Exo Swinger
A VR platformer game I worked at during college. My main role was as a programmer and gameplay designer. The gameplay was inspired by another project I did by myslef, but changed the mechanics to work better as a VR game.
Programming for VR
The hardest part of working with VR was the set up. Making Unity work with the VR headset took us a moment to figure out, but after that, it was pretty much smooth sailing. Working with VR wasn't all that different from just working in 3D. I knew the position of the player and their hands. I was able to treat the player as any other 3D physics object in Unity.
Designing for VR
Even though the game was inspired from a previous project, there where some changes that needed to be made to the main mechanics in order to make it work in VR. I changed the way the grappple works. In the previous game it automatically pulled you pretty fast. But in this game the grapple doesn't pull on the player, it just allows them to swing. This makes the game a little slower which in VR is good since if it were to fast it could be disorienting. The player is able to hold a button to slowly be pulled towards the grappling hook, which helps give
the player more control of their swinging, which adds a bit more depth to the movement.
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I also made it so that when the player rotates they snap to the new rotation instead of having a continuos rotation like in a normal 3D game. This helped the game feel more responsive to the player's intention, and helped with motion sickness.
Level Design
While designing levels wasn't my main role, I added contribute to it. We realized there was a problem with the levels. There were buildings on the sides but nothing in the middle. This made some parts of the levels feel empty and harder to swing through them since most of the time you would end up crashing against a wall rather than swinging swiftly through the city. Thankfully it wasn't too hard to solve this issue. We ended up adding a few floating objects in between the buildings. Swing under something is much easier than swinging besides something, so this allowed the players to swing with much less friction, especially at the beginning.
