Pollution Below Water
Unreal Engine
Team
16 Weeks
Contributions
Gameplay
Interaction
Puzzles
Pollution Below Water is an escape room game, where the player must solve puzzles to progress the narrative and escape. What’s special about this escape room is that it incorporates virtual reality and educational elements about the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The setting is a crashed submarine, where the player is a scientist investigating the pollution of a coral reef. The player must repair the damaged submarine to bring the results of the investigation to the UN.
Escape rooms have a central narrative, reflected in the scenery and puzzles need to escape the room, and our team attempted to leverage that to raise awareness specifically about SDG 14: Life Below Water. The combination of an escape room, virtual reality, and educational material provided an innovative solution in attracting young adults to learn more about the problems under the ocean.
This game was the team’s first Unreal Engine project and for that reason, the game could have been better.
Gameplay
I didn’t contribute to normal gameplay as usual but I added a quality-of-life change to the game by allowing the player to move an object some distance away from their hand (or in this case controller) closer to their hand, similar to when Jedi use the Force to grab their lightsaber from the ground (or how Thor calls his hammer Mjolnir to him, hence the thumbnail to the right).
I programmed another feature by the way of a small linear dialogue system using tables as a list of dialogue lines.
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Interaction
I developed and contributed to our codified interaction system, that includes buttons and slots by expanding the functionality. I added more events and flags to satisfy the needs of our puzzles.
Puzzles
I worked on two puzzles for the game but unfortunately, they were scrapped. One was a sequence puzzle which included taking a beaker, filling it with a water sample, and examining it. The other puzzle consisted of using a foam gun to close holes in the submarine causing a flood.
