The Dread Forest Dungeon

Designing a VR Puzzle Game

The Dread Forest Dungeon is a VR puzzle game created for Udacity’s VR Developer Nanodegree program that challenges users to solve a familiar type of puzzle in a new way. This article details the project’s iterative design and user testing processes and provides a video demonstration of the final, post-feedback game design and gameplay mechanics.

The design process employed for this project begins with the initial development of lowfi sketches that help to determine design and gameplay requirements. For the purpose of this project, we created a series of preliminary sketches that outline level design and gameplay mechanics, as well as necessary UI (“user interface”) elements.

Once the initial design assets and gameplay mechanics are up running on a VR device, we can proceed to user testing and iterative design feedback. The following section introduces us to our test user, documents user feedback during multiple test runs, and outlines resulting enhancements made as a result of the user testing process.

Our test user for this project is Faith, a 17 year old, casual gamer. She is interested in learning more about VR, but is concerned with the potential learning curve and hardware demands that typify VR gaming. Faith is looking for a simple entry point into VR gaming that will introduce her to standard VR gaming mechanics and enabling hardware.

After multiple test runs, Faith recommended three primary changes to enhance the overall experience. First and foremost, she indicated that the scene could be “more interesting to look at.” Secondarily, she recommended making the rules of the game “more apparent.” Lastly, she requested a more interesting name for the game than the “VR Puzzler” placeholder title.

In response to user testing and feedback, an iterative design process was employed to add additional objects and scenery to the dungeon exterior, place instructions for the game on the opening “Play” UI screen, and change the name of the game to “The Dread Forest Dungeon.” A final user test confirmed that these iterative changes solved all issues found during user testing.

The finished game successfully incorporates all user feedback as demonstrated in the following video walk-through:

Following established best practices greatly benefits the VR game development process as evidenced by the findings in this article. Doing so provides meaningful structure to the project and helps to uncover issues not readily apparent to the developer, thus enabling a far better experience for developers and end-users alike.

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