Defragment VR - Post-Mortem

Time to go over things that went good and bad in my VR-only entry, "Defragment VR". (There's still time to play, if you have VR!)

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What Went Good

  • My first VR entry! (Not counting LD 28, which had Oculus support that no longer works with current systems.) I had less problems with it than I expected, and was able to fairly seamlessly integrate all the VR elements I needed. I didn't know how to bind the player to a specific area, so it was still possible to walk through walls, but there was no advantage it would give you in the gameplay so I didn't mind. The fact that I got it working in the first place was a huge victory to me.
  • Music, as usual. A mixture of Atari 2600 sounds and a little electric guitar. Vocaloid is still new to me so it very minimally uses it, but I think it was a nice touch; hopefully I'll be able to use it more in later entries.
  • Voice-over tutorial! Usually coming up with a tutorial or instructions screen takes too much time and effort alongside the rest of game development, so I decided to try this to make the process quicker, and I feel like it worked just fine. Also, hooray for robot vocal effects!
  • I'm starting to get much better with Unity's particle effects finally. Being able to make a good particle effect goes a long way in disguising the fact that I'm typically terrible with graphics otherwise.

What Went Bad

  • The gameplay wasn't quite where I wanted it to be. Originally there were 7 different colors of cubes, and you could only tell the colors by picking them up. That felt chaotic and weird, and it became more worth it to stack the cubes without bothering to merge ones of the same color. When I reduced it to 3 and made the colors visible without holding the cubes, the opposite happened, making it only really worthwhile to merge them and not stack them separately. There's a middle ground somewhere, but I missed it.
  • The particle field that ends the game is not very visible, and (as people have pointed out) it's practically at eye level making it even harder to work with. This was because I prioritized the amount of work space you have over the aesthetics of it. If I had set it higher, it would've been an extremely long game without the pressure it was supposed to have, and if it I had set it lower, there would be no room to actually play it. What I probably needed was a different endgame mechanic.
  • I originally wanted dynamic audio, but was too focused on getting everything in VR to work right, so I didn't have time for it. Having the music change depending on what color cubes you were holding seems like it would have been a good idea.
  • There was an ongoing collision issue with the cubes that I couldn't fully solve by the end of it. If you were holding one cube and it was touching another cube when you picked it up, it would consider the cubes to already be touching, and wouldn't trigger the merge effect. This lead to some frustrating moments for players where you can't seem to merge cubes together, or they would try to push through each other and launch instead. I'm pretty sure I know what caused the problem, but just didn't have time to fix it.
  • I really, REALLY wanted to make it possible to play the game without VR, but there just wasn't time to look into it. Besides, I don't think the mechanics would have been possible to do in a FPS setting. Maybe it's best I didn't try.