Katana defense

Inspiration

We originally planned to make an 80's inspired ninja vr trainer for the vive. Lack of vive made us do a 180 towards mobile instead.

What it does

You slash and reflect incoming projectiles with nothing more than your hand.

How I built it

I used unity engine and c# to program the game. A bit of camera shake and particle effects handled the game juice, and Anthony's ms paint skills are beyond belief.
I had fun using scene management to allow for background switching and waitless transitions.

Challenges I ran into

Decompressing the 24s music track at runtime added 10,000ms of compute time to the background scene asynchronous load. This led to a jarring disconnect between scene loads. I fixed this by spending CPU cycles on playing compressed audio, and removed the conversion from mp3 to vorbis. This removed intermediary steps to loading and playing the track from SRAM. This subsequently put the scene loads in almost perfect sync, with virtually no wait for the background and music to appear after the menu UI loads.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I got the game extremely fun out of a really simple mechanic, and still managed to accomplish higher order dynamics-level design structures. This opens the door for a lot of strategies to be viable.