[VR prototype] Eat The World

Tuism

I spent the past weekend at Free Lives so that I have access to their Vive, and bashed this prototype out: Eat The World.

Apologies for the absolutely crap images, getting content out of VR is like pulling hippo tooth. I tried video capture and that didn't work. These came from a camera propped on an Ouma box shooting the game window in Unity.



The video is on my instagram (easier than youtube but now I regret it because the embedding is crap on instagram)
https://www.instagram.com/p/BHczRijARIM/
https://www.instagram.com/p/BHaGopcgKyl/

My goals for this was:
1. To learn how VR worked in Unity
2. To see how/if scale works in VR (Some may remember Echo which was also a play on player scale)
3. To experiment with a different form of locomotion in VR

To these ends I think I got pretty far in a weekend, and by the end had just gotten past technical understanding and was beginning to run into "balancing" issues which I do wish I had reached sooner... Because of course I don't have access to the Vive at home :(

The idea is that you eat everything you can grab, and eating makes you grow, so you go from pebble-scale to tree-scale to giant-scale by eating more and more stuff. The build I had at the end has you eating clouds.

The final bout of additions and adding mole-scale (initially the player started at tree-scale) to the game kinda broke the balancing and made reaching the clouds much harder, and it was like midnight on the Sunday so I called it and headed home. But damn I had such a blast, and wish I could conveniently continue working on this.

Some learnings from working on the Vive:

>> Vive doesn't work on Mac. SteamVR doesn't even work on Mac. Sigh.
>> Even if you're working on a monster machine (I was), be careful about overloading the game. Lag WILL make you motion sick.
>> In most cases, use FixedUpdate instead of Update in VR. You need the best refresh rate to not get motion sick.
>> SteamVR from the Unity Asset Store is your friend
>> SteamVR documentation is hard to find :(
>> If you have to move the player, do it very fast, or telegraph it and make it very, very slow. A medium speed is usually motion-sickness-inducing.

I'm going to try and hook up at least a Cardboard setup at home soon... Believe it or not I have zero gear that's VR capable - my phone is a 4S which is underspecced for Cardboard and... That's it. Damnit. But I'm really, really really keen to get into VR.

I've been binging on the Voices of VR by Kent Bye which is a FANTASTIC podcast with some amazing insights into literally the cutting edge of VR, I can't recommend it enough: http://voicesofvr.com/top-10-voices-of-vr-episodes-to-get-started-into-vr/

P.S. Thanks @Elyaradine for the cool name :)

FanieG

I know that book learning is not for everyone, but for those that do like them, and like @Tuism want to try their hand at VR...I saw that packt publishing has a book out for VR in Unity. Will post a link when I get a chance. @Tuism what FPS did your game have to run at to avoid motion sickness, and what other stats in the profiler did you have to keep an eye on?

Tuism

I didn't bring up the FPS display while jamming, I didn't know about its existence in SteamVR till much later. In that podcast there's been a lot of talk of 90FPS Bing minimally required to not get motion sickness. But lag in VR, or at least Vive, is not the lag that we are familiar with in other displays, the software seems to pushe out spurts of movement and some stuff goes out of sync, like head position or hand tracking.

As I relied on SteamVR for my devving, I doubt that such a new kit will have much documentation in some book. Googling for documentation was tough. If this book has SteamVR documentation then oooh, shiny.

EvanGreenwood

Sad I didn't take the chance to play this when you were around. Hopefully you'll come back.

It seems like a really elegant and rad concept.

Tuism

I was hogging the thing all weekend devving on it and was making changes all the way till the last minute so you probably wouldn't have had time to play anyway XD

And some changes at the last sprint actually made the game worse (added tiny-scale and edible clouds, but the tiny-scale mucked up the scaling differentials and the growth at mid size slowed too much and you ended up not being able to reach the clouds eventually... I have to re-work the growth factor without making the player nauseous - these are tricky little bits that all add up surprisingly in VR...), so let me work through those and show you again sometime :)

SEE YOU THIS WEEKEND!! :D

Thanks! Hopefully the concept stands up to some stress playing and allows variety :)

FanieG

Found this reading list on Unity's site. Looks like there's a lot of VR info on there:

http://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/topics/virtual-reality/vr-reading-list?playlist=22946

EvanGreenwood

@Tuism I really just want to eat people. Send me a build when that is possible.