Vox - Project Details and Overview

VOX 

Presented by Scrumbo Studios

Description:

Vox is a classic-style adventure game controlled with your voice! In Vox, the player acts as “Guy in the chair” and gives verbal commands to help a young man escape the mysterious mansion he finds himself trapped in…

Vox utilizes the “Hugging Face” Unity API in order to convert the player’s text to speech on the fly, allowing the player to physically tell the character where to go and what to do in order to solve puzzles and escape! 

Development Process:

Development began in December 2023, after being inspired by my own experiences of playing video games with my mom who often likes to shout at the screen as if giving the characters directions. From this idea, research into references and various methods of implementing voice-to-text in unity began. 

After deciding to use Hugging Face as the API service for the game, I created a basic demo in early January that consisted of a stock character who could move between a set of colored cubes by giving him directions into the microphone like “Move to the blue cube”. 

 Before too much work began, I spent time with paper prototypes to get a feel for the kinds of verbiage people would use when giving commands in the game. Specifically, I made a note to look for verbs like “Look, Use, Take, Open, ETC.” which informed the way the commands were programmed. 

From here, I really wanted to lean into the idea that the player is like one of those characters you see in movies and games that are watching the player character and giving them advice and helping them out by hacking devices and such. This informed design decisions such as manual camera control and the ability to hack into locks to open doors. 

Seeing as this project is something that I’m working on solo, I’ve taken an agile approach to development, where I set weekly sprint goals for myself that allow me to break what would be bigger tasks into smaller chunks that make the development process more manageable. Then, I get feedback on my work from peers and mentors and use that feedback to inform my next steps. This is all kept in check with a Github Project board to track issues.

Now, after over a month of back-end work and several weeks of preliminary testing, Vox development has hit the ground running, and new developments and additions are being made almost every day!