Overview
The game “Mazegunner VR” was developed over the course of a weekend during the “Semester Game Jam” in the summer of 2018. The topic of this game jam was “Nightmare” as well as alternatively a topicless “VR challenge“, where each team was provided with Google Daydream VR headsets. Our game features asymmetrical multiplayer with one VR player and four PC players connected via network. The VR player tries to eliminate all PC players by means of controllable turrets and traps, while the PC players attempt to exit a maze, playing in first person.
I was responsible for the VR gameplay, which consisted of teleporting around over the maze, controlling turrets and being able to place traps in the maze. While the Google Daydream VR headsets generally worked well, the Unity plugin was still in (early) development and caused many issues. The VR gameplay did work eventually, but many workarounds were necessary and development was certainly difficult. All other teams that participated in the VR challenge had issues and since our VR gameplay worked decently well, I helped most other teams implement theirs as well.
Impressions
Final Words
This game jam was certainly a learning experience, as I had not worked on neither VR nor networked games before. The project ultimately was too ambitious, with the team size of 11 participants being to big to manage properly and the scope of the game being to large for only 42h.
While the game did work and was a somewhat playable prototype, there were many bugs and issues such as e.g. the VR player not being able to shoot PC players. Since this game requires both a network and a Google Daydream VR headset, no build will be provided, the project can, however, be found on GitHub!
