My VR partner, Weichen, at this point had completed his work sending the channels from the EEG headsets into raw data. He then developed a 3D gizmo using VIVE trackers to be able to track the player’s limbs (photo above). Initially we were only tracking a player’s eye-movement and head gaze, but now we can also track decision-making from their body movements.

During this time, I remained unsure about the difficulty of the game. Similar distractor bullets made the game infinitely harder, especially with how small they were. Very early beta-testers also said that the target bullet on the wall didn’t help them figure out what the actual one looked like. Thus, I decided to make the beginning even smoother by placing an extra target bullet along the gun they picked up and starting the bullet counter at -1 instead. That way they would immediately know what it looked like.

Since I was focused on gameplay for the last couple of months, my next goal was to work on the sound effects. During this time the only sound I had added was the bullets clicking into the gun for error checking, and felt that in order to help with the immersion of the game, I needed to add sound. The team had considered previous scenarios and story-building that we could do, but in the end they weren’t that important. I added a timer sound effect that sped up toward the end, as well as a win-lose sound effect to easily tell the player when the game is over. Here’s a preview of the final gameplay below!