This experiment was not as successful as we had hoped, but we feel it did prove that, given enough development time, a tower defence or RTS game in VR could be viable. The core premise that inspired this project was the idea of watching an RTS-style skirmish play out in a more tangible environment than the highly-detached God’s-eye view usually found in this genre. Between the development time for this class and having additional obligations outside of this class, we weren’t able to spend as much time on this project as we would have liked, causing it to be very bare-bones: only two tower types, one enemy type, and very little polish. Even so, the basic mechanics of grabbing a tower off a “shelf” in the VR play-space, and placing it on a table also in the play-space, was confirmed as a viable way of placing units in this type of game.
One of the larger concerns we had in this project was lack of room to maneuver. Because the table showing the active ‘battlefield’ took up a rather large portion of the play-space, it was difficult to move around without walking through the table. Although this didn’t cause any problems in the game mechanics or any simulation sickness, it was certainly immersion-breaking, which is never good in a video game (or in many other types of entertainment media, for that matter). And, in addition to the player having only so much room to move about, the designers have only so much room in which they can craft the UI. While two tower types fit nicely into the play area, letting the player see and choose from an entire army’s worth of units, as would be expected from a full-scale RTS, is a much different story.
Accordingly, the biggest thing we took away from this project was a better appreciation of the constraints brought on by confining gameplay to a small area. Especially in our example of a strategy game, a single room was simply not enough space to keep track of the battlefield, what units you be spawned, and anything else that needs to be communicated to the player. Looking back, two questions come to mind that could have been very helpful for this particular project: “What do we need to show the player? And how much space do we have to show it?”
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RIT VR Design 