EchoRealm

1) Overview

Enter the EchoRealm—a mysterious world where music shapes reality. Explore realms inspired by different genres, each with its own rhythm and challenge.

Play using either controllers or hand tracking. After starting the game, follow the prompts and step through the portal to enter your first music world. As the music plays, strike the cubes in time to build your score. Reach 5000 points to conquer the realm and unlock the next. Fall short… and you’ll have to try again.

Can you master every genre and uncover what lies deeper within the EchoRealm?

2) Development Process

We began by focusing on what we both enjoy most—music and immersive environments—and made that the foundation of our game. We collaborated closely on designing and building the opening scene, then divided responsibilities to develop the remaining systems and levels.

3) Successes

We successfully implemented all the core features we set out to build. One of our biggest accomplishments was integrating a BPM-based system to synchronize gameplay with music, allowing interactions to feel rhythmic and responsive.

4) Challenges

Collision detection proved to be one of our biggest technical hurdles, especially when ensuring accurate interactions with moving objects. Additionally, learning to collaborate using GitHub was challenging at first, but ultimately became an essential and powerful part of our workflow.

5) What We Learned

We gained valuable experience working with both controllers and hand tracking. To make hand interactions function properly, we implemented rigid bodies and carefully tuned sphere colliders to ensure precise detection without unintended overlaps.

We also learned how to use BPM (beats per minute) to drive gameplay timing. This allowed us to create a flexible system that can be reused across different songs and genres, making the game more scalable.

6) Future Improvements

In future iterations, we plan to expand progression by enabling seamless access to new portals and realms. We also aim to introduce additional gameplay modes, such as a conductor-style rhythm game.

Other planned improvements include persistent scoring, a high score leaderboard, and more opportunities for players to compete with themselves and others.