September 2022
Laser Mom
Mixed Reality Stealth Game
Description
Laser Mom is a mixed-reality stealth game made in Oculus Passthrough. It uses a mix of virtual reality and real-life props. The Player must avoid the Mom enemy and her laser while seeking out candy scattered around the room. The mother cannot see behind the physical table, so the Player can hide behind it to avoid the enemy.
Final Demo Video
Process
My teammate Angie and I wanted to use the AR Quest Passthrough platform to its full potential, by making the game utilize real space as well as virtual reality. I had suggested a steal-based game, a heist at a museum, where the Player would have to hide behind real objects to avoid virtual enemies.
We brought it up with our producer, who suggested something more child-friendly, like a kid trying to steal candy from the kitchen while mom isn’t looking. At the end of the discussion, we came up with the basic mechanics and initial level design, with the assumption that all furniture in the room would be real, while the mother would be virtual.
We playtested the concept by taking turns roleplaying as the mother, setting up the scene with props we had on hand for the table and chairs. We better understood the Player experience and the way the AI should behave to make the game tense and fun.
We agreed that our initial design seemed successful for the project, and scoped the design down to just the table for the interim presentation since we noticed that it was the primary piece of furniture used by the Player.
Together, Angie and I created a real-life table prop out of cardboard. We didn’t want to use an actual table because it might encourage the Player to hide underneath it, something we wanted to be impossible in the gameplay.
Our “grey-box” playtest
Playtesting
During production, we playtested several times with people of varying experience with VR. We had tried using real-life candy to be overlaid with the virtual candy in the game and quickly realized that the interaction was too confusing for the Player, as what they were feeling with their hands wasn’t what they were seeing in the headset. Because we could not simply use real-life candy due to the limitations of the technology, we decided to use the candy instead as a reward for the Player at the end of the game, further combining reality with the virtual space.
The biggest obstacle during production was the alignment process. We needed the virtual table to align closely with the real-life prop we had built, which often meant fixing the size and shape of the prop itself. We ended up adding more height to the table for it to align properly with the in-game model.
Main Takeaways
There were still quite a few design issues that had little to do with the technology. For example, there was no indicator of how long the Player was in the mother’s laser path before the game was officially over, leading to Player confusion at their loss. The Player also paid little attention to the UI elements, often not noticing them there, or getting confused about their meaning, especially the mother’s “anger” gauge and what it meant. Having a clearer design for the UI as well as an audio queue would have helped that tremendously.
