Hello! Welcome to my first actual blog post. After spending months coding away at work finding nothing really substantial to blog about, I became interested in the VR scene.
I recently did a massive upgrade to my 4-year-old gaming computer. The case and the hard drives are the only components that weren’t replaced. This was mostly to power my 1440P 144hz G-Sync monitor I grabbed on Black Friday for $350.
While the Oculus Rift S initally piqued my interest, I ended up picking the Valve Index as my first VR headset. I admit a thousand bucks is a lot to drop on a piece of tech that I’ve only used for 45 minutes (My friend let me try out his HTC Vive one afternoon), but the Index Controllers and the HMD looked like a big step forward for VR.
So I made my reservation on May 8th, and received my full VR Kit on July 18th.
Hello Worlds!
Since then I’ve been using this thing daily. It is honestly an amazing piece of technology. I’m still being impressed every time I put the HMD on and look around.
I’ve mostly been playing Beat Saber (Rhythm Game), In Death (Rogue-Like Archery Game) and a mix of Gun games (H3VR, Onward, Pavlov, Superhot). I think the major thing holding VR back from mainstream is no longer the hardware, but the software. The Oculus Quest is a $400 standalone HMD that makes it easy to get into VR without having a gaming PC, the PSVR has sold well, and the Valve Index is confortable enough for hours-long gaming sessions.
But where are the games? Oculus has some decent exclusives (Lone Echo, Robo Recall) and Valve says they are making a full-length VR game for 2019 (That’s totally coming out in 2019). But everything else feels like the Wild West. Beat Saber seems to be the only killer app for VR. It was 70% of the reason why I bought a VR set. The rest of the library are either multiplayer-driven (VR Chat, Pavlov, Rec Room), tech demos (H3VR, The Lab), or previously released games (Skyrim VR, Doom VFR).
So if no one is making compelling VR games, why don’t I try to make one? Let’s begin.a