
A Place Like No
ASCII VR Adventure
Role:
Engine:
Platform:
Solo Developer
Unity/C#, VOSK
Oculus Quest 1 & 2 (mobile)
SteamVR (PCVR)
Store Page:
Game Info

Rogue (1980) - The original rogue-like.
Image credit: The Rogue Archive
A Place Like No is a VR Adventure inspired by the style of 80s ASCII Adventures. Explore a mysterious world made of letters and signs, where words turn into their meaning!
Early adventures had to rely on ASCII art for presentation due to technical limitations. I wanted to see what it would feel like to explore such a world in VR, and if I could use the graphics for world-building and interesting gameplay ideas.​
Challenges
Initially, I developed this game as part of my Bachelor's thesis in Game Design at HTW Berlin. In the following years, I ported it to almost all VR platforms and used it as a training ground for coding best practices.
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An interesting challenge was the inclusion of speech recognition as a gameplay mechanic: The player needs to speak to create words in the world, which can then interact with the environment to solve puzzles.
Initially, I implemented the recognition via Microsoft Azure's cloud service. But the limited tokens and latency prevented it from becoming a viable longterm solution.

Solution: Local Speech Recognition
I found a good alternative in VOSK, a free light-weight and local speech recognition project. Implementing the library became a challenge, as starting the recognition led to significant CPU hick-ups on the Oculus Quest 1, which was my main platform when I started the project.
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In the end, I managed to delegate the recognition to a dedicated CPU thread, which turned out to be a good learning-experience.
Awards
I am happy to say that in 2021's XRC awards organized by nextreality Hamburg, my game won the Community Award and was a finalist in the category 'Interactive Entertainment'.


Credits: nextreality Hamburg
