and bug fixes, we're amazed we even got a working demo in 20 hours. Not only that, but the game's actually pretty fun and playing it can get rather intense (at least in our opinion)!

What we learned

How to use VR frameworks
C#
How to use vectors and polar coordinates for pathfinding
How to use animations in Unity
Sound Design

What's next for Beware of the Phog

We were originally going to include some quality-of-life improvements like a tutorial, basic menus, and cutscenes, but we had to cut most of it due to time constraints.