Space Combat Simulator #70

Inspiration

We've always wanted to go to space. To experience the weightlessness, to jump up and keep flying up, to view the earth from above. Sadly, that's very hard to do as of right now. We see many kids, space enthusiasts, and even prospective astronauts have the same problem and would want a convenient way to experience what space has to offer. So we come up with the ideas to make a virtual reality experience.

What it does

This game simulates space environment:

Movement

No gravity
No air resistant
Players need to use Astronaut Propulsion Units to move around
Players will remain at the same velocity after acceleration
Advanced Mode: allow the player to adjust the rotation

Combat

Fire projectile will push the player backward
Being hit by projectiles will push the player backward
The enemy detects the player and will engage in combat

Environment

An immersive space settlement to explore
Realistic skybox with the Earth and the Sun

How we built it

This game is made in Unity, it uses the Oculus integration plugin and the BNG framework to handle VR interactions. It's built for Oculus Quest 2 with Oculus Link.

Challenges we ran into & What we learned

oh boy, there were a lot. Just to name a few...

Player Movement: zero gravity may sound easy but is very hard to do when the player is not a single camera, but an entire VR camera rig. We run into all sorts of trouble such as different body parts of the player not following; air drag is bigger than expected; acceleration is not accurate. We solved the problem by making the player a rigid body rather than using teleportation to fake the physics.
Building the Settlement: I initially uses a different set of free 3D assets to build the corridor. However, after I finished it, all the models are having clipping issues where they would disappear if looked at a specific angle. This only happened on the VR rig, not the normal unity camera. We spent about an hour and couldn't figure out why and ended up switching asset packs and building a new corridor.
Gun: The gun in this game is the hardest to get right. Even though we have existing models, the different parts of the gun just don't work well in zero gravity. Sometimes when the player moves too fast it will lag behind, other times it won't event grab correctly. We spent a good few hours messing with different settings on the grabber and the player controller to get it to work.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Flying in zero-G feels good!!! The physics systems works!! We even made original sound effects!!!

What's next for Space Combat Simulator

We see a lot of value in a simulation game like this. We would love to hear feedback from professionals to see if something like this could be useful for actual astronaut training or serve any educational purposes.

If not, we plan to make it a full game with more levels. We also see it could become a cool multiplayer space battle game.