VR Escape Room

Created as part of the Play & Games module for my 2nd year studies at UWE, I was randomly assigned a piece of gaming hardware and instructed to make a co-op game. A wide brief but limited by the fact that the hardware I was given was a single Oculus Rift set which I somehow needed to create a multiplayer experience with. I decided to build an escape room and have each of the player’s be responsible for a different aspect of the movement of the player, forcing them to work together (or not) if they wanted to unlock the rooms and proceed through the level.

To accomplish this, I decided to extrapolate the 3 key elements to the Oculus Rift and assign their use to each player of the players, one player wears the headset, another controls the movement, while the other player(s) use the hand controllers.

The core loop of the game involves picking up various ‘keys’ from around the room and slotting them into place in order to unlock the door and move on. Sounds easy enough however only the person wearing the headset can actually see the keys. The other players can see the room from the POV of the headset user on a second screen but can only see the keys displayed on their screen when they successfully grab them. The headset user needed to give clear instructions to the others to direct the movement around the room as well as to the hand players to be able to pickup the keys.

During play testing there were many humours moments of the headset user saying things like “go over there” and the other players having no idea what they meant. Additionally, when one of the hand players would accidentally drop a key and then have to be guided back to picking it back up again. An average run through the level would normally take around 20 minutes however I created the below walkthrough video solo to help players better understand the mechanics as the real playtests proved quite chaotic to try to get recordings from.