The Prism Keeper

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  Menu

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  Solving Puzzle

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  Puzzle Completion

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  Solving Puzzle

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  Random Puzzle Difficulty Menu

Inspiration

I wanted to turn a simple idea—redirecting light with mirrors—into a puzzle you could reach out and interact with. VR offered a way to make that feel tangible: instead of clicking on pieces, you use your hands to manipulate a miniature puzzle in front of you.

As a solo developer at Robertson Gaming Studios, I wanted The Prism Keeper to combine colorful surroundings, clear mechanics, and plenty of reasons to return.

What it does

The Prism Keeper is a hands-first VR puzzle game where you rotate mirrors to guide colored light from a prism to matching flowers. Every mirror must receive light to complete the puzzle, so finding a route to each flower is only part of the challenge.

Obstacles complicate the paths, while movable blockers give you another way to solve them. Players can progress through the normal levels or choose a random mode with multiple difficulty settings and over 4 billion possible combinations.

How I built it

I built The Prism Keeper in Unreal Engine using Meta’s XR and Interaction SDK tools for hand interactions on Quest.

The project brings together mirror rotation, beam reflection, color-matching objectives, puzzle completion checks, and local progress saving. Alongside the normal levels, I developed a random puzzle system to give players more combinations to explore.

I refined the tabletop layout, menus, lighting, and visual feedback so the puzzle pieces and their interactions would remain the focus.

Challenges I ran into

A central challenge was making small tabletop objects comfortable to interact with using hands. Mirror placement, rotation, and interaction boundaries needed careful attention so players could manipulate the intended piece.

Another challenge was keeping the light paths understandable as puzzles became more complex. The environment needed to feel colorful and atmospheric while still allowing players to follow the beams and identify their targets.

Developing the project alone also meant balancing gameplay, presentation, testing, and release preparation.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm proud of bringing The Prism Keeper from an idea to a complete, playable VR game as a solo developer.

The combination of direct hand interaction and light-based puzzles gives a simple mechanic room to become challenging. I'm especially pleased to have both a normal progression mode and a random mode with over 4 billion possible combinations.

What I learned

This project reinforced how much the small details matter in VR. Interaction boundaries, object scale, menu placement, and visual feedback all affect how natural an experience feels.

It also taught me the value of keeping the central mechanic clear. Adding complexity to a puzzle works best when players can still understand what each piece does and why their actions change the result.

What's next for The Prism Keeper

My next step is releasing The Prism Keeper on the Meta Horizon Store and gathering feedback from players.

After launch, I want to use that feedback to improve interaction comfort, puzzle clarity, and difficulty balance, while exploring opportunities for additional puzzle content.

Built With

• blueprints
• c++