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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_ASCII-dungeon.png

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. 

09 - Speaking on the stage.png

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'. 

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XRC-2021-Nominees.png
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