Olivia Yin

Game Designer // CREATIVE TECHNOLOGIST
 
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Detour Bus

Casual VR Road-Trip Game // Physics-Based Construction

"Detour Bus" is a comedic, room-scale casual VR construction game that challenges players to build winding, tactile highways around their own physical space. Tasked with guiding the dysfunctional Flowers family on a road trip across a vibrant, satirical Post-Infrastructure America, the experience blends physics-based level traversal with high-agency interactive storytelling.

PRODUCTION TYPE 19-People Large Scale Team
ROLE & FOCUS Game Designer, 3D Artist
TIMELINE & CYCLE 2020 - 2021 // 12-Month Production
HONORS & SPOTLIGHTS • Yugo BAFTA Student Awards Shortlist (2022)
• Oculus Launch Pad Grant Recipient (2020)
• Featured at USC Games Expo (2020)

Technical Pipeline & Toolsets

VR LEVEL DESIGN & ENGINE ARCHITECTURE
Unity Engine: Designed spatial grid alignment, calculated modular road snap mechanics, and balanced physics-driven collision systems tailored for the Oculus Rift platform. Scripted player interaction logic to guarantee highly intuitive, comfortable room-scale traversal workflows.
3D PIPELINE & VISUAL STYLE
Blender & Asset Pipeline: Modeled optimized, low-poly environmental assets, eccentric vehicle models, and modular highway segments. Maintained strict geometric topology and low-draw-call performance budgets essential for seamless real-time VR rendering.

Level Design 

01

Tactile Architectural Interactivity

The core gameplay loop centers on highly kinetic tactile mechanics, converting the empty air surrounding the player into a living engineering canvas. Players interactively piece together chaotic highway ribbons to build structural pathways, actively dodging unpredictable obstacles scattered throughout the stylized Post-Infrastructure levels.

As an artist and designer on the team, my focus lay in marrying aesthetic clarity with mechanical functionality—ensuring that every modular asset was instantly recognizable under changing lighting profiles while remaining perfectly optimized for rapid real-time spatial arrangement.

02

Comedic Spatial Environmental Puzzles

The environments operate as externalized comedic landscapes where the vehicle's automated motion dictates the pacing. Levels require players to rapidly diagnose environmental roadblocks, navigate tricky vertical drops, and craft unconventional structural detours on the fly to support the erratic driving path of the Flowers family. This tight interlocking of real-time physics tracking with situational environmental storytelling creates a high-agency, stress-free puzzle flow that leverages the immersive presence unique to virtual reality.