Nexus Reality

Tired of reality? Step into Nexus, a place where the world revolves around you.

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Inspiration

Our game is inspired by the new hit show WandaVision. If you've seen the show, you will know that Wanda creates a new reality as a result of her trauma. Additionally, our game takes elements from the reality stone used in Avengers Infinity War. In the film, Thanos uses the reality stone to create an illusion to trap the Guardians of the Galaxy. We thought it would be interesting to take these elements and create a game out of it. Essentially this game is our implementation of what it would be like to have possession the reality stone. Since this application is in VR, the game really makes users feel like they can experience different realities.

What it does

We decided to address the problem statement of creating an Entertainment Hack. Since VR is becoming increasingly popular as a gaming platform, producing a game with VR would be relevant in the current industry. Additionally, our game's inspiration from popular culture would resonate with many users. With Nexus Reality, you will get the chance to customize your reality (18 different combinations) . These customizations include characters, time period, and season/climate, since we thought these would impact the scene the most. We believe that having pop culture references to various films, shows artists, and music would excite players of all ages. We decided that instead of a traditional quiz using UI elements, we would do an interactive quiz where the user selects the door that speaks to them most. Since the game is in VR, we wanted to take full advantage of immersing our players into the environment. Once your reality is created, you will get the opportunity to explore both indoors and outdoors, and interact with characters all over the town. Some of the characters will prompt you to a mini game (basketball, archery, beer pong, maze and science/math game). These will help you earn coins, which you can spend at the shop. We figured that having a "store" would motivate players to interact with the characters and play mini games. Use these coins to purchase music or build a new reality! The more realities you unlock, the higher the level. Incorporating the concept of levels would influence players to try out the different realities.

How we built it

Nexus Reality is built with Unity using BNG Framework. This framework allowed us to get the controls working in VR, we primarily tested our game with Oculus Quest 2. Since our project is very technical and functional, we realized it was necessary to use pre-made assets. The majority of our assets are from the Unity Asset Store, and UI elements were created with Canva. Our project has 56 scenes and over 30 scripts coded by us, in C#.

Challenges we ran into

The entire project was a challenge. Since our game was very large scale, we spent every day this week working on it. A huge challenge would be paying attention to the small details. Since we have over 18 different realities with both indoor and outdoor scenes, we had to customize each scene very well, and had great attention to detail. Although we have made 3D Unity games before, we never created a game in virtual reality, and we noticed many differences. Since in VR everything is largely scaled, rooms that looked detailed in the scene editor seemed empty in game mode. To overcome this, we primarily focused on the bigger picture the first few days, then went more into detail after. Another large challenge we faced was the many MANY bugs. There were bugs that we wouldn't notice when using Unity, but once we built it onto the Oculus, we found many problems. We had a document that we would put all the problems we found, and we spent a few days crossing off the list and fixing them. The amount of content in our game was very heavy for a one week hackathon. Another huge issue we faced was uploading our project. Since we have a file size of 8GB, it was a big challenge to do so.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Completing this project in a week was a huge accomplishment for us. Our project has many components, including the interactive quiz, the 18 different combinations of both indoor and outdoor scenes, and 5 mini games, and we are very proud we were able to do it all. We found that our mini games could have been games on their own, so we are happy to have gone far beyond that.

What we learned

This hackathon was a huge learning curve for all of us. We have never created an XR application before, so this was all brand new to us. Additionally, we brushed up our Unity and C# programming skills. We are now able to do much more in short periods of time. Another thing we learned is that although the creation of the product didn't take too long, fixing the bugs and putting detail into the game was very time consuming.

NOTE

Most files are in the Google Drive link, including the build if you would like to play. Scripts and README (citations) are on GitHub. If you would like to see our process videos and live streams through Oculus, check out the Facebook link!

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