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Fallshift

By shole

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Comments

graebor 2015-12-15 04:36

Hello! Cool to see some vive games popping up in the jam. I've got the hardware to try it so I'll give you my thoughts.

The short of it is, I couldn't play this game for more than a couple of seconds. The space environment looked cool at first (though my fear of heights kicked in straight away) but as soon as I clicked on something and started moving I had to take the headset off immediately due to completely losing my balance and getting motion sick due to hurtling through space.

Sorry if this comes across as harsh, but I think subjecting people to locomotion like this in VR is really really not a good idea. Artificial locomotion in any form just does not feel good in VR, especially while you're standing up. Maybe you have extremely high tolerance for motion sickness, but I'm certain 99.9% of people who play this will get uncomfortable real fast and not be able to continue - this type of jarring movement can even sour newcomers on VR in general which would be super unfortunate.

My advice for you in your future VR projects is to think about comfort first (what immersive things can you do in the VR space without breaking the player's 1:1 agency over their own body/position/orientation?) and then figure out your mechanics from there. This game feels to me like a non-VR game concept haphazardly attached to a VR camera rig, with nauseating results.

Again, sorry for the harshness but I think with new tech like this it's really important for VR devs to be honest and up-front with each other so we can all learn and improve. That's my brain dump, hope it helps you. Cheers!

shole 2015-12-15 04:39

Yes, this is very much an experiment and not something I would ever do for a proper product :)

graebor 2015-12-15 05:12

Good to hear haha - I only just noticed your disclaimer at the bottom of the description after writing that comment, so I guess you already knew! :)

ym 2015-12-15 09:00

This would be an awful lot better if the movement between spheres was more linear and didn't have that horrible slow down as you land. It works counterintuitive to everything ever. As you fall you speed up not slow down!

Anyway, this made me uncomfortable. I've got good 'VR legs' as they say, I have no problem zipping around like Iron Man, but evidently your spongy landings is where I need to draw the line. I played for maybe 3-4 minutes before stopping.

Walking around the spheres didn't phase me, but it was a little bit lost, I only noticed it was really happening because I have my floor bounds on permanently and they ended up splayed away from the initial sphere. If they'd had a texture it would have been far more obvious that they were rotating beneath me.