JOEY MAZERO

Ideal red is a personal project I undertook after my graduation from Indiana University and a summer of being a white water rafting guide in eastern Tennessee. Over that summer I had purchased an Oculus quest and immediately started getting my hands dirty developing for it. After hearing my friend Simon Gardner's (David History's) album, it inspired me to create a virtual reality experience reflecting on some of my experiences in college.

The player takes on the role of Ed, a man who has been going through some intense rough patches with his girlfriend, Gwen. This rift in their relationship is mostly the result of Ed's low self-esteem, and he projects his insecurities on Gwen through his obsessiveness over her.

What I did:

• Conceptualized the story and worked with voice actors to implement the script into the project.


• Worked in Unity using OpenXR to create an experience with a total of 4 different scenes.


• Collaborated with a musician to closely link the music to the story and gameplay.

A Time-Constrained Story

Knowing I had a limited development time, I decided to capture the emotion of obsessiveness through short and impactful dialogue paired with purposeful level design and music selection. Each line of dialogue serves the purpose of portraying the protagonist's mental state whilst giving context to the situation. The level design did the same - for example, in the first part where the player is in a club scene has all of the people track their eyes on the player. This was to show that Ed is anxious, and feels like everyone is watching him. I worked closely with my musician to make sure the music furthered the tone of the specific scene. In the driving scene, the music changes via a script from slow and suspenseful to angry and pounding after Ed expresses his anger.

Bending Reality

In addition to making sure my design was purposeful, I had to implement elements of ambiguity into the story because of my time constraint. This ended up becoming a welcome challenge though, because it opened the story up more for interpretation. Every person that played it, I immediately asked them what they thought the message of the story was. While each person had a different answer, they all fell underneath the same umbrella of the theme which was delightful to see.

Oculus Development

Developing for the oculus was a blast, and I learned a lot in the process. It was relatively simple to create a movement script and navigate the pick-up and drop functions with the scripts in the OpenXR package. Some things I had to keep in mind that were the scale of objects around the player and how the physical height of the person would impact that. I also had to realize that the player would be phsyically experiencing the environment around them, so I was mindful of things that would cause motion sickness or things that would throw the player's sense of reality off.