Wings of Trouble

VR Stealth Game, using flapping motion as controls

2025

A VR game where the player is a parent bird, stealing food and hiding from humans to feed their babies.

Development Time: 2 weeks
Team: 5 people (me and four other students at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center)
Objective: Build a VR world for an naive guest using indirect control
Prompt: Hiding from Something
Task: Without using direct control like arrows or written tutorials, guide the player throughout the experience and help them figure out why and how they should steal food, hide from humans, and bring them back to their nest.

Instead of letting players hold controllers to flap, we built physical bird wings and attached the VR controllers to them. This guide the player to use the “flap” action naturally.

My Highlights

Proposed and co-developed the core concept of playing as a parent bird who must stealthily steal food to feed its babies — establishing the foundation for the game’s emotional and mechanical direction.
Redefined the main mechanic from free-flight control to a stealth-based movement system, shifting focus from physical freedom to strategic timing and tension management. Designed the stealth loop where players move between hiding spots by looking and flapping toward them, drawing inspiration from Assassin’s Creed and Persona 5 to adapt visibility and risk systems into a VR context.
Enhanced player readability and feedback clarity, introducing red visual indicators to represent human sightlines — a change that dramatically improved player understanding during playtests.
Collaborated on level pacing and encounter layout, ensuring the rhythm of “hide–wait–steal–return” cycles felt intuitive and satisfying.
Directed the visual style, defining a picture-book aesthetic that matched the humorous, exaggerated tone of the gameplay and helped maintain emotional charm under stealth tension.