Problem Statement :

• Indirect control for someone who has not used the platform before.

• To feel a strong sense of freedom.

To feel a strong sense of freedom :

After the team settled on the idea of the hamster, I suggested tube city to allow the player to enter tubes and move around the house according to their will.

I was responsible for designing the rotation and movement of the wheel along the different axis with respect to the player’s camera movement and controller input. This was done using a combination of Quaternions and Euler angles.

After creating a quick prototype, I realised the following scenarios can exist :

I proposed the interaction objects like vacuum, catapult, spring and tube city. After working closely with the artist for the placement, I scripted the mechanisms for the same.  

Playtesting Results and Observations :

Players needed to make a wild guess at the start.

Players sometimes took a few good seconds to understand that they were a hamster inside a wheel and the mechanic was to turn the wheel to proceed. [Insert Gif]

We eliminated this confusion by having a hamster in a wheel approach you as a part of the story. This helped user make sense of the situation they were in. This provided indirect control and the interaction was easy even for someone who hadn’t used the platform before.

Why did I decide to let the wheel to rotate along y-axis when the player looks left or right?

One option was to have them press the trigger to move the wheel left or right. Since the player was going to be a naive guest, I wanted to minimalize the number of interactions with the Vive controller. Playtesting helped us confirm that this did not seem out of the ordinary.[Insert Gif]

Originally, the height of the wheel was fixed and later had to be changed.

Oddly enough, the team members did not vary much in height. When we playtested outside of our team, we realised different people viewed the wheel differently, for tall people, the wheel felt like a helmet. After playtesting that, I resolved the problem by dynamically assigning the height of the wheel at the start of the game to the height of the controller from the ground and the distance of the wheel in front of the player was approximately equal to half of the height to ensure it was at arm’s length.

These arrows felt like they were pointing to something on the ground that can be collected.