Sonic Escape

The Project

Sonic Escape was 5of12’s entry to the Meta Start Developer Competition 2025 and was designed to be a gentle puzzle experience focused around engaging hand interactions and a musical theme.

From this we came up with a few design principles that we’d carry into the development:

• Include scales of interaction
  • Finger scale - pinch and move a slider
  • Hand scale - bashing pads
  • Arm scale - moving large items and levers
• Puzzles based on pillars of music
  • Pitch - harmony and frequency
  • Timbre - tone quality and artifacts
  • Rhythm - transient and timing based

Development

As it was a Meta competition, we focused efforts around the Quest 3 and 3S and utilised the Meta Unity SDK for XR capabilities. Aside from the built in functionality from the Meta SDK, everything in the game was custom made. All the 3D models, sounds, music, shaders, animations, UI were all created during the competition.

Much of the development time was spent itterating on the puzzle concepts themselves. The pitch and rhythm ideas came relatively quickly (adjusting the frequency of tones to be harmonically pleasant and tapping pads to reproduce a specific pattern respectively).

The timbre puzzle took a little more itteration. The concept we wanted to achieve was filtering out “bad” sounds from the system (representing pollutants in the air system). The first idea had a complex set of tones playing and a spectrographic representation shown. The task for the player was to adujst a filter to find the “bad” (read dissonant) tones and to remove them - leaving behind a nice harmonic sound.

It quickly became apparent that this had some issues. Firstly, it was too complex a concept for anyone who had little knowledge of audio and second, the interaction just wasn’t that much fun!

So, back to the drawing board, we pivoted to the idea of physically replacing a filter component rather than just adujsting a control. This felt much better, and paired with the large movement of opening a drawer to get at the filter, it became the favourite interaction. The dissonant tones were replaced with non-musical sounds (like bug noises or scraping) to make it as clear as possible that they were incorrect and we ended up with an experience that was intuative and loads of fun!

Challenges

The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry

Badly Timed Viruses

After discovering the competition just as it started, we wanted to get going straight away and dropped the other projects we’d been working on - only for two out of three of us to get sick.

The last thing a virus addled brain needs is to have a screen strapped 2cm from its visual input, so we took some time to recover before really getting going. By the time we’d recovered, we only had a couple of weeks of development time left.

Tooling

Something we didn’t forsee being quite the time sink was the tooling. Most of the team only had access to MacOS development machines for the competition. Meaning they couldn’t use the Quest Link software to stream straight from Unity to the headset and had to do a full Android build to run the game. Having to wait sometimes 20 minutes to test a change made itteration a slow and frustating process at times.

The Result

I’m really proud of what we managed to achieve in only a few weeks! In spite of a few set backs and some dev tooling struggles, we’ve made something that feels really polished and, I feel, really achieves the vision we set out with.