VR research demo
— PROJECT NAME
VR Research
— ROLE
Gameplay programmer
— DATE AND AFFILIATION
March 2021,
College of Maisonneuve
Research in which I learned how to create games with interesting VR mechanics. This work piqued the interest of my teachers and in the end netted me a job to train a few of them so that they, in turn, could teach students who would take their game class.
What I worked on
VR integration, character movement, teleportation, climbing, walking by grabbing and pulling, creating two-handed objects, inventory slots, movement recognition using the PDollar Point-Cloud recognizer from the Unity asset store.
What I learned
Basically everything, since I started from scratch. I learned to set up the VR rig, getting the hands and animate them, teleporting methods, prehension methods and using hinges to create furniture like cupboards that could be used naturally.
Once that was done, I learned to use sockets to place items in the world or use them as an inventory, and then how to climb walls, which led me to create a grab & pull walk mechanic, and finally I learned to use point-cloud detection to create gameplay features, such as spawning a ball that can be thrown.
My full research document is linked at the bottom of the page, in French only.
Challenges
Starting in VR was a big challenge in itself, since I knew nothing about VR game development. The real challenge happened right after my VR internship, however, when the school hired me to train my teachers on how to create VR games. I spent a full week reviewing my documents and started a new project from scratch to show everything I learned, and in the end it was worth it.
