ESCAPE!

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  Diffuse Texture of one of the pieces.

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  Bump map of one of the pieces, this is used to create illusion of detail.

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  One of the modular pieces diffuse map

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  Bump map, aka normal map

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  Some of the pieces being modeled

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  Testing one of the hallways for proper scaling

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  This is how it all began. A lonely cubic guy standing in from of a building.

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  This box is very important

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  The Humble little map I ended with. Not a bad job actually.

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  In Unity finally.

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  Some finishing touches still needed!

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  It's probably too dark, but still I am liking how it looks so far.

Inspiration

I wanted to create a walking sim for the occulus rift because is a piece of technology I haven't had the chance to play with, unfortunately I could not access any of the units, so I had to build for PC instead.

What it does

The intend is for the player to get the feeling that he/she is being watched/followed by someone, even though there is no one there. The fact that you are trapped in an unknown place and that you need to escape adds to the experience.

How I built it

I used 3DS max to model the pieces I needed for my scene, these where small pieces that would enable me to make modular constructions just by rotating them I could create a building with different amounts of detail, in other words, they are my own set of lego pieces. In Photoshop I created the textures for the models out of pictures I downloaded from the internet, the original plan was to hand paint them, but time constrains would not allow me to do so. Again, the original idea was to create the normal maps/bump maps using the usual pipeline method in 3ds max where one models a high poly version and then a low poly version and then projects the texture from one another, but this is also time consuming, so I googled pretty much everything I needed and used a website to create my normal maps. Everything in this game, except for the sounds and the character controller was built from scratch by a one man team.

Challenges I ran into

First was the unfortunate event of not being able to access an oculus rift, second my partner abandoned me and I had to pretty much create the whole project from scratch. Unity wanted to update mid project, fortunately nothing broke, however 3DS Max kept on crashing and there were instances where I lost some of the work I had. The biggest issue was having to do everything myself.

As mentioned above, the ideal would have been to be able to hand paint my textures as well as create my normal maps out of high resolution models projected into low resolution ones (the way nature intended it). But I have google to thank for saving me from what could have been a disaster of epic proportions!

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I pretty much built this full project alone. I modeled and textured everything and put it together and made it work, There are things I took from the internet like the music and sounds, but I can confidently say this project is mine because I created it with an almost inhuman amount of effort. :)

Finally got to learn Unity's new audio system, which help me create the cool effects I wanted for my project, this makes me happy and at the same time saddens me as now I am curious of how it would have turn out in the Occulus

What I learned

Hardsurface modeling, Bump Mapping, Mechanim, Texturing using photoshop and the almost lost art of unwrapping. I also learned to keep projects simple and to be ready for any eventuality, like losing your partner... Also, just learned the basics of Unity's audio system. It is impressive and allowed me an extra amount of detail in my project!

What's next for ESCAPE!

Going to revise everything, from the models to the scripts, probably start adding a couple of enemies here and there and the most important part, create the story and expand from there.

Built With

• 3ds-max
• c#
• photoshop
• unity