MITO VR

Lead Designer

Champlain College Production Level Game – Unity3D

Team Size: 8 (Spring 2017)

MITO VR is a VR adventure game where the player has to focus on interacting with the alien-like beings in various ways around them to figure out how to progress.

About MITO

MITO is a finished vertical slice VR adventure game, created with Unity3D and developed for the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive device. In MITO, the player interacts with puzzle elements to make it through the game. We focused on three different interaction mechanics that connect the player and the environment to feel more immersed with the in game elements.

MITO was created for our Production II course at Champlain College. In this course we had a semester to create a VR game experience vertical slice.

Player Interactions

We split the player mechanics into three categories for VR interactions. Since MITO takes place in a gravity-free environment, we had a simple movement system of pointing where you want to move and pressing a trigger, which led for us to use the majority of the motion control movement and buttons for interacting.

Pull Interaction

The first mechanic that the player can preform is the pull interaction with consists of the player being able to yank flower pods out of the walls and grabbing the torch out of it’s ‘shell’ in the beginning of the game.

This interaction is the most basic of the three but directly relates to the environment as the player will have to literally pull the interaction objects out of the walls creating a change in the atmosphere and surroundings.

MitoPull — Interacting with the environment by pulling

Shake Interaction

Shaking in MITO is primarily used to brighten the torch that the player holds to explore the surroundings and will draw more attention from the bugs that fly around.

Additionally, shaking the torch will let the player dodge bugs when they charge towards the player. If the player lets the bugs hit them, the torch will be launched away from the player. The shaking will brighten the torch to teach the player how to brighten their surroundings as well.

The shake interaction is the player’s main way to progress through the game because with more light it becomes easier to tell where to go and understand how many bugs the player has to interact with before the door will open.

MitoShake — Shaking the Lightsource to brighten the surroundings

Peel Interaction

The final interaction is peeling, which the player must do to obtain items. In the vertical slice the first thing the player must do to progress throughout the game is peel open the torch.

This interaction was a test for our development to see if we could prototype and develop a way to make the peel feel very responsive and immersive for the player. We succeeded and the result makes the player feel even more in the environment. This interaction uses both motion controllers rather than just one like the other two interactions.

MitoPeel — Peeling to reveal the lightsource

My Roles and Responsibilities on the Team

During the development of MITO, I was the lead designer mainly responsible for the creation of the interaction systems as well as the balancing of the difficulty of the level itself. Throughout the semester I worked on tasks such as:

Prototyped the original planned levels in a week
Designed the interaction systems
Balanced the bug variables and the lighting values
Placed props throughout the level
Did animation scripting of the various environmental props
Led team meetings
Gave update presentations on the game’s development progress
Designed the alien torch object
Designed the final flower that collects the torch
Designed the bug behavior
Designed the game flow for teaching the player how to use the interaction objects