With my research coming to a close, I have cultivated my gained knowledge of VR development into this mini-game Egg Rush. In this short experience, you will be able to test out the Lean Movement system and the updated Object Interaction system that I developed. When re-visiting these systems, they have both been translated to Unity XR to be available cross platform. The Object Interaction system has also been integrated with a flocking algorithm, allowing player to pickup multiple objects at a time based on how quickly the grip objects. The slower they grip, the more objects they pickup. If you would like to play this mini-game, it is available on Itch.io and SidequestVR. Otherwise please enjoy the demo video below.
This project has been an excellent exercise in putting my research over the various topics into practice. With future projects I hope to build upon my knowledge of user interaction to better enable player's ability to interact with their environment. While I was able to implement the flocking algorithm, the constant twitch of the eggs is extremely distracting. It may be ideal to use the flocking algorithm to determine which objects to pickup, then delegate those objects as children of the grabbed object. This would hopefully reduce the twitchy movement of objects and possibly make those objects easier to access with other systems.
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This is the final topic of this research venture into virtual reality development and design. It's only fitting to end with distribution, because what is the point of making immersive experiences if you don't share it with people. When we think about how people experience VR, where are they? Are that at home, at work, an arcade, or trying it for the first time at a demo? Where the player is and the context of their real environment can impact the kind of VR experience they'll engage with. VR is still quite a small market and has a lot of different branches with different kinds of users looking for different content.
On the other hand, at-home VR is a much more varied spectrum of player experience. Like we discussed in the previous segment, VR platforms have a broad range of controller input and system specifications. But how do developers get to the players? Well there are quite a few options. Below we are going to go over a few distribution platforms and their process/requirements.
Overall, where you publish will determine your player base and the kind of content you can produce. Understanding this and improving your ability to develop platform agnostic is key to maximizing your possible audience for your VR experiences. If you have any thoughts or experience with the distribution process for VR titles, please leave a comment or start a discussion down below.
After researching best practices and techniques for VR optimization and multiplatform development, I developed my own demo built for Quest 2 and the Valve Index. In this project, I decided to start learning Unity XR Toolkit to build a platform agnostic experience. The plugin actually worked pretty well for this demo. I designed the controls to be physical buttons and the simple grip button that is pretty standard across VR platforms. Doing this made building for different platforms easy since I only had to adjust build settings to switch between PC and Android builds.
The video below showcases the difference in performance when taking the same environments and optimization settings between platforms. Optimization is a tricky art and I look forward to learning more about it. |
AuthorInterested in Level design, Procedural Generation, System Design, Geospatial Technology, and many other aspects of Game Development. Archives
March 2021
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