My partner (Connor Bruce) and I got together on Tuesday April 30 to record a video of me playing the virtual reality game. The premise of the game is simple: you start on a platform and must jump to a higher but smaller platform without falling off. If you missed the small platforms, you would fall outside the play area, but would get respawned on the original, larger platform. Connor was able to write the respawn code and it was all working on the unity play screen. An image of the code can be found on Connor’s post (which I will link at the bottom of this post). I even managed to get to the third block when I played before falling off and respawning.
We assumed that the game would work when we opened it on the oculus. This was not the case. What we expected to take at most 30 minutes took us about 4 hours.
Attempt 1: I tried to play the game on the oculus, but I was only able to view the game on the desktop view within the oculus None of the controls would let me operate the player and we could only move around using the keyboard connected to the computer.
All the buttons for VR support were checked of but the game would still pop up on the oculus’ desktop view. After some research, Connor discovered that maybe the game would work if the Oculus Integration Assets were added.
Attempt 2: Once the assets were loaded, Connor realized there was an OVR Controller option which was similar to the FP Controller from Standard Assets. After adding this to the game, we were able to look around and move. However, the respawn didn’t work and most importantly, we couldn’t jump. We couldn’t jump. . . in a jumping game. You can see this is a problem, as shown in the video below.
Attempts 3-6: In a span of 3 hours, we tried researching any possible hint s to why our controls were not working. We looked through reddit forums and oculus dev forums but to no avail. We tried the game 4 more times but still couldn’t get it to work.
Lucas arrived at the iHub around this time and we asked him for help with the game. When we asked him about the respawn script he said “NOOOpe”. We thought all hope was lost, until he told us to plug in an Xbox 360 controller.
Attempt 7: After plugging in the controller and with a little tweaking, we were able to finally jump in our jumping game. Great success. Here is us getting excited that we were able to jump:
We were still attempting to fix the respawn aspect of the game, but were not successful in doing so. We asked for help from someone who knows code in the iHub. He told us the script should’ve worked but was not sure why we weren’t responding. We didn’t know what to do at this point so we attempted to play the game one last time.
Final Attempt: Here it is. Our jumping game in all its glory. Hopefully we can get it in the app store one day.
Additional Info:
I was originally trying to create a portal-type game which would somehow transport the player through the tree and into a separate platform. From here the player would have to escape a rolling ball of death, Indiana Jones style.
However, when Connor told me about his idea, it seemed much simpler. Since he knows way more about this kind of stuff than I do, I realized I was overthinking this and partnered up with Connor.
With regards to our issues, maybe if we designed the game on a PC we probably would’ve been able to run it on oculus. However, my partner and I both had Macs and we weren’t aware that it would be such a big issue crossing over from a Mac to desktop. With regards to the script, maybe the script for respawn is different for an oculus. That could’ve been the problem but the iHub guy said the script was correct so we’re not too sure what the issue was. Luckily, we were able to figure out the jump controls, which is what really matters when playing a jumping game.
Check out my boy Connor’s page: https://connorcorp.wordpress.com/2019/05/01/vr/
John With a Blog 