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Carambola

An escape room inspired by astrological fables

Project Objective
Carambola is a virtual-reality escape room based on Greek and Chinese folklore. In the game, players explore a house inundated with puzzles inspired by constellations, and players must solve these puzzles to uncover the many mysteries behind the house. Outside of serving as a for-fun VR game, we also investigated the relationship between playing Carambola and increasing cultural awareness in users.
Outcomes
Playable VR experience, steam page release, academic paper based on research findings.
Client
UCSC Computational media Prof. Eddie Melcer 
Team
2 Game Artists
2 Game Designers
1 UIUX Designer
3 Researchers
My Role
Experience Design
Interface Design 
Graphic Design
Sound Design
Success Metrics
in progress :) 
Methods Used
Literature Review
Interviews
Prototyping
Quantitative/Qualitative Analysis
Usability Testing
Timeline
Jan 2024 - March 2024
Carambola game trailer. At the time of this trailer creation, some of my final designs had not been implemented yet
Introduction
What is Carambola?
Carambola is an educational virtual reality game that aims to spread cultural awareness through exploration and interactive learning. Gameplay wise, Carambola is similar to escape room style games, where players must use their nearby environment to find clues on how to solve puzzles. Carambola has 3 levels: a tutorial level, a Greek astrology themed level, and a Chinese folklore themed level. Each level consists of 2-4 puzzles that must be completed in sequential order.
Problem
Making VR games easy, is not easy  
Carambola began development in September 2023, and had a playable alpha version complete by December 2023. Though this initial alpha version was fully functional, early testers were concerned about the game being tricky to navigate in terms of core gameplay, and in navigating the VR environment. My task as the team's newly recruited UI designer was to make the gameplay experiences behind Carambola more intuitive, accessible, and easier to engage with.
Better understanding the issues with Carambola
Investigation
I talked to 20 players of Carambola's alpha version, including testers, internal team members, and peers I asked to dry run our game. Though most testers were able to complete Carambola after a little guidance and assistance, three common usability themes often emerged as follows.
Theme 1: Tedious Learning Curve
Trying to make VR easier
I observed our users often struggled to complete the tutorial stages of Carambola without my assistance. After discussing this with our team, we concluded that though Carambola offered a streamlined tutorial level with simple puzzles, Carambola does not introduce users to movement within a VR environment. To address this, I created several instructional Gif images that were displayed during the tutorial stages of the game to assist in basic movement mechanics.
Camera movement aid
Left Joystick button
right joystick trigger
My tutorial Gif being used to aid in instance-specific interactions.
I also created a pause-screen interaction guide, as our less commonly used interactions were often forgotten by users midway through playing Carambola.
Theme 2: Puzzles are too hard to solve
Lowering the escape room difficulty levels
The majority of our users struggled with our in-game puzzles, but I observed that the difficulty  arose more from the amount of reading required rather than the puzzles themselves. Going back to objective of Carambola being a medium to spread folklore and cultural awareness, I concluded that reducing the text in puzzle clues was not ideal, as doing so would bring less exposure towards the folklores the game was highlighting. Therefore, I decided to highlight the most relevant information in the puzzle clues rather than removing text entirely.  
Highlighting the text in puzzle clues that are most relevant to their respective solutions.
To further lower the difficulty of puzzles, I collaborated with our team's developers to develop a system in which if the user struggles with a puzzle for too long, hints on the puzzle's solution will be automatically provided.
Offering hints to users
Offering hints to users (Chinese inspired level)
Theme 3: InteractioN signifiers are missed
People like to touch shiny objects
To add the the immersion of our folklore inspired world, our team's developers avoided including signifiers on interactable objects. This caused some users to be unable to finish puzzles without assistance from myself or a team member. Therefore, I worked in tandem with the team's developers and artists to make interactable objects easily identifiable while aesthetically fitting the game's theme.
Purple glowing "Go" stones narratively fit our Chinese folklore level, as Go stones are traditionally white.
Placing interactable objects on top of distinct and identifiable pillars to make them more noticeable to users.
Graphic and content design
Designing Carambola's title screen
After many of my design solutions had been implemented inside of Carambola, I continued to contribute through content and sound design, my largest task was creating a landing page for Carambola. I decided to make the title screen feature Azure Dragon and Orion, two prominent constellations from Chinese and Greek folklore respectively, that also make appearances inside of Carambola.
Orion(Greek) on the left and Azure Dragon(Chinese) on the right
Research
Back to where we started
After redesigning Carambola for a more streamlined gameplay experience, we shifted our focus to Carambola's original intended purpose, promoting cultural knowledge and folklore through interactive learning. We hypothesized on utilizing the cultural competency checklist, a verified assessment test to measure cultural awareness, and would ask our testers to take the assessment before and after playing Carambola to determine if an increase in cultural awareness was prevalent. Because we did not have many Greek-identifying testers available, we focused on observing the effect a modified Carambola (with only the Chinese astrology inspired levels) had on the cultural awareness of Chinese Americans.
After our study concluded, we observed an average increase in the cultural awareness of testers by about 2 points (The maximum score was 44, and testers scored an average of 33.7 before gameplay and 36 after gameplay). Based on our paired samples test, we were also able to verify that this was statistically significant, meaning that Carambola had a significant effect in increasing the cultural awareness of players before and after gameplay. Please take a look at the full research paper we wrote for more on how we verified this.  
Final Game Content
Enter Carambola
Small playthrough of Carambola, does not contain the entire game footage
Future work
Steam Release
At the time of making this case study, we are working to launch a steam release of our game. We are very confident that with a steam release, we will have our hands full with a lot of bugs to fix from our early players.
Reflections
Spatial designs are a whole different beast
I had no idea how different designing in a spatial environment would be. Lots of text content that have a sufficient contrast on a 2D screen look unreadable inside of a VR environment. Also, content is almost unreadable when placed near the sides of one's perspective in VR, this caused a lot of iterations of my original designs. I'm glad I got exposed to spatial design, as it's completely different from what I had grown accustomed to. This makes me excited to relearn design principles for all kinds of mediums to come.  
Here are some of my other works
Kainos Studios
GoalMates
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Made by Siddharth Subramanian © 2024