Cardboard Castle
The Team
- Samuel Kerr (Programmer)
- Takuma Aoki (Designer / Programmer)
- Christopher St George (Designer / Artist)
- Joshua Paton (Programmer)
Overview
Cardboard Castle is a Unity VR puzzle game that me and a team of 3 other students developed for QUT's Design and Development of Immersive Environments unit. We were tasked with creating a VR game under the theme 'Scale is a Lie' - from this simple theme, we developed the central mechanic: a magical wand that could grow and shrink objects. Players could use this wand to solve various puzzles across 5 different levels, starting from the depths of the castle dungeon and eventually making their way to the gatehouse to escape.
The game was intended to be played at VR festivals/showcases (which did end up happening when we showed it off at the 2026 QUT open day!), so our target audience were VR beginners, with a specific focus on under 14s. Because of this, I went for an eclectic, hand-drawn aesthetic that drew a lot of inspiration from the Little Big Planet games and their 'toybox' feel.
What I did
Cardboard Castle was my first time ever making a fully custom indoor environment and, while the models were pretty simple, I ran into some challenges with creating texture variants that fit seamlessly in different contexts. I also had to keep performance constraints in mind - because we wanted a game that ran natively on the headset, texture size and count had to be limited in order to mitigate filesize. All of the wall, floor, and roof pieces were atlased in a single texture, which was another first for me as I had never done texture atlasing prior to this!
This project was probably one of the most valuable learning experiences for me in terms of hard skills. I learnt a lot of important optimisation lessons that have carried over into pretty much all my other development projects. Special shoutout to Mark Auman for the lecture he gave on optimisation during this unit, which was a massive help.
In addition to modelling and texturing the environment, I also contributed the following:
- All puzzle designs
- NPC model and texture
- Some prop models and textures
You can access the project here: tk36k.itch.io/cardboard-castle.