02 — Design Framework
Design
Story · Mechanics · Aesthetics · Technology · Prototyping
The Game is set in the Office of a large Tech corporation. The Player is a newly hired junior developer who has just completed their master's degree at university. They are now eager to gain hands-on experience and work on important projects.
However, the first day at work becomes a harsh reality check. The rude CEO assigns them a seemingly pointless task, building a Jenga-like tower out of tech equipment. Although the Player finds this task boring and meaningless, they must complete it in order to climb the corporate ladder.
The Player moves to their workstation, where tech equipment rapidly appears on a conveyor belt. They must grab the object and place it in a suitable spot to make the Jenga-Tower as steady as possible.
As the Player keeps stacking objects, each time they drop an object or don't grab it in time from the conveyor belt, the CEO yells angrily. After losing a certain amount of objects, the player is fired, triggering the fall of civilization.
Through a symbolic Jenga-style gameplay, the Player physically interacts with different layers of modern technology, trying to keep the system stable while external pressure keeps increasing.
If the tower is greater than a certain height, the Player has done too good of a job. By building the tower, they have given power to AI to conquer humanity. There are some visual and sound effects to signify the AI Take Over End Scene. If the tower collapses, the technological world as we know it has collapsed as well. The Player is transported to a Pre-Technology post-apocalyptic-like End Scene. Finally, the Player always has the option to quit this stressful and meaningless job. If so, they become a farmer in a rural area and they are transported to a Farm End Scene.
Accessibility shaped every decision. Movement supports both continuous locomotion and teleportation — because VR motion sickness is real, and the game shouldn't exclude anyone before they even start.
Grabbing uses a near-grab system rather than physics-based collision, making interactions feel immediate and physical without the frustration of missed grabs.
Every interaction — grabbing components, pressing buttons, triggering UI — is mapped to the same controller input. One button. No confusion.
The visual style lands between photorealistic and cartoonish — detailed enough to feel grounded, stylized enough to feel intentional.
The Office is cold. Futuristic, minimalistic, unwelcoming — and deliberately empty of other people. Just you, the conveyor belt, and a boss who doesn't like you.
The AI Takeover ending warps that same space into something chaotic and apocalyptic. The Farm is its opposite: warm light, open fields, natural sounds. And the Pre-Technology world is quiet in a different way — a city without screens, without machines, nature slowly taking back what we built.
Techfall is a 3D VR experience built for the Meta Quest 2 — two controllers, full hand tracking, full immersion.
Built in Unity, the engine handles everything from the physics of the conveyor belt to the spatial audio of the boss reprimands to the lighting shifts between scenes.
During the design process, we created a prototyping map outlining the progression of the gameplay.
