Red's Smart Room

An evil artificial intelligence takes over your room and tries to kill you. Dodge lasers, cleaning robots, and deadly tech to survive as long as possible

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Inspiration

The rise of artificial intelligence, digitalization, and dependence on smart appliances has changed modern life. While these things can be quite useful, excessive dependence may eventually lead to one's demise. AI remains a controversial topic, which is why I decided to create a game that explores this darker possibility. This game is also a small nod to The Stanley Parable and Black Mirror. While they weren't direct inspirations, I kept them in mind from time to time during development.

What it does

It is a game, where an evil AI takes over the room and tries to kill the person inside. It uses everything at its disposal (lasers, cleaning robots, bombs, turrets, mines, camera surveillance, and much more) to eliminate the player. The game starts easy but gets more difficult by the second. Every spawned appliance stays permanently, creating an increasingly cluttered and dangerous environment as time passes. Red's Smart Room has a locally run artificial intelligence that actively works against the player. It tracks the player's every move and behavior, then configures the minigames accordingly to encourage movement and prevent camping in one spot. Players must physically duck, jump, lay down, climb on furniture, and dodge incoming attacks to survive. The environment itself can be used to the player's advantage, and seemingly useless objects like balloons can be strategically used to block attacks and create temporary shields.

Throughout the experience, the AI's voice accompanies the player with humorous commentary, mocking remarks, and references to popular media. The game uses a hybrid system of (Elevenlabs) API-generated and prerecorded voicelines, since I didn't want to lock this experience behind an internet requirenment.

How I built it

The game was built from scratch using unity and the provided meta SDK, tested on a meta quest 3. Paired together with a ton of time, and lots of determination.

Challenges I ran into

Finding the right voice for the AI was one of the challenges. A humane and emotional voice would have undermined the robotic nature of the AI. I spent days tweaking the voice to match my vision, something devoid of soul and humanity, yet expressive enough to deliver humorous lines effectively. On the technical side, implementing a responsive API voice system required optimization to prevent delays, as waiting for the request to finish completely kills the immersion.

The local AI and its surrounding features also demanded significant optimization work. While performance is acceptable for this initial demo, I aim to refine it further after release to achieve better performance.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Creating a unique game concept that leverages almost every positive aspect of XR. The mixed reality, the integration of your own environment, the real life dodging and the whole immersion. This is something I belive could not be done as effectivly and fun on a flat screen.

What I learned

Everything is possible. Even though I didn't believe I, as a single developer, could build a polished project within a month, from planning to submission, I still did it. Also, programming the game, I strengthened my knowledge of AI, both integrating and optimizing external solutions and building custom prediction and behavior systems from scratch.

What's next for Reds Smart-Room

Definitely more ways for the AI to kill you. Also, local multiplayer, because everything is more fun with friends. Along with multiplayer comes cooperative modes, where players must work together to survive the AI's threats. And lastly, visual experimentation. I didn't have enough time to try different visual styles before submission, but I plan to explore this afterward. While I'm satisfied with the current visuals, I believe I could create something even better with more time to experiment

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