Doge VR Overview
Doge VR is a VR dog simulator with gameplay elements where the player is embodied in a family dog's body which allows the player to experience how it feels to be a dog. The experience includes quests, interactions, unique movement implementation and vision colour change to simulate how a dog sees the world.This project was inspired by games such as Goat Simulator, Stray and Nintendogs and was tested on Oculus Quest 2.
Who am I and what I did
I'm Dominik Komar and my role in this project was programming and house design. I was responsible for all the quests in this project, including pathfinding and quest UI as well as creating the whole house structure.My very first contribution to this project was creating this house.
Interactions
Quests
There are 2 quests that I've implemented, finding food and finding water. The quests are triggered when a player approaches the point of interest that will trigger the quest, for example, the finding food quest is started by finding an empty bowl in the room the user is spawned in first.Pathfinding uses particles drawn in OpenBrush, I have tested other ways of implementing pathfinding but this way was by far the quickest and most time effective. I have placed the particles by hand making a way that leads to the end of the quest, it appears once a quest gets started. The idea behind the pathfinding effect is that you follow the "smell".
Individual Addition
Hidden Room Addition
For my individual addition, I've decided to go for something very unexpected and more game-like. As in the game you play as the family dog, I have added an easter egg room where things take a dark turn. When the specific place is found, a door appears that leads to the hidden corridor where an unsettling image is found and creepy music plays.To get to the hidden room, the player has to follow clues found in the house that lead to the room, so if the player decides to follow the clues he has a chance to discover the dark secrets of the household.The image of the dog is the actual dog the player is playing as, and as I found it a little disturbing to look at I decided to make it into a scarry easter egg. It was inspired by GoatSimulator's easter eggs.
When the player finds the spot, the wall disappears when it's touched and it reveals the doors. The doors automatically disappear behind the player once he goes further into the corridor and the music starts playing, with no way out the player is forced to look at the unsettling image while listening to the music.
Gameplay and Reflection
Reflection
Overall, I'm very happy with how the project turned out. As a group, we set ourselves weekly goals and every goal has been reached and sometimes even exceeded which led to our VR experience being very successful from what we have been told when our application was tested by many different people, overall we got very positive feedback which made us very happy.I feel that we definitely not only met the goal but exceeded it, the goal of our project at first was simply to embody players into a dog's body, and now it has more game-like elements, amazing visuals and most importantly it's a fun experience which makes it more enjoyable and better than planned!The most challenging thing for me in this project was actually making sure that the quests disable themselves only when the quest was previously activated as I had an issue where the finish line of the quest would trigger even when the quest wasn't activated, also figuring out how to use Coroutines for the UI when a quest is triggered as well as when a quest is finished.
Gameplay
There is no specific user journey as our project is meant to be played however the player sees fit, let it be simply walking around and enjoying the experience or specifically looking for quests and other things to do, we want our project to be as free as possible therefore there is no user journey to explain. That said, in the gameplay above I show you what a general gameplay might look like, including quests and finding the hidden room.