CasualRifting

Inspiration

I wanted to create a game with parkour elements while using the Oculus Rift. Realizing that the amount of time I had was limited to 18 hours by the time I started, I pivoted to use a more controlled environment for the player to interact with. This being a single slope level that is contained within walls, rather than an open world to reduce the amount of testing in the end.

What it does

This game places the user on a ride down a long slope to take down a flying object before reaching the end of the track. The user has to avoid obstacle walls and collect coins using only an Oculus Rift to turn and aim, as well as a single button from a gamepad/keyboard to fire at the flying object.

How I built it

This project was built with Unity-3D, Oculus DK2 API, C#, and using the Oculus Rift DK2 hardware to control steering using both yaw, and roll of your head. All rotational axes of a human user is used to aim the crosshair.

Challenges I ran into

The toughest challenge was calibrating the cross-hair and firing angle. The user's point of view angle in Unity skewed the actual projection of any projectile sent from the user, away from the drawn crosshair on the user's UI.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm most proud of the amount of work I've accomplished in the allotted time given. This includes cross-hair calibration, random level generation, speed/acceleration calibration, asset development, environment creation, user-head tracking, and Virtual Reality UX design to minimize motion sickness, a common side-effect of using virtual reality.

What I learned

UX design is absolute essential to make this game usable, and enjoyable. I spent an enormous amount of time on calibrating the user's camera, level design, and speed/acceleration calibrating to minimize motion sickness.

What's next for CasualRifting

As I will no longer have access to an Oculus Rift, I won't be continuing development on this project. Once I do, I will consider rebuilding the game to be playable on a much larger plane, thus giving the player more mobility. This will also change the current UX that exists, as motion sickness is a big factor on usability.

Project is too large to be hosted on GitHub. Please E-Mail me at richard.p.tran@gmail.com for source code, and assets. If there are a large number of requests, I will upload my entire project to a web host for download, and provide a link here.