Building Virtual Worlds (BVW)
Building Virtual Worlds (BVW) is a rapid game prototyping course at CMU ETC, pioneered by ETC co-founder Randy Pausch. We, as teams of 5 students, were given 2 weeks to create an interactive virtual world using creative platforms like VR. I participated in four rounds of BVW and you can see all the demos here: https://www.youtube.com/@yanchenhu5579
Throughout this course, I have taken the following roles: Game Designer, Producer, Programmer, and Sound Effects Artists. For Sweet & Seal-ious, I was Game Designer, Producer and Sound Effects Artist.
We were given the prompt 'naive guest'. Essentially, a guest with no prior knowledge of video games or consoles (some struggle with how to press buttons) or VR should be able to just put on the headset and figure this game out. The design goal here is to be as intuitive as possible: so you wave your quest controller (the lollipop), which attracts seals, and then you put seals into the tank as fuel and hit boost to speed up your boat to collect cake slices that are floating above the purple ocean. This is all very common sense.
We did iterate the experience after playtests, because some guests don't get how the game works (shocking). We reduced the number of tanks from 4 to 1, added text UI directly in game, and put instructions up on a whiteboard for guests to view before they stepped into the boat. Programming-wise we hid a trick where when you hit the boost button, we auto-adjust your direction to the closest cake slice. As a result, even though the game loop makes no sense in real life but a weird game in a weird setting felt pretty natural to our guests - even if they still don't get what the gameplay is, they are sitting in a boat, sailing in a pink ocean with cute creatures and that on its own is a cool experience. I believe that through good thematic design, using minimal controls (simply waving, no button presses), spamming instructions inside and outside the game, and hidden built-in guiding, we were really able to deliver an immersive experience to 'naive guests'.
