Horror On the Holodeck

Inspiration

Ben drowned creepypasta [http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/BEN_Drowned]

Inception

Requiem For A Dream

Stranger Things

What it does

We attempt to ease the player into a sense of calm before forcibly pulling all of their comforts from them.

How we built it

With Vive in Unreal!

Things we made from scratch this weekend: Our blueprints Our visual effects Our music / VO Half(ish) of our models

Challenges we ran into

This game is more of a storytelling experience, so we spent a lot of time building out a story with a good dramatic curve to keep the player involved mentally. None of us are very experienced writers, so this was a big challenge for us.

Additionally, we planned for having 2 3D modelers, but we lost one a few hours into the hack, which threw off our time tables a bit.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We really wanted to sell the idea of a holodeck that you experience in VR and we're definitely proud of the effects that sell the experience of a holodeck. We also are proud of the music and sound that are supposed to drive the experience. We're not sure that it will be effective yet, but we see the possibility in the way that we could build anticipation using the music.

What we learned

Cinematic experiences are hard with VR. Instead of directly moving the camera, you really need to draw the player's attention using visuals, mainly lighting, and sound to the focal points of the experience.

We also realized that psychological horror is a lot about polish.