I finally got my HTC Vive and I couldn’t wait to test out some VR concepts I saw at GDC. I decided to to a quick gamejammy game before LD35 to take the development cycle for a spin.
There has been a fire at the downtown children’s hospital and the rooftop (why?) nursery is at risk! Catch the falling babies before they hit the asphalt in Bouncing Babies VR!
I chose this concept because it hits a number of core virtual reality game design issues:
- Depth perception as a central game mechanic (catching falling babies)
- Leveraging hand-eye coordination (throwing babies into ambulances)
- Encouraging room-scale movement (scrambling around to catch babies)
- Interacting with physical, diagetic mechanisms (difficulty slider, bat)
- Eschewing HUD for diagetic data representations
- A familiar, but not-uncanny 360-degree environment including audio cues
VROMG! I did a full write-up with gifs at TIGsource or you can check out the r/gamedev discussion. There are some good VR-specific tidbits in there.
See you at #LD35!