The Merge Conflict

Developed for Open Project in Interaction Design 2024 as part of the Game Design & Technology Masters' Programme at Gothenburg University.

This prototype of a game makes use of stationary portals as a means of redirected walking within a non-euclidean environment. That is to say: all movement in virtual reality is real-world movement.

You play an intern at a company in charge of developing updates for, and maintaining, imperative reality. Someone has recently pushed a broken build of physics onto public servers, which has wrecked havoc in everything tangible. You, however, were lucky enough to hold a somewhat working build on your local device. None of your coworkers seem to be as lucky however. So it is up to you to set reality back to normal.
Work your way around this space altering environment to roll back changes made to scale, time, and perspective.

Time

Something's off about the business hours in this office building. What's with these endless hallways? You may need to anchor yourself in time before you can proceed.

Scale

I'm sure I've seen this spacecraft before. Upscale and downscale objects and your environments to solve puzzles.

Perspective

I spy with my little eye. See things through things to solve things. All about your point of view.

Requirements

• An empty, even-floored space that can fit at least a 4x4 meter square.
  • You should be able to stand on one of the corners of this square and look straight ahead to the next clockwise corner. This position should become the VR origin point.
• A Virtual Reality device including:
  • Hand and position tracking
  • A boundary system 
  • The capacity of installing or executing APK files

Disclaimer

The current state of the game is not optimal.
We don't currently have plans to develop the game further, but wanted to display it for posterity nevertheless.

We have made an effort to make natural boundaries as intuitive as possible, but please support yourself in any boundary system your virtual reality device may have access to.  Some areas will break the game. Some, admittedly, don't have the best guidance or feedback. 

If you find yourself playing the game, and struggle with something, don't shy out from commenting here to get any confusion sorted out.