Mortimer's Mansion is a survival horror puzzle game. It's designed to have one character played by a series of players in the Vive. There is also an external player station that allows spectators to donate to charity to set off jump scares that are also hints for the player.

This game is for the HTC Vive, and PC. It's a public project in it's second year, organized by members of RunJumpDev.org as an opportunity for people in the game dev community to gain experience working on a VR project. It will be featured at LexPlay, a consumer game conference to be held October 28-29, 2016 in Lexington, Kentucky. After that, it will be made available on Steam for the Vive. The theme is of a horror survival puzzle game, and would be in theme with the Halloween season.

This is the second year of HVRE, Halloween Virtual Reality Experience, organized by members of RunJumpDev.org as a public project to bring an opportunity for individuals to gain experience developing for VR. This year we decided as a group to try to develop for the Vive.

The story of Mortimer the Mortifier is borne from parameters decided on during our first meeting. We wanted a horror survival to play on the immersion of the Vive, and we wanted to have more of a game experience.

The idea of an old house full of deadly puzzles is a theme found in multiple horror movies, and easy to write around. Given our constraints, we went with the path of least resistance and a back story was created around the haunted mansion, and idea of involving players from outside of the VR experience to contribute.

Mortimer is inherently "unfeeling" and highly inquisitive, wanting to understand why people scream when in fear or while they're in pain. He doesn't consider death as a loss since he can reanimate creatures. He sees bodily mortification as art. He kills and maims people for his art and curiosity.  This seemed to write itself after establishing such horrific motivations. 

We really want to create an experience with solid immersion. It's fun to be scared in certain ways, and want to create the fun kind of scared. We feel that a certain level of believability is needed to accomplish the depth needed to feel fun, so we want it to feel real enough with the knowledge in the back of the player's mind that they are safe and can stop at any time. 

• Asymmetrical game play
• Puzzle based survival game
• Highly immersive VR experience
• Ability for outside players to affect VR player experience

The game is played by a sequence of 5 players in the Vive, 10 min each, with a total of 50 minutes game time. One additional station will be available at the event, where spectators can donate to trigger jump scares that also provide hints to the victim. 

The "Victim" is easily played using the two Vive controllers as extensions of their own hands as well as their own ability to walk around, crouch, lean etc. They will solve puzzles at room scale, so the depth comes in their ability to understand the language of each puzzle rather than the game interface.  Because the game is linear and set up around a series of players, the puzzles are made so that the first puzzle for each player is the most difficult and their second is easier. This is to encourage the players to only have time to solve their own puzzles, but if one gets behind it's easy for the next person to solve, or if one gets ahead they probably won't have time to finish a third, more difficult puzzle. 

If a player reaches 5 min without solving their primary puzzle, hints become available. These hints are provided by spectators for donations. When triggered, something frightening but helpful will happen, giving the player a hint toward the solution. If spectators don't provide hints, event coordinators will provide them after 7 min, at which point the room will begin to give subtle visual and audio cues. 

The reward system is based on clearing of the senses when the player solves a puzzle. The player's been poisoned, so their vision will slowly dim/become less saturated as they play, and eventually start to blur on occasion, increasing in frequency, near 5 & 10 minutes it might nearly fade to black. Their hearing will also give cues to their condition, an echo to the sound of the clock ticking, sounds become slower or stretched out, auditory hallucinations, and flashbacks to give narrative of how the player got here. The player is rewarded when they solve a puzzle and take a dose of the antidote. Their vision becomes clearer instantly as a visual cue, and audio cues like ringing/humming or distortion will clear. But when the clock strikes their 10 minute mark, their vision fades to black and they have a super auditory flashback that plays outside of the headphones, so the player's headset can be removed in preparation for the next player.

The fun of our game is in being scared. We want to play on the human emotion of fear, and really tap into the player-avatar empathy only achievable in VR. Perhaps the meaningfulness comes in experience the feeling of how important self preservation really is. Or what it means to lose someone in a dire situation. The game should also emphasize the importance of loving a child as they grow. Mortimer was essentially abandoned by his parents, and perhaps this horror wouldn't have happened if he was properly cared for.

he world of Mortimer's Mansion is dark and old. The old mansion was built in the early 1800's, and the decor is Victorian. It hasn't been kept up, but it hasn't been entirely abandoned either. Dust covers everything, but footprints in the dusty floor tell the player that someone, or something, else inhabits this place. 

The player wakes in a chair in the library of a large house. 

There's a large desk in front of a window where the "host" must still work.

Player Characters:

Victim (Vive Player)

Enemy Team (PC Players):

• Corpse Puppets
• Franken-Critters
• Vengeful Spirits

Ally Team(PC Players):

• Father (puppet like qualities)
• Brother (critter like qualities)
• Mother (spirit like qualities)

Non Player Characters:

Villain (Mortimer the Mortifier)

Servant (scripted ally character)

Groundskeeper (scripted enemy character)

This is experienced from a first person perspective in virtual reality.

The player has been trapped in a mansion, poisoned, and had mechanical hands attached to their limbs. The player is just one among many that have been in the same position: the subject of a terrifying experiment by a mad man. 

The villain was born disfigured and without the sense of touch. His family was embarrassed of their first born son, and decided to keep him at their summer home away from the public eye. They provided him with a servant to care for the child and a home, as well as a library full of books. Without the sense of touch, the child would hurt himself constantly without knowing it. And not understanding pain he became curious about his wounds and would pull at them and dig in them, further disfiguring himself. His curiosity fueled his insatiable thirst for knowledge. Having no other source, he turned to his books for guidance. Unfortunately his selection of reading material was strictly scientific, save for the few books on art and sculpture, and lacked emotion. So the boy grew up emotionless save for his inherent curiosity.

His curiosity grew until he had to experiment. His own body had it’s limitations, and so he began to catch animals and experiment on them. His servant found the boy’s collection of animal corpses and told the boy he must get rid of them or they would rot. This created a new curiosity in the boy, and he began research on preserving bodies after death, taxidermy, and even how healing and regeneration worked for different creatures. He no longer let bodies rot, and so the servant let it go, chalking it up to his strange nature. The boy considered his work art, and he took pride in displaying it.

Each time the boy exhibited these odd traits, the servant would send for the boy’s parents. Most of the time they just sent more books in hopes of occupying his time with reading rather than experimentation. Rarely would they visit. And when they did, they did not visit their son for long, but mostly due to his disinterest.

As he grew into a young man, he grew bored of animals and desired human specimens. After voicing this to his servant, the servant knew that discouraging him was a futile endeavor so the servant told the young man there were bodies donated to science for research that he might be able to procure if he were a student. And so the young man asked that he be able to study.

The servant once again sent for the young man’s parents who instead of fighting the experimentation decided that building the young man a laboratory and facilitating proper experimentation would be a better solution. And the young man’s father contacted a university to arrange for his son to study by correspondence. After a couple of years of university studies, they granted his request for human research. So his human experiments began.

His human research pleased him for a time, but he could get so few corpses, so he began to rob cemeteries. One night he was seen, and when the cemetery groundskeeper came face to face with the young man, he screamed at his hideousness. This frightened the young man at first, he had never heard such a sound, but then it struck him as interesting. He hit the groundskeeper over his head in his surprise, not realizing that such a blow could kill a man. And it nearly did. As the gash in the man’s skull gush blood, the young man became fascinated with it. But his understanding of the human body, and blood loss, led the young man to doing what was necessary to keep the man alive. So he took the groundskeeper home instead of the corpse he dug up that night. The young man kept the groundskeeper alive, but the man suffered brain damage, so he sat there like a vegetable.

After the groundskeeper went missing, the papers wrote that it was likely to be grave robbery gone wrong, and the groundskeeper was assumed dead after two months. The young man did not return to the graveyard for fear of being caught, and so depended on his donated corpses and his secret patient for entertainment.

One day the young man’s parents decided to visit. His father believed that perhaps he should see the young man’s work in person. But they didn’t come alone. Two children accompanied their parents. A girl and a boy around the age of 12 and 8. The young man was now approaching 18. The children were told about their brother, but still were not prepared for the reality of his disfigurement, and his siblings were terrified. They ran away screaming at the sight of him. The young man felt a pang of annoyance, an emotion he hadn’t really felt before. But then he remembered the fear he felt when the groundskeeper screamed at him. Screaming evoked emotion in the young man, and he wanted to understand why. So he set about to find a way to experiment on his siblings, and sought ways to make them scream. He would stand outside of their room when the servant brought them news of breakfast. He would wait in the shadows and step out to frighten them. This evoked humor in the young man, and he laughed. A sound he had never made before. And then he felt giddy and happy. More emotions he had never felt to this degree before. Then he experimented on making others in the house scream. All to his delight in different ways.

After his family left, he had no one to frighten. The groundskeeper could not be frightened with the appearance of the young man anymore, as he was nearly a vegetable, but pain caused a different kind of scream. So into the nights the young man would make the groundskeeper scream, filling the house with the sound. His servant began to fear the young man, and would have sought employment elsewhere had the time in history been so that he was not owned by the family. But he could not leave, and so did not confront the young man about the screaming.

Eventually the young man grew bored of the groundskeeper. And so decided that he needed to find a way to lure more subjects into his home. He had altered the groundskeeper to work using electrical stimulation to the brain, and set him to building traps on their property, things that would frighten humans to running toward the house. He had plenty of hunting experience with animals, he only had to adjust it for human psychology. His first subjects were a couple on their way home in the rain, and their car broke down. The screams were new and fantastic.

The young man was not so young anymore, and his collection had grown. He had commissioned his own labyrinth of rooms and equipment. His genius was not relegated to medicine alone, but had also extended into engineering.