Streets of Rift – Postmortem

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Description

Streets of Rift is basically VR Frogger. You have to cross the street in 10 seconds, (20 for the wider streets with a 10 second time pickup). The streets cycle in a series of fout, 2&4 lane day then 2&4 lane night. Each cycle the traffic gets a bit faster. The game is designed to be played with the Oculus Rift HMD, but you can play with mouse + keyboard or even a 360 controller.

What Went Right

• The theme forced a very tight focus - Gameplay was reduced to something as simple as looking left/right and moving forward and backward. This meant I had it playable within a few hours on the first day. Which saved me a lot of time when working on getting later details working.
• Stuck with low fidelity art – I briefly explored a couple of options for pulling in Google Earth data and other elements to crank up the visuals. But each one looked like a rabbit hole and sticking to basic greybox blocks helped keep the whole thing consistent.
• Oculus Unity Integration - The default character/camera controller examples just work, so I could focus on my restricted set of motions and making the cars work without fighting with the hardware. So nice to be able to play with something as exotic as VR with a simple drop-in solution as an initial starting point.
• Gameplay Focused on using the HMD – By massively restricting player motion you have to turn your real head left/right to get across the street. This made the VR feel core to the experience and not just an add-on tech feature.

What Went Wrong

• Speed building a game in VR is not for the weak stomached – VR is a new space and we have a lot to learn in how to do it right. Proper implementations get rid of a lot of the mistakes that can cause motion sickness. But when you are rapidly prototyping you get to experience a lot of bugs while in the headset. Suddenly launching at 100mph in a different direction because you messed up an impact calculation does bad things to your brain.
• Hand Constructed Levels - I brute forced the levels placing them all by hand. This limited the variety as I only had time to copy/paste and tweak. Doing it again I wish I’d built something more procedural, but I was concerned I wouldn’t be able to finish it in time.
• Resetting the player each level – Again in brute forcing the levels I created a new character each level. This is often fine in normal games but it is a bad idea in VR. If you aren’t looking forward each level transition then your center point is getting reset. Making the whole experience more uncomfortable than it needed to be.
• No non-VR mode – I really wanted to make something with the Oculus devkit as I’ve had it sitting in the house and hadn’t really built anything for it. But for a competition like this it would have been smarter to set aside time for a non-VR mode so that more people had the opportunity to play the game. You can play it with a mouse or even controller but the camera still displays left/right images. Next time I’ll make sure anything built is more inclusive.

This was the first Ludum Dare I was able to compete in and really enjoyed the experience. Looking forward to doing more in the future.