Harry Potter VR Dark Ride
(Group Project)
Made in UE5
This is a VR project that simulates a multiplayer dark ride experience for the Harry Potter theme. The players will compete in the Triwizard, travel in the Harry Potter World, and shoot lanterns to get points.
I work as a designer and producer and am the level designer for the Hogwarts and the Forbidden Forest part.
It’s a group project, so we first divided the areas, and make sure the overall game flow works out. The goal is to provide an interesting and exciting experience for the players. The pace would be relatively fast. We also want to encourage the players to play again since it’s a project which supposed to be in a theme park.
My idea is that this is a dark ride, and should be a little bit intense. I want to create diverse spaces and paths including verticality changes, speed changes, and multiple turns. I also want some special moments to make the players impressive and recognize that this is a Harry Potter world.
Based on these, I found some references and inspirations and then started a draft of the layout and potential game plays. Then I created the white box and blueprints for gameplay.
The Process
And then we start polishing everything, and do the set dressing. We did several rounds of play testing during the project, and make adjustments according to the feedbacks.
Some of the meshes and blueprints
First Playble Presentation Video
Reflection
One thing I should have done better is that I should make less strict U-turns. Based on our moving mechanic, the players move with the cameras we set, so when the cameras change suddenly, the players are likely to get motion sickness. This could also be improved by more frequent play testing in the early stage. I as the level designer have played my level too many times and gotten used to it, so it is very possible that I get less motion sickness than others.
Another thing is that I could do better time management. I spent quite a while on the white box for the Hogwarts courtyard and tried to make it as realistic as possible. However, we used asset packs for most environment objects, so they probably will be replaced by some Hogwarts assets. I could use those time to improve other parts and create more content and gameplay.