Bug Eyez
Platform:
Oculus Rift
Tools Used:
Unity, Maya and Photoshop
Role:
Game Designer + Developer
The start screen image of the game.
This screen appears when an enemy ship is approaching, meaning that the player has a new wave of enemies that they are going to engage in combat.
One of a series of character posters I created for the characters in the game.
The start screen image of the game.
Overview
Bug Eyez is the first 3D Oculus Rift Virtual Reality video game I designed for NJIT's Vision and Neural Engineering Laboratory. It gamifies the principles used in therapy for convergence insufficiency. In the game, enemies approach the player and the player must focus their gaze on the targets ("converge" on them) and after a specified amount of time a missile is launched at the enemy. Since the therepeutic objectives limited the nature of the gameplay, I strove to keep players engaged by designing the game around a compelling storyline, including cinematic cutscenes in the game, and including a variety of enemies for the player to engage in combat.
Gameplay Video
Cinematic Cutscene Videos
In the first major cutscene of the game, Captian Parrot alerts the player that an army of armored ants are headed for Planet Earth, and it is up to the player to stop them!
A flaming comet is headed for planet Earth! The player must shoot these comets out of the sky before one of them collides with our home planet!
An epic team up takes place, as Captain Parrot and the player unite to fight the combined forces of the armored ants and the wasps. The player's mission is simple: send the bees buzzing back to their home planet.
The next cutscene shows a wasp ship approaching Earth's atmosphere. Awe geez, its the bees!
A group of stingray ships surround Captain Parrot and the player, leaving them to either surrender to the mercy of the stingrays or blast through their entire army. In the words of Captain Parrot, "Never surrender!"
An army of alien spiders attacks the player! In this final cutscene before the last battle of the game, the player is pitted against the native warriors of Master Spider's home planet. The fate of our planet is in your hands!
An alert to the player that plays whenever an enemy ship is preparing to engage them in combat.
3D Game Assets
All models shown in Sketchfab are game-ready assets.
Click play and then use the following controls to view the models:
Orbit: 1 finger drag or Left Mouse Button
Pan: 2-finger drag or Right Mouse Button or SHIFT+ Left Mouse Button
Zoom on object: Double-tap or Double-click on object
Zoom out: Double-tap or Double-click on background
Zoom: Pinch in/out or Mousewheel or CTRL + Left Mouse Button
Armored Ant
Alien Spider
Detailed Info
Convergence insufficiency is an eye disorder that affects one in twenty people. It affects fifty percent of patients that suffer from traumatic brain injury. The symptoms of this disorder include the inability to do near work for any length of time (reading, writing, or any other activity that requires close up vision). In as little as five minutes, a person with this disorder engaging in one of these activities will see words jumping off of the page and have blurry/double vision of whatever they are focusing on.
Current therapy for convergence insufficiency is effective but boring and therefore lacks patient compliance. In the case of young children and teens, this vision problem can greatly inhibit school-related tasks like reading and writing, which can significantly impact the education of children and teens in a negative way.
These VR vision therapy games that I designed are meant to gamify the therapy and make it fun and engaging for patients. The core movement of the therapy is the eyes crunching inward as they maintain focus on an object coming straight towards the patient. That is the reason that each of these games follows a similar structure, as it has to follow the parameters set by vision scientists and other researchers to ensure that it is therapeutically effective in treating this disorder.
The fuzzy lines seen in the game are Gabor patches, which force the patient to work their eye muscles and prevent involuntary "cheating" by the lenses of their eyes automatically changing size to produce the same convergence movement. Essentially, there are two Gabor patches that the player must line up to destroy the enemy. One of these patches is where there eye position is (in the case of my web game versions of these projects, this patch is tied to the xy position of the mouse). The other patch is on the enemy object. When the player lines these two patches up for a certain amount of time, the enemy is destroyed.
Gabor patch