Year
2025
Client
Virtual Reality Exploration (Oculus) | Rosh , Jacob , Hrishi
Category
VR & Entertainment
Product Duration
2 Weeks
With motion-tracked controllers, players may aim, fire, and interact with the environment in single-person VR shooting games that usually focus on simple principles. These games' minimalism frequently stems from their emphasis on key gameplay components rather than intricate plots or intricate mechanisms.
From peaceful target practice ranges to zombie apocalypses and future battlefields, players are submerged in a variety of settings.
Typical core features are:
Target shooting helps players improve their accuracy and reflexes as they strike stationary or moving targets.
Combat Scenarios: Some video games mimic battlegrounds where players must contend with swarms of adversaries.
Weapon Variety: These games include a wide range of weapon options, from futuristic plasma cannons to handguns and rifles.
Interactive Environments: The gameplay may incorporate puzzle-like difficulties, teleportation features, or destructible things. A standard for this genre has been established by a number of VR shooting games. Games like Arizona Sunshine, Pistol Whip, and Superhot VR provide a variety of gaming experiences. Superhot VR is a simple yet powerful game that prioritizes strategy over quick shooting and only lets time pass when the player does. Pistol Whip is a rhythm-based shooting game that blends fast-paced action with music.
While designing the environment, we made some decisive decisions that made the project stand out significantly. One important thing I remembered from my classes in this module was how hyper-realism had some drawbacks in the VR space due to the fact that users tend to compare it with the real world. To tackle this we decided to go with a simple environment, which is colorful and great for target practice. And for the other assets, we browsed through the unity asset store for 2 guns. One shoots bullets and the other plasma/laser.
The development of the VR project was pretty straightforward, since we already had our systems set up to create VR spaces in Unity. This actually saved us some time. But we did have to change the build and other settings to match our headset. Next we went on to the unity asset store to look for free environments that fit our description and design idea. We found a few but stuck to an environment made in primary colours and has targets. The next step was to move the models around to make it fit our plan and requirements. Then we created the teleportation area with the trigger being releasing the button. Next the teleportation anchor object was created to make the second teleportation method. We followed a few tutorials on YouTube and used ChatGPT to find answers and clear queries. After this we created a sphere to implement the grab interaction as per the requirement. We moved on to script next, first one being the weapon script. Followed by interactable events, pickup weapon events, weapon methods, Pistol properties, and few more like damage and bullet spawn. Now the user will be able to pick up the gun and shoot targets.
Interactions:
The game allows the user to interact with their environment using the controllers. The basic interactions like teleportation and colour changes are prominent in this project. We designed it in such a way that the user will have to use the left controller to teleport from place to place. The two types of teleportation we have implemented in the game are area based teleportation and the teleportation anchor. The left controller will change from a red ray to a white one when pointed to places teleportation is possible, this too can be seen as an interaction. Therefore, pointing to the area and clicking the button will teleport the user to that specific area.
Another interaction we have implemented is picking up or grabbing objects. And the ray gun specifically can interact with the other objects.
Challenges:
The challenges faced were tackled mostly, the first one being setting up the VR headset and properly pairing it with the device. It took some time to figure that out but with the help of some user guides and some subreddits, we got the answers to that.
The second challenge was to make the user teleport properly to the destination, as we ran into some issues where the user was either too high off the ground or submerged in it. After a few trial and error methods we managed to fix that too.
The next one was fixing the angle of the gun to thee controller to make it feel like we are holding the gun right. That too was fixed.
After all this, the gun doesn't fire, that we couldn’t fix. Everything seems to be in the right place but the issue persists.
Conclusion:
The game we created gave us a hard time, but the learning process during the development was definitely worth it, in the virtual world, simplicity is often forgotten and frowned upon, this game is our small contribution to a world of ever growing complex gameplays and features. We are aware of the fact that this can be made in better graphics and style, but that will take away the simplicity of the game, we are sure that there is a good target audience for our small venture.
