This last week was all VR ideas. I spent a lot of free time in the Vive, and thinking about VR in general. Wednesday night was the monthly VR & HCI meetup, and the standout for me from Matt & Tommy’s excellent presentation was probably just finding out that there are three different open source projects for vive utilities. (None of which were the one I linked to last week.) Matt went through what each one provides, and even had Tommy play around in the demo scene from each. The three projects were Newton VR, Steam VR Unity Toolkit, and ViveGrip.
Anyway, here were the ideas:
5/20 – Thinking about mining-sim games, and in particular the 2D ones where you have to dig downward continuously, finding resources in the passageways you’ve excavated. Imagine a mechanic like that in VR. You hold a mining tool that lets you point it at the ground and excavate, collecting the rock, and then you’d have to teleport into the hole you’ve created, looking at all the walls for gems and coins and things to collect. Maybe your excavation tool has lots of settings, one that lets you blast away whole walls, and also one that lets you carve tiny crevices around interesting looking bits of the surface. You could unearth fossils, and evidence of alien civilizations.
5/21 – A game where every time you teleport, you are transported to a randomly generated world very like the one you are in, but subtly different. Probably this is a procedurally generated world in some way, and all but one or two (different) parameters are persistent from one generation to the next. Maybe you are a scientist and there is a story about why this happens, or you are an explorer searching for a world with some specific properties.
5/22 – A VR space battle game, like a mix of real-time strategy, turn-based strategy, Xortex (the lab space shooter), and a little bit of Subterfuge. You assign a unit to go to a specific place by simply grabbing it and moving it to the new place. (The play field should be the size of your VR space.) The unit would then start moving toward where you let go of it, (which still shows as a translucent version of itself), and you could of course grab either again at any time, to re-position. I thought through a bunch more about this, and have some neat ideas for how building / spawning could work too.
5/23 – A “Put your head in things” game. Putting your head in random models in VR is kinda fun, and I think it would be cool if there was a game completely written around the premise. Essentially, everything takes place in a room, and if you put your head outside the walls of the room, you see outer space, (or something weirder), so you know you aren’t supposed to be out there. Inside the room, there are different boxes. Each box has another room inside it, and putting your head in there for a sufficient period of time (a few seconds) would transport you there. Basically, at any given time, whenever you put your head through a model, you should see something else. If you put your head back through the outer wall of any room, you would see the original room around it, and if you wait, again, you’ll be teleported back to that. You should be able to dig deeper into each experience at least 3 or 4 levels.
5/24 – Marble-rolling sandbox game in VR. You know those block sets with grooves cut into them for rolling marbles? Imagine having infinite blocks! And maybe also those wires you can position. And maybe you have to hit checkpoints with a limited number of marbles or pieces or something.
5/25 – More thinking about room-scale puzzle prison. Also imagined a similar but totally different game, but with the same sort of “block walls” where you grab the blocks and put them into empty spaces. Nothing falls, but every time you place one, another one is generated in your hand. So maybe you always have two to choose between, since you have two hands. I also spent some time thinking about cord tangling, and how it’s going to be a pain in Puzzle Prison. I should maybe keep track of how many times the player has rotated in either direction and incentivize rotation back to zero in some way, possibly with power ups or possibly with a simple visual inductor.
5/26 – A sort-of VR DDR, where there are colors on the floor. The color your headset is over is the selected color (it should be indicated at all times in some obvious way) and the only color you can currently “break”. Random colored indicators are constantly moving toward you (maybe a bit like AudioShield) but you have to be on the right color to match them. Maybe they are also different shapes, and you also have to match the shape by rotating or swiping your controller in some way.