Virtual Realms, Real Considerations.

Recently, I have devoted numerous weeks to game development on the inVadeRs project which is a VR title for VIVE.

The game was designed to be around 5 minute gameplay, which shows off all the functionality of the core game in a bite size play. It was designed this way due to the fact it would be shown off at a games show in late May, therefore all players would need to have experience of the full game and then it must effectively reset on return to main menu. However, it does have functional leaderboards allowing you to play it more than once and compete with yourself or swap the VR headset to someone else and compete with them.

The real considerations behind VR development however are vast, from optimisation to motion sickness.

Firstly in optimisation, you cannot effectively pull off alot of the tricks of the trade in normal 3D or 2D game development, such as masking things from the player or having some effects such as bloom (shows more whitewashed), motion blur, camera effects and a few others. Some of these if added would increase the motion sickness feeling for participants, an aspect that I myself are susceptible to.

Motion sickness is also a hard thing to tackle as many people get it for different reasons in VR but I find the predomenant reason to be the method of movement. In which case I tackled this by having the player not move far from their spot atop of a skyscraper during the invasion gameplay in inVadeRs. I found this a success in preventing motion sickness, compared to allowing the player to move via teleportation or smooth movement, however this could also be attributed to the VIVE having larger game space than most VR systems and allowing the player to wander around more.

I really enjoyed working on inVadeRs and a more detailed report and apt amount of screenshots from the game will be up in the following weeks.