Drawn To Life
A VR escape room where you wake from hibernation aboard a powerless spacepod, only to find the resident lab rat has escaped its cage. Restore the ship's systems while catching the rogue rodent and survive the journey home.
ROLE
Rat NPC, onboarding and systems scripting, set dressing
TEAM
Team of 4, covering core mechanics, level layout, art direction, and my onboarding and NPC work
ENGINE
Unity, XR Interaction Toolkit, Meta Quest 2
PROJECT
University VR project, one semester, 2026
Rat NPC: A Mischievous Antagonist
• Built the rat's behaviour: it roams the subfloor and chews cables
• Grab it, throw it, or lock it in its cage for a timeout
• Recovers from a throw and finds its nearest waypoint
• Sway and speed exposed for tuning game feel
• The playtest favourite: "mischievous and silly"
Waypoint and Pathing Tools
• Dynamic paths built from arrays of waypoints
• Editor gizmos draw every route to prevent clipping
• Rat interruptions update the UI panels and backend systems
Wake-Up Sequence and Onboarding
• Scripted the opening: vignette fade, tutorial panels, hibernation pod
• Standing wake-up replaced an earlier build that caused nausea
• 7 of 8 testers then rated it immersive
• Emergency lighting and audio: "really helped me feel like it was an emergency"
What I Took From It
• My impact: the rat became the playtest favourite, and the reworked wake-up removed the build's biggest source of nausea
• Three rounds of playtesting with both experienced and first-time VR players shaped each iteration
• Goal clarity was the weak point: players needed clearer system feedback, which set the priorities for the next pass
• Merge conflicts across overlapping systems made integration the hardest part of the project
Credits
Team of 4
Acelin Berthelot: Core mechanics and behaviour systems
Liam: Level layout and whiteboxing
Willow Heo: Art direction, materials and animation
Lachlan Taylor: Rat NPC, onboarding and set dressing
