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Echoes of the Red Death
Gamified VR Experience | Independent Project
This VR experience reimage Edger Allen Poe's classical novel, The Masque of the Red Death, exploring the interactive storytelling emanbles by VR. This story is recontexted in a revisit to the ancient castle, with the lighting and sounds to help the audience find out what happened in the castle a time ago. In the compelete dark rooms. The original story inspired the design of the immersive theater experince. This project explore how the literary story can be experienced in an interactive and multisensory experience beyond written form.
TOOLS
Unity, C#, Adobe Mixamo, Meshy AI, ChatGPT
TIME
October 2025 - December 2025
INSTRUCTOR
Zack Hegarty, PhD Candidate
AFFILIATION
Indiana University Bloomington, Informatics Department
THE DEMO VIDEO
THE NARRATIVE DESIGN
The story takes place one hundred years after the events of Edgar Allan Poe's The Masque of the Red Death. The castle still stands, but it is no longer filled with people, only the echoes of what happened there. Players are invited into the seven chambers of the castle, each with its own color and atmosphere. Guided by sound, they explore and illuminate each room to uncover what happened long ago, following a story of life, from birth and growth, to decline and death. The tone is reflective and calm, turning Poe's tale into an immersive experience about memory and time.
The seven rooms follow the original color sequence exactly, blue, purple, green, orange, white, violet, black, but the storytelling is reframed: the player is not a guest at the ball, but someone revisiting the castle afterward, piecing together what happened before.
Room-by-Room Narrative Design
THE GAME MECHANISM
The experience is built around three core mechanics, navigation, exploration, and illumination, which turn the player from a passive viewer of a story into an active participant in uncovering memory. Players use a torch to move through the castle and search for clues, guided as much by sound Shining the torch on a hidden object triggers a shadow performance, replaying a fragment of what happened in that room. This loop of moving, listening, and illuminating turns Poe's static narration into something the player physically does. Finding something in the dark becomes the act of recovering a buried memory.
The Chart of Game Mechanism
The Storybroad Sketch
The Idea of the "Light → Shadow → Story/Animation" Trigger System
THE LEVEL STRUCTURE
The castle is structured as seven enclosed rooms, connected in a single line that follows the room sequence in Poe's novel. Inside each room, the player is free to roam and explore, there is no fixed path. But between rooms, movement is strictly linear. A door only opens once the player has uncovered that room's story, and once they step through, there is no going back. This combination of freedom and constraint mirrors the story itself, guests who believe they have all the freedom in the world, moving through a sequence of rooms toward an ending they cannot reverse.
The Layout Reference and Sketch
The Constructed Rooms in Unity
The Chart of the Level Structure
TECHNICAL DEVELOPMENT
Scene Creation
Each room was first blocked out using basic cubes, based on the room layout and color sequence from the narrative design. Once the room shapes were in place, suitable 3D models were sourced from sites like Sketchfab and Meshy AI to use as props and furniture, then placed and scaled to fit each room's atmosphere.
The Constructed Scene
The Layout and Decoration in the First Room
The Different Version of Silhouette Generated by AI with Revised Prompts
Character Modelling and Animation
The characters were created using AI-generated models, then animated in Adobe Mixamo by selecting the appropriate motion for each one, such as idle, dancing, clapping or speaking. The animations were then imported into Unity, set up in the Animator, and paired with matching sound effects for some characters.
From Image to 3D Modelling of Character in MeshyAI
From Image to 3D Modelling of Character in MeshyAI
The Character Animation in Adobe Mixamo
An Example of Animation with Audio Attached in Unity
Interaction
Each room has its own Room Manager that keeps track of every interactive point in it. Walk into one of these zones, and it triggers automatically, either it plays the shadow scene and voiceover, or it pops up a hint UI, depending on the type of zone. Graspping some props trigger a whole chain of things at once. The instrument in the green room, for example, pick it up, and the lights turn on, the dancers start moving, and the music starts playing. When the players put it down, it turns on the door light. So putting the object down is basically what unlocks the next room.
The Room Manager in the First Room
One of the Interactable Zone Tirggers Stories
One of the Interactable Zone Tirggers the Door Open
The Setting of the Player
The Testing of Grabbing an Object
User Interface & Instruction
Before entering the castle, a short UI screen introduces the core mechanics, torch, sound cues, illumination, against a quiet background. Room 1 then doubles as a soft tutorial, wehre voice prompts walk the player through these actions in context, so that in the following rooms, players already know how to explore.
The Instructions and UI
The Adjustment of UI in Unity
ITERATION
Feedback from the playtest was that the complete darkness felt disorienting. Without any visual cue, it was difficult to tell which direction to move or where to go next. Based on this feedback, I added subtle visual cues within the dark rooms to help guide players' attention, while still preserving the atmosphere of darkness that the experience depends on. I also added a "Help" button, in case players forget what they need to do next.
The Lighting Effect Indicating the Interactive Zone
The Lighting Effect Indicating the Door to the Next Room
The Lighting Effect Indicating the Interactable Objects
The "Help" with Instructions
THE FURTHER STEP
The next step of this project is to gather feedback from players and observe how they move through, feel, and interpret the experience. Rather than expanding the work in scale, future development will focus on refining the atmosphere, pacing, and emotional clarity of the interaction. Based on player feedback, I would like to explore whether the gameplay can support more personal and open-ended responses to the story. This may include more interactive objects, subtle choices, and possible multiple endings, allowing players to experience different emotional paths through the space.