Enter The Palace of the Monarch to experience Chinese horror and mystery in a fully realized virtual reality game. Follow a trail of cryptic letters and portraits, solving many unique puzzles in ever more extraordinary places—this is a mysterious journey where knowledge meets myth. This fully immersive game asks the player, in the role of the first son of House of Lin, to return to an ancient palace to fulfill solve a mystery. This game is unique to Western markets, bringing Chinese culture, history, writing, and horror sensibility and coupling this with a carefully designed and paced mystery that is told through discoveries in the game world. Ultimately, players will unveil the hidden secrets of the palace. Through research on environmental storytelling, human computer interaction, and game puzzle design, we want to provide the game with fascinating and immersive VR experience.

Enter The Palace of the Monarch to experience Chinese horror and mystery in a fully realized virtual reality game. Follow a trail of cryptic letters and portraits, solving many unique puzzles in ever more extraordinary places€”this is a mysterious journey where knowledge meets myth. This fully immersive game asks the player, in the role of the first son of House of Lin, to return to an ancient palace to fulfill solve a mystery. This game is unique to Western markets, bringing Chinese culture, history, writing, and horror sensibility and coupling this with a carefully designed and paced mystery that is told through discoveries in the game world. Ultimately, players will unveil the hidden secrets of the palace. Through research on environmental storytelling, human computer interaction, and game puzzle design, we want to provide the game with fascinating and immersive VR experience.

This thesis studies a few established design principles which were implemented in a developed fast-action puzzle game prototype. The aim was to study how several design principles affected the performance of players. The prototype was described as a Time-Based Memory Mashup with six different ”presets” based on the established design principles in which small changes occur. All participants in the study played through all six presets. Gameplay data was gathered from the participating users and were automatically recorded into a database in order to determine which preset was the most successful. Participants also filled in a survey to answer questions regarding on how they would judge their own performance, engagement and enjoyment of each played preset. Collected gameplay data from the participants were compared and ranked to determine which presets and design principles were the most effective. Surveys, observations and interviews have been studied to see if it matched the statistical data. Participants had higher performances with a fixed or more forgiving timer, which participants preferred the most. Downgraded graphics and sound were enjoyed the least, however did not led to much worse performances. An increased difficulty had the most effect in lowering performances. Design principles such as Pacing, Difficulty, Feedback, Interface Design and Foreground had the most potential to lower performances among participants.

Game instructions play an important role in all games, as players always need them to help them understand the rules of the game. Constructivist learning theory and procedural rhetoric theory provide the theoretical basis for exploring unguided game instruction. This thesis aims to investigate two aspects of unguided game instruction, how it affects players' perceptions of the rules of the game, and how it affects players' perceptions of the message the game is trying to convey. An experiment was conducted with a control group and the results were analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively, based on objective data of the participants' performance during the game and their subjective answers in the post-game questionnaire. The main conclusion is that, unguided game instruction helps some players to construct an understanding of the rules, but it has no clear advantage in helping the player to understand the message the game is trying to convey.

This study is focused on the challenges in puzzle video games. Based on several previous studies, the researcher created seven different types of challenges in puzzle games. To study the key of challenging levels in puzzle games, three games were chosen, then walkthrough videos of these games were watched and challenges were noted and categorized into different types. The collected data showed that different puzzle games have different challenge types while abstract reasoning is the most common challenge in every puzzle game. The total challenge numbers and pacing in puzzle video games strongly depend on the design intention of the game. And The number of challenge types has no direct connection with difficulty. The category of seven types of challenges and the results of this study may bring reference and inspiration to future studies. It may also shed some light on puzzle game design.

" We designed an interactive 3D user interface system to perform object modeling in virtual environments. Expanding on existing 3D user interface techniques, we integrate low-cost human gesture recognition that endows the user with powerful abilities to perform complex virtual object modeling tasks in an immersive game setting. Much research has been done to explore the possibilities of developing biosensors for Virtual Reality (VR) use. In the game industry, even though full body interaction techniques are involved in modern game consoles, most of the utilizations, in terms of game control, are still simple. In this project, we extended the use of motion tracking and gesture recognition techniques to create a new 3D UI system to support immersive gaming. We set a goal for the usability, which is virtual object modeling, and finally developed a game application to test its performance. "