The Curse of Lavagedara is a game that resulted from Round 5 of my Building Virtual Worlds class during my graduate studies at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center. I was a part of a team of five which consisted of two programmers, two artists, and a sound designer and we were given three weeks to make a game for the Valve Index VR device with the addition of four computers. The Curse of Lavagedara is an asymmetric multiplayer game where a single VR player uses spells to slow or prevent the four PC players from getting to the center of the maze. The curse is that the player who defeats Lavagedara is the player who, in time, becomes the next incarnation of Lavagedara.
In the first iteration, the maze was square shaped and composed of smaller colored squares. The VR player had the power to rotate all squares of one color in an attempt to thwart the PC players’ progress. The maze proved too complicated to navigate and the VR player was too powerful. The latest iteration involves a circular maze divided into layers where each layer is made of four quadrants. The VR player can drop spells into a quadrant to unleash harmful effects on the PC players who happen to be located in that part of the maze. I specifically worked on the design of the maze and focused on getting as close to a balanced multiplayer experience as we could.