The Shapeless Estate (VR Game)

Ghost
Circle Room
Room 3 Interior
Room 5 Interior
Room 1 Interior
The Shapeless Estate Banner

Inspiration

Our main inspiration goes from Phasmophobia, Luigi's Haunted Mansion 3 and the concept of Non-Euclidian games like Anti-chamber.

What it does

The Shapeless Estate is an interactive ghost hunting VR game. You play as a detective searching for ectoplasmic clues. Your journey takes you to a Victorian styled mansion and using your special magnifying glass, you can find and capture ghosts with a modified vacuum cleaner. The journey you take will be filled with trial and error as the rooms and items will be randomly generated and scattered around the environment.

How we built it

Our build started by creating our main concept then finding and creating assets that went with our overall theme. Some assets had to be personally built, using blender, like our ghost, ghost clues, ghost animation, magnifying glass, vacuum cleaner and vacuum cleaner animation. After creating the base game in unity, the construction on the rooms could begin. Afterwards, we designated spots for items and created code to randomly select items for those spots. Some other features that we had to create where door hinge mechanics, interactive physics, ghost animation, implementing sounds, creating code for the randomly generated room layout, the magnifying glass ghost feature, the magnifying glass cooldown feature and the magnifying glass shader that allows magnification.

Challenges we ran into

Our first challenge was learning tools and creating our custom assets, our team had no experience working with blender. A lot of time was spent watching YouTube videos and playing around with the new software. The next hurdle involved the magnifying effect that was applied to the magnifying glass. We ended up creating a custom shader in unity which calculated angles of refraction from incoming light. Due to differences between Unity versions, very little help could be found online. A few of our smaller problems involved rendering the rooms, global coordination vs local coordinates in relation to the ghost animation, making the door hinges work and overall, the project itself. This project was a great undertaking and we ran into many more problems during development.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The entire project is a huge accomplishment, we were able to overcome many hurdles and learn along the way. A couple of our favorite accomplishment are learning blender, being a internal decorator, the magnifying glass (as a whole), learning vector functions, door movement and VR game development.

What we learned

We learned how to use blender, unity, basic animation, magnification rendering, internal design, vector functions, room creation, door movement and VR game development.

What's next for The Shapeless Estate (VR Game)

Overall, our next move would be to make the game more detailed. We would like better graphics, a more thought-out storyline, outdoor environments, more indoor environments, windows and even more details throughout the game.