V-Rex

View of the warehouse cubicle, i.e. playing area

Inspiration

We were inspired to create this project after our first dinosaur-themed game, called Rawrer, which received an honorary mention in the Complexity Game Jam in 2020. We decided to dive deeper into the dinosaur community of Rawrer and flesh out the story of a working class individual. Being already professionally active in VR development, we chose the VR format to tell that story, and so V-Rex was born.

What it does

The game puts the player in the shoes of a T-Rex who work as a warehouse employee for a living. The game-play is focused on packaging and shipping customer orders. The twist in this otherwise straight-forward task is that the player needs to perform it with the simulated restriction of the short arm reach and two-finger anatomy of the T-Rex. Adding on top an intense time-pressure for performance and an unforgiving salary system, makes V-Rex an infinite-runner about the absurdity of the contemporary working conditions.

How we built it

We are making the game using Unity as a game engine and a series of tools for the creation of the assets, e.g. Blender, Illustrator, Visual Studio, Audacity, etc.

Challenges we ran into

Given the importance of arm and hand movement in our core game idea, we put great value in customizing the virtual experience to the physicality of each player for VR games. Therefore we are designing the game itself in a way where key spatial dimensions are adapted to the height of each player during setup to provide a tailored experience.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are especially proud of the core design idea which we believe has great merit in terms of engagement, fun, but also sociopolitical commentaries.

What we learned

With the opportunity of V-Rex, we honed our skills in the fine details of hand-based VR interactions and in design principles for tight-space layouts for VR. Furthermore, we gained more insight into gameplay loop design adapted for VR, especially with regards to conceptual clarity and spatial orientation for the player.