Become a Home Detective!

Get the game here:

https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/6123516891014614/

Today I released my new game, Home Detective on the Meta App Lab. It’s a VR game that uses passthrough (making it a bit more like an AR game), and lets you become a kind of work-from-home detective, solving crimes from your own living room.

I started off making a passthrough and hand-tracking game only, with the idea that players would interact with their environment in a very natural way, but soon realised that adding controller support would be best, as the accuracy and precision of controller tracking (along with it having real buttons) makes it a lot more reliable. And then recently I added a ‘Pure VR’ mode which you can play standing or even sitting down, so anyone – even those with small play areas – can still enjoy the game.

There are some cool interactions – you can search a body for clues, finding debris under the fingernails, open cupboards and drawers and search them (while they feel like real furniture in your own home), and dust objects for fingerprints.

One feature I am particularly proud of is the ‘Residual Heat Scanner’ which shows leftover footprints, and items that the criminal(s) may have touched. It is basically a Unity light that activates certain objects, but I had to optimise the shader very hard to allow the use of more than 1 per-pixel light on the Meta Quest 2.

Another feature you can’t see in screenshots is the Dynamic Music System. The tracks for each level are divided into instruments (thanks to the awesome guys at https://www.fesliyanstudios.com/), and I layer on more tracks as the scene gets more intense. By the end of the level, when you are picking the suspect, everything is going full blast, but it ramps up so gradually you don’t notice the changes.

The game can be downloaded for free from App Lab, and extra levels are available as IAPs. Please take a look!


Comments

One response to “Become a Home Detective!”

  1. wendy torres Avatar
    wendy torres

    The data clouds are hard to align and take a while. And then we still fail to catch who did it.
    Not sure what we are missing though good idea.

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