Pawlice Escape

Github repo: https://github.com/laurenhsueh/Cat-Escape-Game

Videos: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1JKSMvFb-MhJ4LVGyadF7DQesNz78MZ8a?usp=sha...

Premise

You messed up. You stumbled upon your cat having a secret cat society cabinet meeting. Now, you know too much. They knock you out, and you wake up in what looks like an interrogation room.  Not knowing what to do with you, they temporarily leave you alone to discuss their plan. Escape the facility while you still can using hints and voice controlled doors.

Overview of the game

Starting in the interrogation room, you talk to the interrogation officer to learn more information about why you are there. There is a motion detection camera monitoring you, giving you limited options for movement. As the interrogation officer leaves, you have an opening. You grab a piece of gum you find and jam the motion detection camera with the gum. In the vents, you find a hint seemingly left by someone before you. The key to the door is  "meow meow." You press the door button and speak into it saying "meow meow," which opens the door to a prisoner cat giving you an offer. He will give you more information if you let him escape after. You learn that the next door out is at the end of the hallway and that the next voice key out changes. Looking at another vent, you find another hint that reads "meow x hour" The next door key is saying meow the number of times the hour is. Going to that door and saying the key, you enter into the guard room where you can escape the facility.

The development process

I started with modeling my environment and cats in blender. Then I rigged the cats, animated them, and created the animation transitions for these animations in unity. After, I imported the environment model fbx into unity and worked on getting the proper materials/textures to transfer. When all my models were set, I started on the code development process. My first instinct was to figure out the hardest aspects first, so I did the Meta voice sdk and door opening. Then after the door triggers were good, I did the NavMesh enemies. At the very end, I did all the other HUD, dialog, puzzles, and story driven functionality.

Successes

My major successes were figuring out most of the nav mesh behaviors and cat animations. Also, I figured out how to get my head under doors and use the voice sdk properly. I simply shrunk the collider so it matched the cameras position so that players can go under doors. For the voice sdk, meta does have built in triggers in wit.ai, however I could not get it to work. Instead, I just used the transcription of what the player was saying and matched it with the door key to have door opening behavior. 

Challenges

Figuring out NavMesh behavior was definitely really painful. Since I wanted there to be both predefined paths and non-predefined paths (chasing the player) behavior, there was a lot of difficulties switching between waypoints and making sure the agent didn't get stuck. What was great though was unlike last time the NavMesh Surface baked perfectly so I didn't have to do any funky linking. The lighting also kept getting baked weirdly with squares of shadow showing up randomly. So, I decided to get rid of mixed lighting baking and used Forward+ URP realtime lighting rendering. Another painful thing was modeling, rigging, and animating the characters in blender. The rig kept being weird with the mesh, but I eventually figured it out. There were many, many, many, many, more challenges but these were my top headaches.

What you learned

Overall I learned so much through this project. I learned how to model, rig, and animate characters in Blender. In Unity, I learned more NavMesh functionality, baking lighting (even though it didn't work out), using Meta's voice sdk, and how to create a VR application in general. 

Possible future revisions

In the future, I would definitely put more puzzles and also fix the reset button. For some reason when I try to reset the game by reloading the scene, it loads the dialog differently for the officer cat. I would also try to figure out how to optimize things more through baking the lighting properly and cleaning up objects and scripts.