REN QINXIN's Metaverse
Rubik’s Dreamcage -
2.5D optic illusion game
1 Brief Intro
Rubik’s Dreamcage is an adventure and healing puzzle game, in which the core of the exploration world is a Rubik’s cube. The protagonist is an office worker who is engaged in countless work and stressful life. The main task of the player is to help the character find his childhood dream. Optical illusion is applied in the design of the puzzle and players need to adjust the cube to find the relationship between each side. When players find the scenery correctly, they will be brought to a new level. The winning condition is that players unlock all of the levels and help the character leave the cube.
Demo:
Project Deliverable
PC Game
Game Design
2.5D Design
Timeline
Apr 2022
1 month
Tools Used
Unity
Shader Tool
Blender
Team
Programmer: Xuanru Meng, Ronghao Zhou, Qinxin Ren (Me)
Game designer: Qinxin Ren (me)
My Contributions
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Designed and implemented the game mechanics of this optical illusion game
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Implemented the 2.5D visual effect through Shader.
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Communicated with the players for their feedback, improved the design of the scenes and storyboard.
2 Shader Design
Main Characters Background Design
Shader in complementing the optical illusion
• Built six separate scenes with independent cameras. RenderTexture is bond to each camera’s TargetTexture. Coded for the shader of the material ball to achieve the visual effect of optical illusion.
• Wrote Shader to realize 3D Perspective effect (first calculated the screen coordinates in the homogeneous cropping coordinate system in the vertex shader stage, and then get to the homogeneous (that is, divide by W component) in the chip shader stage, then convert it to UV coordinate, and then sample the texture. The result is equivalent to the small scene being laid flat on the whole screen, and then being trimmed by the box grid featuring the effect of looking at the world through the window.)
Implementation
Use Blender to model the cube
Six independent scenes are built and bind to each side of the cube.
Effect of this Shader
This operation tweaks four squares on the selected plane. The squares in the Rubik's cube have a total of six colors. In the course of the game, they are assembled in two states. Before all interactions are completed, the player only needs to assemble the current main scene and the sub-scene of the adjacent circle, that is, to complete one side of the Rubik's cube, and surround this side with four groups of squares of the same color. The other state is at the end of the level. The player has to complete all sides of the cube, with all squares of the same color clustered on the same side. When the player successfully assembles the Rubik's cube, the organ will be triggered to open the interaction between different scenes in the cube. For rotating the cube, the player can drag the mouse left, right, up, and down to change the orientation of the perspective.
3 Decryption Design
4 Design Details
One page Design Doc
Game Mechanics
There are two main interaction mechanics in Rubik’s Dreamcage. The Rubik’s cube is consisted of 8 smaller cubes. The first step for the player is to tweak the small cubes and recover the Rubik’s cube. When it is recovered, there are six independent scenes on each side of the Rubik’s cube. Player then needs to rotate the whole cube to change the orientation of the perspective. Animations will be triggered if the cube is rotated to a certain degree.