Drowned Mind

General information

Date completed June 2018
Role in team Developer
Environment Unity 2018.2.6f2 & Oculus Rift
Language C#

Description

Drowned Mind is a Virtual Reality experience we created as a team of 5. It’s meant to give you the feeling a demented person might have when confronted with his day to day life.

The story revolves around an old man with dementia, who has many regrets when it comes to his life. He tries to get through his day and remember what he was supposed to do. Sometimes when he touches an object, he is reminded of the history of that object and as such remembers little parts of the past.

During the game, you find out that he was a marine biologist, but lost his wife to the sea. Because of this, he treated his child in a cold and distant way. Every day he wakes up and remembers he wants to apologize to him for his behaviour, not remembering he already has apologized the day before.

Oculus Rift

During the project, we made use of the Oculus Rift. I didn’t have much experience with Virtual Reality before the project, but I fell in love with it as I worked and tested and researched other Virtual Reality games. The immersion was mindblowing. Since this project, I’ve put many hours into getting to know about Virtual Reality development, but that is a story for a different page.

During the project, I learned how to make use of the Software available in Unity for the Oculus Rift. There were a few difficulties we ran into because of it, but the immersion it offered was more than worth it.

Shaders

This project was also my first project in which I experimented with shaders. We needed a way to show visually that the player was entering a memory. To do this, I figured a shader could work very well, so I did a bunch of research and found out how to write shaders in Unity.

The shader I decided to use was one similar to a dissolve shader, where the scene seemed to dissolve into the memory. For this to work well, I made use of two cameras. One for the current scene the player was in and one for the scene the memory was in. The reason I had to do this, was because the player still had to be able to move their head around and so I couldn’t just save a 2D image of the scene they were in.

I really enjoyed the process of making shaders and have since created many more different shaders, so I’m really glad we ended up needing one during this project.