One of my goals for this project was VR "evangelism" in a way - I knew most of the people who would play it at the showcase have never tried VR before, or even games in general, so my intention was to make it as enjoyable and easy to understand as possible, for everyone of any age and experience, with a big emphasis on accessibility.

First of all, in order to insure the maximum level of comfort for the players,
I decided this would be a solely seated experience.

So to both inform them and make sure they are consciously sitting, they will have to confirm they are sitting down.

Then the game starts at a classroom, present day.

From playtesting I learned that the thing new users had the biggest struggle with was understanding how to grab objects with the controllers. To solve that before the story starts rolling, I wanted to give the players the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the grab mechanic.

The player appears in front of a desk with a bunch of objects for them to try and pick up and throw around, with the furthest one being a phone. In order for the story to start you would have to grab the bottle (which triggers the phone to vibrate, getting your attention). Once you move the bottle away, you can reach the phone. Picking the phone up finally triggers the beginning of the story timeline.

15 seconds later, everything shakes, things fall to the ground, and out of a big bright light appears your new time traveling, highschooler companion – Rose.

Before she takes you on your adventure, you have a short dialogue where she introduces herself and asks you what you believe the future will be like.

Because pressing the dialogue choice is the main mechanic, this is also a learning step for the player. Later in the game, they choice will also be time based, so here is the opportunity for me to make it as clear and easy choice as possible, giving the player time to understand how to aim and select.

Another thing that was important to me for accessibility was subtitles. I feel like this subject is not entirely solved in VR yet, many products in the industry do it differently but no solution is perfect yet. It can be distracting, disturb the immersivity, and honestly it's a little annoying. Still, I believe it's important enough to add, despite all that.

 I chose to design the subtitles with different colors for each character speaking, for easy differentiation, even if you can’t hear the voice.

The subtitles follow the player's head smoothly with a small delay to not be too irritating.

From here on out, I was confident the players can manage to continue and enjoy the game's flow pretty smoothly, no matter their experience with games or VR at all.

I felt that this project was a success, as I could tell from the dozens of people I watched experience it at the showcase and hearing their enthusiastic feedback afterwards.

If you want to read more about this project, you can do so here.