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Defend your castle! A group of buildings surrounded by thick castle walls.
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The shooting stand, a castlewall with a sign, a bow and arrow and an archery target
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But they look so friendly... (enemies on our game, green funny looking humanoids with clubs)
Inspiration
One of the first games we ever played in Virtual Reality (VR), was the archery game in Valves "The Lab". It was such an amazing introduction to VR, that to this day, its a demo we show to new VR users.
However, even on the newest and most feature rich hardware, it still always feels like playing a VR game, because the haptic feedback of the bow is just not there. This is why we set out to fix that!
What it does
In our game Stylus Strike, you can get a fun archery experience where it is up to you to defend your castle from the evil monsters. To make you feel like you're really there, we built a spring loaded "bow" that uses a Quest controller for tracking the bow, and the MX Ink attached to the front for tracking the arrow. You can grab the "arrow" and draw it just like you would a real bow!
How we built it
We designed and 3D printed all the parts for the bow ourselves and attached them to a metal rod with springs. We added a mount for the quest controller and the MX Ink to mount it to the front. The game itself was built using UnityEngine 6 with the XR Interaction toolkit. The arrows shoot further the more you draw the arrow, simulating real shooting.
Challenges we ran into
The biggest challenge we faced was getting the pen tracking right. At first the pen was too far away from the quest to be accurately tracked. There is also still the issue of speed, since the pen sometimes looses tracking when shooting an arrow too fast.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Since both of us are PhD students, we are very limited on time. We are extremely proud to have made this within a week and are very happy with how it turned out.
What we learned
We learned how to use the MX Ink effectively and improved both our Unity skills, as well as manufacturing and modeling skills. We have also learned how to use Davinci Resolve to edit the submission videos. Please be sure to check out the longer teaser in the Google Drive!
What's next for Stylus Strike
The future for this project is to give it more enemy types, difficulty levels, an endless game mode with a highscore that gets progressively harder and to make a mode that does not utilize the stylus, so that people without the stylus can enjoy it too. We will also release the stl files for 3D printing and instructions on how to build the bow.
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