Disco FeVR Dream is a game created in Unreal Engine for my Game Production class during the fall semester of 2018. It is a horror game set in an abandoned discotheque and playable on the Oculus Rift. I worked on a small team over the course of about four months to create the game, which was the first time any of us worked with virtual reality.

My primary roles on the team were level and puzzle design. I used the geometry brush system in Unreal to build a basement room, where the player finds a breaker to turn on the power, and a balcony area which leads to the maze at the game’s end. I also used the Unreal blueprint system to create several setpieces: the aforementioned breaker, a keypad used to access the final maze, and a color-shifting skybox, among other things.

We faced a number of obstacles during development, stemming from unfamiliarity both with Unreal and virtual reality. Player movement was a recurring limiter—the player controller saw at least three total rebuilds before the end—and aspects of the environment and puzzle flow had to be reorganized around them. We moved the balcony I created down to the same level as the main floor late in development, and didn’t incorporate exploration as heavily as we initially intended. These and other roadblocks provided learning points that will help—and have helped—to guide future work on virtual reality projects, both in and out of Unreal.

Credits and Links

Alexandra Fredrich – Producer, Game Designer

Aaron Gelblat-Bronson – Sound Designer

Parker Hamilton – Game Designer

Henry Hoare – AI Programmer, Game Designer

Jacob Kryca – Material Artist

Alexis Lellios – 3D Modeler, Game Designer

Anthony Podraza – 3D Modeler, Game Designer, Video Editor