Ethereal Escape

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  Look at the view!

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  Spooky, disappearing platforms!

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  The beginning...

Inspiration

We were inspired by games from our childhood where we would have to climb to high ground to survive natural disasters, and the intense heart rush that we would get whenever we got bad dreams of falling into voids. Our goal was to combine those two experiences with VR in order to create an extra-thrilling, immersive experience.

What it does

You wake up inside an ancient temple, racing to escape a flash flood by moving your arms to propel yourself through the surreal obstacles.

How we built it

• Movement: We integrated a free Gorilla Tag locomotion system for intuitive VR player movement.
• Assets: Free 3D assets and textures helped bring the temple environment to life.

Challenges we ran into

Expected: Setting up hardware, learning VR and Unity basics, and finding the right balance between fun, polish, and innovation.

Unexpected: Dealing with the nuances of VR UI compared to traditional UI, forgetting to save our Unity projects, running into cloud storage limits when version-controlling via Git LFS, and optimizing collision detection.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud to have created a fun VR game in just 36 hours! Before this, none of us had developed for VR before, and we are proud to be able to ship an enjoyable prototype.

What we learned

We gained foundational skills in VR game development and deepened our understanding of Unity. We also learned about different render pipelines, game design considerations for VR, and map designing.

What's next for Ethereal Escape

We first plan to add a way for the player to see their progress such as a timer or elevation level. We also plan to add more challenging parkour, puzzles that will stress the player during climatic moments, collectibles like powerups or coins, and integration with AI that adapts the dungeon to your worst fears (through image generation for the environment and AI NPCs). Lastly, we hope to add multiplayer by expanding the levels to encourage collaboration.

Built With

• c#
• quest
• unity