Echolocation
VR Minigame
Solo Developer
Feb 2024
Tools Used:
Unity, Blender
Background: This was created as a final course project for MAAD 24920: Virtual Reality Production.
THE PROJECT
The concept for Echolocation was born out of several mini-projects I worked on for my Virtual Reality Production class. I was particularly interested in exploring applications of spatial audio in VR, as this was the focus of the last mini-project before the final, and Echolocation is my attempt at gamifying the location of objects using spatial sound. As I discovered when working on my spatial audio mini-project, due to the limitations of most sound devices, stereo sound is usually not sufficient for being able to correctly locate an object in VR, so I was particularly interested in exploring how else I could use audio to convey information about location to the player. In Echolocation, gems appear within a circle around the player, and they must touch the gems before their time runs out. They get some time back every time they collect a gem, but this amount of time decreases as the game progresses, and gems also begin fading out to transparent, in order to make the gameplay more dependent on auditory cues.
The rules menu of Echolocation.
THE PROCESS
After almost an entire term working with Unity’s VR tools for this course, I was definitely starting to find my footing, but certain aspects of setting up the scene still proved somewhat challenging. I started by creating the rules menu and triggering the start of the game, before moving on to implementing the various events that take place over the flow of the game (such as the player having a timer that gets reset, and the gems fading out as the game progresses). Once I had set up the gems to spawn in a circle around the player at various random heights, I determined that I could use the pitch of the gems’ sound effects to correspond to their height in the world. This was inspired by some in-class examples, where the position of objects was used to determine properties such as their color or thickness, and I figured the same could be applied to adjusting the pitch of the gems’ audio sources. This ended up being the missing piece I needed in order to provide the player with adequate information to locate gems based on sound alone. Originally, the gems would fade to almost complete invisibility, which I adjusted to make the gameplay feel more fair, but even when they were nearly impossible to see, I the spatiality and pitch of the sounds still proved sufficient to find and touch the gems throughout several test sessions. Thus, I had succeeded in my mission to create a VR game using spatial audio as the primary means of expressing information.
As the player gets further into the game, gems get harder to see, forcing the player to rely more on their hearing.
THE RESULT
Given that Echolocation is the first proper VR game I created, and that it was developed within a relatively short timeframe due to class deadlines, I am very pleased with how it turned out. I personally find it incredibly fun to play, and I think it succeeds at making use of an interesting property of audio in virtual reality. Additionally, the process of translating my idea into a full-fledged game went much smoother than previous projects, an indicator to me that my design skills are improving. Further, I’m glad that this course has pushed me to tinker around with developing for VR, since I have some future passion projects in mind that lean heavily into VR capabilities, and the experience I gained developing Echolocation will certainly help with reaching those goals. Due to the nature of VR, Echolocation is best experienced by playing it firsthand (it can be downloaded here), but I have also included a video showing a bit of gameplay footage.
A video I recorded showing the basic gameplay of Echolocation.