Balloon World | Devpost

Inspiration

We live in a busy world nowadays. Employees work 9 to 5, 40 hours a week. Students study hard for their future. The advancement of technology has pushed people to work harder or fall behind. But technology also creates opportunities never seen before. By using Virtual Reality (VR), we want to mitigate the troubles that people are facing. We want people to temporarily forget about their worries and immerse themselves in Balloon World, a world of no real objective. Sometimes, we take a step back to move forward.

What it does

Balloon World is a VR game where people touch balloons with their controllers, while listening to meditating white ambient noise. There is intentionally no real objective in this game. There is no score for touching balloons, and there is no end game. Balloon World is an endless world of balloons and relaxation sound. We design the game with one sole purpose in mind - to create a stopping point for players to forget about their worries for the day, and simply touching balloons.

How we built it

We built Balloon World using Unity and testing the game with the Meta Quest 2. We created balloons as game objects and let them float in a randomized pattern. Then we designed a simple collision detection system when players' controller sticks touch the balloons, which causes them to shrink and be slightly pushed. We chose a light-toned textures for our world to please the players' eye, as the ultimate goal for the game was pure meditation and relaxation.

Challenges we ran into

Since we were unfamiliar with VR game design, we initially had trouble setting up VR environment to develop the game. Furthermore, since VR game design requires 3D models that were not availably ready, where most of them are paid through asset stores, we ran into troubles finding the 3D models (terrain, balloons, controller' sticks) for our VR game. Time limitation was also a factor that let us push some ambitious intentions behind, such as the ability for players to draw something, and their drawings "inflated" into a 3D object.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Since this was our first time design a VR game, we were quite satisfied with the result. The game was in line with our initial vision of creating a meditation world. When testing the game, we could feel the relaxation environment that we tried to create, and we hope that the players would feel the same.

What we learned

We were able to learn a lot about VR game design. We realized there was much more to a VR game than we thought. Designing a VR game required careful planning and a feasible vision of the final product, as for a 3D object to interact as intended was much more challenging than it looked. We also enhanced our collaboration skills as we were communicating with differents team members who had differents sets of skills and contributions towards this project.

What's next for Balloon World

We look forward to continuing to expand Balloon World by first implement our unfinished intentions, such as the ability for players to draw and create 3D objects. We also want players to change world theme (a forest of pine trees and soothing wind, or a sunny beach of sounding waves) based on their current emotion. As busy students ourselves, we realize how important it is to have a break opportunity, and to be as relaxing as possible, Balloon World will continue to expand to be a place of no real purpose, except to stop the troubles and worries.