XMAS VR was a project made during the first Unity part of the Immersive Experience Creator program at Futuregames. During the first part, which was roughly one week, we were tasked with creating a small experience / game in the game engine Unity. During the second part, which was another two weeks, we were tasked with polishing the experience as well as adding immersive sound to the experience using the program FMOD, with a plug-in that replaces Unity's audio engine.

The result of these three weeks was a holiday-themed game: XMAS. The challenge for the player is dressing a Christmas tree with decorations that are hidden in a snowy landscape. The main way of locating these is through spatial sound, as they each emit a small audio loop. Once one decoration has been put on the tree, the next pops into being, and starts emitting sound. When all decorations have been collected, the player is rewarded with the entire song the loops were taken from, as well as snow and many more decorations falling down from the sky.

A simple concept, but quite pleasing in the way that many simple interactions can be in VR.

Being the person responsible for tech / project management, it was quickly apparent that we had to be very humble about what could be achieved in such a short time. The first thing I settled on was the use of an interaction system called "Auto Hand" from the Unity asset store. This basically bypassed the need to construct our own VR-rig within Unity, and also gives access to a lot of object interaction mechanics. This allowed us to go straight to designing a game, and not having to worry too much about the technical aspects of what we wanted to do, as long as we were willing to put up with the robotic hand model that comes with the "Auto Hand" asset.

The next task was finding a free low-poly asset bundle on the website "Kenney", which could become the basis of our game. As we were designing for the Quest 2, going for assets with a simple geometry is essential if one wants to build in an outdoor space like we were. After browsing the various packs available, we settled for a holiday themed game, which was complemented with some other Christmas-assets off the Unity asset store.

The biggest challenge during this phase of the project turned out to be understanding Unity itself. Due to our team splitting up the project into tech (which was me) and level design, we had to merge three different projects into one. At this point, a rouge camera sneaked in, which caused a severe bug that took a day to figure out.
We also had issues with low frame rate, which came from building in the "Demo" project of one of the assets, as well as strange visual effects from the material on the ground and the fog we used to hide the horizon. These challenges were overcome by swapping the fog for a low-poly landscape generator, as well as building the level from scratch rather than building from the demo-level.

The hands were an additional problem, since the default egg-white color made for horribly low contrast with the bright-white ground, making it very hard to see your hands. This was corrected via the creation of a material through Adobe Substance Painter, creating a sort of semi-transparent, polka-striped pattern that was both festive and interesting too look at.
The final and most important challenge was the game itself, i.e. locating and fetching the decorations. Creating an experience that would not outstay its welcome, while being satisfying took some tweaking. The audio loops had to be short, but not too annoying, and the audio used for locating decorations had to be subtle, forcing the user to actually listen. The audio loop had to be just about audible above the wind and other ambient nature sounds, while not being too loud once up close.

In the end the decision to use an off-the-shelf interaction system saved us plenty of effort and made space for the kind of fine-tuning that is essential to creating satisfying games.