September 10, 2019

Escape From Dino Island

Description

In this project, a desktop VR experience was developed, where a person was stranded on a dangerous island and tried to escape from there. To interact in the virtual environment the HTC Vive hardware was used, which was consisting of a virtual reality headset and two controllers. The headset used room scale tracking to let the user move in the virtual environment and interact with the controllers. The goal of the game was to find a radio transmitter and call for help. While searching the area the player had to defend himself from aggressive dinosaurs by killing them with a gun. The remaining ammunition and the health of the player was displayed on a HUD in front of him. When a dinosaur attacked and hurt the player a blood effect was issued to notify the player that his health gets reduced. When the player’s health reached a life-threatening state the blood effect got more intensive until he died. In case of that, the player was able to start the game again from the beginning. After the player managed to find the radio transmitter and call for help, he was picked up by a helicopter. If after ending the game the player wanted to play again he only had to say the word RESTART which went him back at the beach where he was stranded.

The application was developed in Unity using the C# programming language and the SteamVR SDK which gets gets provided for free. To achieve the voice recognition operation, a keyword recognizer was used which got provided by the Unity SDK.

Dinosaur AI State Machine

To let the dinosaurs act in an intelligent manner, an AI state machine was developed which consisted of the following states. Each state was related to a specific animation which was shipped together with the dinosaur’s package.

SateDescription
Idle The dinosaur stays and looks around him
Patrol The dinosaur walks within specified waypoints
Alerted The dinosaur gets alerted if the player is nearby or hears something
Pursuit The player is being followed by the dinosaur
Attack The player gets attacked by the dinosaur
Dead The dinosaur dies

Below there are some images of the VR experience depicted and a video which shows the gameplay of the application.

Screenshots of the Application

Video