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Playtest screenshot.jpg

Liminal Cacophony

Year
2025
Project Type
Platform
Personal
Quest 3

Liminal Cacophony is an MR horror game where you have to exorcise invisible demons hiding in your physical space. The coolest part of the game, and what makes it unique, is that you use your voice to reveal both exorcism phrases and the Liminal Creatures themselves. I don’t usually go anywhere near horror content because I’m absolutely terrified of it, but one day this idea of invisible monsters roaming around your real world environment popped into my head. The thought of using your voice to uncover them felt like such a fun and wild experience that I couldn’t not make it, even if it’s way outside my comfort zone.

GAMEPLAY

Gameplay Video

In this video, I am demonstrating the core gameplay loop of Liminal Cacophony. 

TESTING FOOTAGES

First Test Session

Right after the idea of discovering invisible monsters with your voice popped into my head, I started prototyping the audio visualizer. For the first iteration, there was no game play, but just the barebones of the visualizer and seeing how people felt getting chased by the invisible monsters. People seemed to really enjoy the experience already. One thing is that some people were very terrified while others were not that much affected by the horror element.



One major issue is that the performance of the visualizer was terrible at this point, mostly due to the fact that each dot's position is generated by a raycast before the GPU instancing. As a person who focuses greatly on optimization, I had to fix this issue before proceeding. I later optimized it by using the job system with Raycast Command, and then also updating only every quarter of a second using a Coroutine. 

First Gameplay

The first iteration with gameplay that I created is completely different from my first official prototype. And it was truly a big failure as it was unintuitive, and the use of voice was too hard for most people for it to be enjoyable. Here is how it worked:
 

  • The player needs to first calibrate their lowest and highest natural pitch so that the pitch used in game will be within the player's natural range.

  • After calibration and the game starts, in the same way as the current prototype, the player needs to first discover the creatures. Difference is that when they are discovered they will emit their own unique frequency.

  • To exorcise them, the player will need to do the gesture shown which will create a frequency sphere. The player needs to use their voice to project onto the sphere and make it match the weakness of the creature. Once it's matched simply stab the weakness with your fingers to exorcise them.

 

Main Lessons:

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  • I discovered how hard it truly is to teach people how to do something in XR, especially for people who are relatively inexperienced. On some occasions it took me 2 minutes to teach a user how to record from the headset. The internet was too slow for me to cast the headset's POV so I had to describe blindly.

  • Many people just do not have the musical background to comfortably find the right pitch in between their lowest and highest pitch. 

  • It was just too convoluted for people to truly understand the gameplay. The current version is also slightly complex, but the core idea is less abstract which makes it much easier to understand.

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