Devlog #2 – Strating the developement

06/04/2025

This week was focused on 2 things, defining more precisely the scope of the project and starting the development of the demo.

Scope and features

The idea of the game is to create a VR horror game where the player start playing old games in a retro style but suddenly the game becomes a horror game. The player will have to finish the level to escape form the "chaser". For this demo, we will start by creating a simple level inspiered by one of the most famous retro game: Super Mario Bros. As we don't have the copyright of the game, we will create our own level and gameplay elements to remind the player of the original game while avoiding any copyright issues.

The fact that we will inspire the game form retro (mostly 2D) games will will also try to adapt the gameplay to the work in VR. For example, in VR, jumping is not as easy as in 2D games, it will probably create a lot of motion sickness and break the immersion. So we will try to avoid jumping as much as possible (which will be a bit challenging since the game is inspired by a platformer).

Development

To start the development and adapt the mechanics to VR, I started by implementing the mechanics to break blocks and collect coins. In mario, the player can break blocks by jumping and hitting them with the head. In VR, this is not possible, so I decided to implement a mechanic where the player can break blocks by hitting them with the hand with an haptic feedback. The same can be applied to some enmies. For now we have a simple block that can be broken by hitting it with the hand. When we break a block, it disappears with a simple temporary particle effect.

Demonstration of the block breaking mechanic inside the unity VR emulator

Issues

We still have a few issues to solve:

• We found solutions to replace some mechanics that relies on jumping, but we still have to find a solution for the "jumping" mechanic. We will probably use teleportation to move the player in the level but this will be less interesting than jumping as the difficulty will be reduced. We will probably have to find a way to make the player jump in a way that is not too nauseating.
• I don't have access to a VR headset yet, so I will have to test the game on a simulator. This is not ideal as the simulator is far from creating the VR experience (I will probably have my headset in a few days).
• The question is will the game be fun to play in VR? I think that the platformer mechanics will be hard to adapt to VR, but I think that the horror aspect will be more interesting in VR.