"Grounded" is a cryptic VR puzzle game where you play as an amnesiac scientist attempting to piece together lost memories of his "great experiment" while following instructions from his past self through phonograph recordings. Set in the rural Americas in the 50's, "Grounded" has players scrambling through a now unfamiliar home, discovering clues that only make the situation more ominous.

Developed in a two-man passion project, Grounded's objective was our first exploration in combining VR with storytelling. We enjoyed the immersive potential VR had to offer and we had a lot of fun staging the puzzles and environments together in a way where it truly felt you were there.

Puzzle and Level Design

There are four puzzles our forgetful scientist had designed to bring back his memories using audio logs scattered around the map.
One of them, as seen from the image below, is a painting that is broken into squares that are scattered around the room, some of them requiring the player to open them with a separate lock puzzle or requires further guidance from the audio logs. Solving the paintings displays a series of numbers that is used to solve the padlock.

For this project, my main role was programming the whole game which includes all of the puzzles, VR interactions, and animated sequences.

The most important lesson we learned from making this game was user feedback and iterative design tweaking. Players were, at first, disoriented by the simple house design and weren't sure where to go next. The house was also too large so it prolonged gameplay as well as newer player's motion sickness. Certain objects would seem interactable but are not. And, overall, the narrative wasn't well understood because sometimes the puzzles were too hard and pulled them out of the story.

As my first puzzle game, it was truly a humbling experience and I had a lot of fun addressing a lot of these issues and eventually creating a game that we and the users were eventually proud of.
Although puzzle games are not my passion, what I want to convey through this project was that I'm always willing to try new things and am obsessed with narrative.