MEPTIK's Haunted House Escape: A VR Experience v1.1

UPDATES​

Project Changes

• A massive of unused assets have been removed from the project files reducing the files size by roughly 7.47GBs
• Fallback settings for TSSA have been applied to the project
• Excluded developer content from being packaged in the final build
• Reassociated all MP4 files
• Updated all plugin assets to their latest version

Level Changes

• Replaced all grass Instances with low-poly version
• The new low-poly grass looks amazing and allows the landscape to have significantly more ground coverage than the previous grass that was being used
• Removed dynamic landscape effects
• With the ground mostly covered by grass, the landscape effects were negligible so they have been turned off for now.
• Simplified landscape material
• This was a result of removing the effects as other functionality that would never be seen in VR
• Reduced the size of the dirt albedo, ORM, and normal maps from 8K to 1
• Removed trees from the outside
• This decision was sadly made to reduce the overhead on the FPS. Lower poly trees were tried but ultimately cut.
• Hopefully, these can be readded in a future update
• Combined Several Interior Meshes to reduce draw calls
• Added LODs to many of the objects in the scene that were missing them
• Redid 90% of the game’s lighting and shadows
• Huge performance was gained from this as the game was trying to calculate dynamic shadows across almost all objects in the mansion
• Got rid of a rogue fire that was sitting in an unviewable area of the map
• Replaced several unreasonably high texture maps of the game

Gameplay

• Fixed issues where the player would collide with trigger volumes preventing progress
• Fixed collision issues on held objects
• Fixed issues where the first ghost encounter would occasionally fail to display the correct content

Comments from our Developer:

​It is my hope that these changes provide a more enjoyable and smooth experience for all users across the board. The settings menu in the start screen remains in place to hopefully alleviate any edge cases to this.

Please be aware that this is not the UE5 update to the Haunted House.

I have heard users request for a teleportation style of locomotion but I do not plan on adding this to the game. Doing so would break the area triggers in the game as well as I personally feel it would mar the immersion of being trapped inside a haunted house. In a future update, I plan on allowing users to personalize the current movement systems parameters to their liking; I hope this will be an acceptable compromise.

I want to thank all of the users who take the time to leave reviews and feedback. I really do read all of the comments and give serious consideration to what everyone is saying. Our team has been working hard on a lot of projects over the last couple of months that took priority over our free mini-game, therefore I thank you all for your patience while I was working on this update!

Lastly, thank you to everyone who downloaded our Haunted House Experience!

Having a game out on Steam (let alone a VR one) is something I always wanted! I hope you all can see this game for what it is, a love letter to one of the greatest holidays around!

Stay Spooky Everyone!