Nāga : The Gaze Maze
A gaze-based VR maze game for the Google Cardboard
Nāga: The Gaze Maze is a Virtual Reality (VR) game for Google Cardboard, similar to the arcade classic Pac-Man. It is created by three students in Udacity’s VR Developer Nanodegree program: Acar Okan AKALIN , Michael Smilovitch, and Nidhal Liouane. Our group name was Team Clu for Teamworks 3. Here is the end result of our 4 week long marathon!
The theme of Teamworks 3 was “patterns”. We had the idea of doing something with snakes, inspired by the serpent’s patterned skin, and decided to make the game’s space a maze as another pattern.
Some brainstorming led to an Ancient Egyptian-themed level, with a mythical Nāga Snake as the playable character.
Story
Norse Frost Giants have invaded Nāga’s home, the great pyramid, in the desert maze. They caught her when she was exhausted from a previous battle with her arch-nemesis. Now, she must collect mana orbs around her house to repel the invaders.
Movement
Character movement in Nāga is gaze-based. The player can guide her through a treacherous maze by looking at any location in the maze and clicking the Cardboard button. But beware! There are deadly Frost Giants patrolling the maze, which can only be defeated after collecting enough mana orbs! Nāga will unleash her fury on her enemies when she becomes strong enough. You don’t want to be near her when she is that angry!
Enemies
Enemies follow various movement paths, or rather, movement “patterns”. Upon venturing deeper into the maze, players will need to carefully examine enemy movements and power-up locations in order to safely move forward.
Shop
Nāga is an elegant serpent lady, slithering gracefully around the battlefield. Battle-zone or not, she always looks beautiful!
Before defeating the invaders in her realm, check out your wardrobe. Choose the best armor and war-paints while unleashing your wrath upon the enemies. You are a goddess after all…
Final Thoughts
Creating Nāga: The Gaze Maze was a rich learning experience for all of us. With more time we would have liked to include more polished gaze indicators, and a more refined movement system. We also would have liked to make maps with different themes, with focuses on unique powerups and gameplay mechanics.
Credits
Nidhal made all the modelling by himself (except the assets listed below) and the level design. Programming was done by Michael and Okan.
You can find our source code here: https://github.com/team-clu/naga
List of external assets:
Maze element Ice Golem by Andres Olivella
Double Sided Shaders by Ciconia Studio
Skyboxes MegaPack 1 by Cerberus (you can’t find this in the codebase as it is a paid asset)
Metal Gear game-over easter egg sounds was taken from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqXRGQJLsCk
Background music was taken from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-2GrtaPnQw
