My PhD focused on understanding how players behave the first time they enter a virtual environment they have never seen before. To make sure our data was reliable, we wanted our gameplay data to be as close as possible to the one that would be collected by any other commercial game. Our solution was to develop EscapeTower, a fully functioning EscapeRoom game that players could download from itch.io and play as they liked from the comforts of their homes and with the equipment they preferred.

On this project I had to take care of almost everything, from the design to the programming. I created the spaces, made the system elastic enough to easily be able to create different variations of the same game (each one able to answer a specific research question), and I even wrote a C++ Unreal Engine plugin for remote data collection. A VR version was in development, but it had to be suspended becasue of Covid.

More info are available on its official page.