Head In The Cloud

📌 Project Description

Head In The Cloud is a virtual reality game developed as part of the Multidisciplinary Project 4 course at ESIEE Paris in E4FI. It offers an experience combining exploration, shooting, and puzzle-solving. The player starts in a central lobby (a forest with a campfire) and steps through portals to access three distinct experiences: a shooting mini-game set in a Wild West universe, a horror labyrinth, and a puzzle-driven escape game.

✨ Technical Highlights

• Interactivity (XRI): use a lighter to ignite the campfire, teleportation portals, pistol shooting via raycasting with a dynamic scoreboard, orb collection, interacting with drawers, handcranks, and ladders in the escape game featuring randomized puzzles. Decals are used to display clues for solving the puzzles.
• VR Comfort: two locomotion modes (continuous movement via the left joystick, teleportation via the right joystick) to reduce motion sickness; jumping capabilities were removed for the same reason.
• Quest 2 Optimization: low-poly art direction, labyrinth fog managed by a particle system rather than global fog, custom shaders built with ShaderGraph.
• Rendering: tailor-made shaders for portals (distortion effect, unique color per level), the campfire, object oscillation to guide the player's gaze, decals, and VFX (muzzle flashes, explosions).
• Immersion: human-scale scenes, custom soundscapes for each universe (music and sound effects partially recorded by the team).

🎲 Inspirations

• VRChat → the central hub connecting levels via portals
• Beat Saber → the shooting mini-game featuring color-coded targets
• Where Darkness Took Them → the horror labyrinth, amplified by the transition to VR

🎨 Assets

• Polygon Horror Mansion (Synty)
• Polygon Police Station (Synty)
• Low Poly Winter Log Cabin Pack
• Bold Pixel Font