VR Sea Legs – Update 12

OC5 wrapup:
It was amazing seeing so many of you at OC5! I’d like to especially thank all of you who stopped by our makeshift booth. Watching people play VR SeaLegs and Slime Rancher VR was an incredible learning experience. We had a great time, with good laughs, silliness, and all-around shenanigans (thanks to Nelia for organizing that group)!

Systems Philosophy:
We’re a small team with a wide variety of experience. We knew when we started this project that we didn’t have the resources to do everything. That’s one of the reasons we developed and published the movement system – because we wanted to help small teams like ours get a headstart on their projects. We want more VR creators to focus on their gameplay and design, rather than reinventing the programming wheel.

Creating systems that can be reused over and over is saving us time on VR Sealegs, as well as all our future projects. We have a base to build on and can extend existing systems, rather than constantly rebuilding from scratch. We’ve specifically designed these systems to be generic enough that we can use them for all sort of applications.

 

Specifically, for Sea Legs, we’ve broken down the core systems as follows:

Body Swap System: This system gives us the ability to swap rigs for different movement systems or putting you into entirely different bodies. We used this in Shadows of the Vault, allowing you to transition between wisp and golem form.

VR Grab ‘N Throw: As the name says, this is a system for picking up, grabbing, and throwing. We also use it for holding or repairing items. We used it for our Sea Legs level, Conversion, when repairing the emitters.

Master Event System: Using Unity’s event system, we can create custom reactions for triggers like playing sounds, activating animations, or even swapping materials.

TimeLord: An extension of Unity’s Timeline animation system, this allows us to stop, pause, and move the timeline to whatever section we want.

VR Input System: This is really helpful for making simple UIs and prototypes. It’s a UnityEvent system in VR that supports both ranged activation and touch activation.

VR Crafting System: An extension of the VRGrabNThrow system, this variant allows us to combine objects into something new.

Production Status:
We continued work on Conversion, the Lab, and Seaside town. These are the first levels any user will see, and they’re critical to success. We expect our average player to have little to no VR experience, and potentially little gaming experience. We redesigned the first crafting experience in Conversion to ensure first-time VR players would know exactly what to do.

The portals now show the worlds (via cube maps).

 

The Inventor model is ready!

 

Thank you everyone for being part of this program! I look forward to seeing all your amazing projects!