In the office over the last year, we worked on a few VR projects and I thought I’d share the ones we can talk about. Working in VR was a nice challenge and felt very different from standard game development. It’s kind of like the wild west, you need to explore new ways of doing things because normal mechanics and conventions don’t work/make sense in VR. That said it was really good fun. We were originally using the HTC Vive headset and later bought an Oculus rift S. VR still doesn’t feel quite right but the Oculus rift S felt like a big step in the right direction. I’m excited to see the next step in technology!
As a team, we started off with a flying plane simulation. Our goal was to create a functional and realistic flying simulation, with simple gameplay mechanics, which would run on the Vive/Oculus Rift. We wanted to test VR development viability, as well as see what kind of quality benchmark we could hit in a small amount of time (3 days):
For another prototype, as a team, we made a Shuttle Launch Simulator prototype. Our goal was to create an immersive and co-operative effort to launch a shuttle into space. This multiplayer experience was split into two roles, the “Pilots” and the “Flight Director”. The Pilots are in VR and need to interact with the controls on the shuttle. Whereas the Flight Director is not in VR and instead has a tablet which simulates a control terminal and a flight manual document. They must guide the pilots through the launch procedure, e.g. what buttons to press in what order and help the pilots work through any alarms/problems they encounter, such as a short circuit in the computer system.
