Blog 2

The start of this project was the first time that I spent a continued amount of time using VR. As such, I learned a lot about how VR works and how games try and get around certain limitations. I learned about how VR systems determine where you are, as well as make sure that you don't run into anything. I also learned about how different VR games solved the problem of moving around. In the real world there isn't infinite space to walk around in, so many games come up with their own solutions. Some games just have a button that moves you forward in whatever direction you're facing, some use a joystick to be able to move in all directions, and some simply use teleportation to avoid the problem altogether. For our game, we decided it would be best to use the joysticks on the controllers, one for moving around, and one for rotating the camera. We felt that this was the most natural way to do it without disorientating the player. Using this we did more work on coming up and creating more ideas for puzzles inside the game. Right now, many of the puzzles are pretty basic, with a few more complicated ones. I worked on coming up with more ideas for puzzles and will try and see which ones end up becoming usable in the coming days, assuming nothing else ends up going wrong. We experienced quite a few errors with multiplayer that I will talk more about in the next blog, and we ended up spending a lot of time trying to get it working. We tried many things including changing networks, talking to tech about possible blocked servers, and changing providers altogether.

It's hard to encapsulate just how immersive VR is, but here is a picture of what it looks like inside. Being able to touch a screen that only existed virtually was very exciting.