Puzzler Submission by Nurit Praeger

Nurit Praeger
Aug 28, 2017 · 4 min read

This is the 4th project for Udacity’s Virtual Reality Nanodegree. Unity 5.5.1 Google VR SDK 1.0.3

Introduction

For this project the user is brought into a dark, eery, scary cave. In the cave there are 4 bright orbs. When you press the button labeled “Start”, the orbs beging to light up in a sequence. The challenge of the game is to remember this sequence similar to “Simon Says”. If you enter the sequence correctly you win.

Objectives

The main objective of this project is to iterate many times and fix any UI issues before you launch your game. In the first build, we had to make sure the scale of the cave was accurate and lifelike. This gives you a feel for the measurement units in Unity compared to an actual door opening.

We also had to create canvases for the user which were easy to use and legible.

I used bright pink for my canvases to take some of the eeriness of the game away and make it more cheerful.


This project was fun but there were many bugs in the program and I had to work closely with my one on one mentor Antony to debug the code.

Feedback for this project was also very important.

Question: What do you see when you look through Google Cardboard?

Answer: A dark scary cave behind a hot pink canvas with a start button.

Question: Are the words legible and instructions easy to follow?

Answer: No, the Start inside the button is too small.

Question: Is the sequence of the orbs easy or challenging?

Answer: The sequence is too easy.

Question: How is the sound?

Answer: I hear birds in the background and orb sound is loud and clear.

These things can easily be changed in Unity by making the time less between lightups in the orbs. The font size is also easy to change.

Svetlana

Changes Made

I changed the speed of the puzzle to make it harder. In fact, it was so hard my subject had a hard time getting it right. I also changed the position of the camera so the canvas was easily in the viewer’s vision. Changes to the fonts were also made to accomodate the user.

Svetlana is a millenial who has no experience with VR. She enjoys competitive tennis and is involved in studying game theory.

Svetlana thought the sequence game was too easy.

Ah, we won!!

Thank goodness she finally remembered the sequence after changing the puzzle speed.

Final Result

The player has a short engaging VR experience

  1. The player sees a canvas with a Start Button and uses gvr reticle to press this Start button. With code written by Udacity, called game logic, the stone cave appears and the player sees the lightup sequence of the orbs.
  2. Player can observe the sequence of the orbs being lit up, observe the ambient sound of birds chirping and look inside the stone cave.
  3. If player repeats the sequence of the lit up orbs incorrectly, the puzzle will restart, once again, thank you to Udacity for providing the code.
  4. If player repeats the sequence correctly, the scene will automacilly be taken to the You Won Canvas that I created in hot pink.
  5. Player, at that point, has the option to restart the game.

Conclusion

The Puzzler Game is great for challenging one’s short term memory. There are many scientific studies showing that practice with short term memory can help increase brain power. Games are an easy fun way to achieve short term memory skills.

This game can be made harder by adding more orbs and making the light up times faster, therefore more complex to remember.

All in all, the puzzler was a challenging game to play when the speed was changed. The user input was helpful in the design of the game. The mood of the stone cave and the puzzle orbs were all taken into consideration in the design of the game.

The final result was a successful build of the puzzler game and the game was made challenging enough for the intended users.

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