Sawblades

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This game, aptly and uncreatively titled Sawblades, was my first venture in developing for virtual reality. I had used Unity to make games before, but nothing playable in VR. None of my team had any experience coming in either. A lot of this project was spent learning the standards of virtual reality production, including sightlines and control schemes. We learned what made people nauseous, what allowed people to gain physical perspective, how to convey information like score and controls, and ultimately how to immerse someone into an environment of our creation.

The main struggle of this game was trying to incorporate any kind of text. I personally am against using raw text to convey information. There's usually a better way to show the user how to do something rather than just telling them. That being said, in our attempt to limit the number of words on the screen, we made some basic assumptions about our players that were evidently not basic enough. While we as designers thought our concept of picking up a sawblade and throwing it at a tree was intuitive, some of our players couldn't even figure out how to pick up the sawblade, let alone what to throw it at.

To solve this problem, we ended up adding a short tutorial at the beginning of the game. The player has only one tree and one sawblade. In case the controls were still not obvious, we put an animation of a Vive controller acting out the motion of throwing a sawblade so that the player would know what they had to do. After this tutorial, the player would be well equipped for the rest of the game. I really like this solution because it allowed us to solve the problem of communicating information to the player without overwhelming them. We were able to focus their attention and deliver precisely what we wanted them to know.