THEY CAN'T SEE

Game Description:

They Can’t See is a mixed reality stealth survival game where players must rescue vulnerable animals from a pursuing monster. Using passthrough, painting mechanics, and physical interaction, players grab the animals and throw them through a portal to safety – the portal is drawn by the user and opens up into the real world using MR. But act quickly, as if the monster catches more than five, the game is lost. Blending creativity, tension, and real-world space, They Can’t See challenges players to think fast, move smart, and protect the unseen.

What is the objective of the game?

To strategically make portals to let the animals escape. You’re not just making portals for fun, you’re painting to outsmart the threat.

What does the protagonists want?

The protagonist wants to protect the animals and ultimately themselves.

What does the antagonists want?

The antagonist wants to eat the small animals.

What are the stakes?

If the protagonist fails to let the small animals escape, they fail at their mission.

Game Development Process:

The game development process was definitely difficult, but working together with my team made the process a lot easier.  We all split the work up to areas that fit our strengths while pushing us to try and learn new things that we hadn't done before. We first made a navmesh and the essential setup that would allow the animals to run around and have monsters chasing them around. I then implemented the code that would count the animals that were killed and load the ending scene once a threshold was met. We made a make-shift portal first to test the winning condition, then used the MR drawing portal code and attached the winning condition code to it.

There was definitely a lot of difficulty figuring out the throwing motion and the physics behind it, the drawing into MR, as well as fixing up the nav mesh. Half way through our game building process, I also realized that there was a bug with the losing condition threshold code, which took me a while to debug through different methods.

Playtesting feedback:

One of the most important feedback we received from play testing was that the animals were moving too fast. So after the first round of play testing, we went back and revised our game to slow down the moving speed of the animal. We also fixed up bugs within the losing condition code as well as the nav mesh bugging out during the game.