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Puzzle Rain: A Musical WebVR Journey for the HTC Vive

Casey Yee Casey Yee    - 

Puzzle Rain is a musical journey in which you help awaken and guide mythical creatures back together into happy musical harmony with one another. Only their combined musical chorus can summon life-giving rain to revive the parched and desolate landscape. Though, there isn’t much time. Dangerous predators roam!

Play Puzzle Rain!
View source code on GitHub

It’s been a fantastic year for WebVR. We’ve been inspired by the progress made, and to celebrate how far we’ve come and highlight some of the newest capabilities with room-scale and tracked controller support, we decided that we would team up with Arturo Paracuellos to see what we could build.

We’re super happy with the results. Puzzle Rain is a visual triumph, has impeccable sound design (by Guillermo Laporta), and the interactions are really fun and engaging. The experience, built using three.js, showcases what Web technologies can deliver in a narratives and storytelling that has never been experienced on the Web before.

People that have experienced Puzzle Rain have been blown away at the quality of the experience and are surprised that the Web can deliver experiences comparable to those of native applications. It certainly has become a favourite for those that have tried it, and we are excited to share it with the community.

There has been a lot learned in the short seven weeks it took to build Puzzle Rain, and a lot of this knowledge has already been making its way into such tools as A-Frame, our WebVR content-creation framework, making it more powerful and expressive for content creators. We have also learned a lot about story development, interaction design, and workflows – all of which we will be sharing more about on this blog in the coming weeks.

To play Puzzle Rain, you will need the following:

Play Puzzle Rain!
View source code on GitHub