I have tried to get into game development 3 times. Every time I lost motivation after the first few steps. I don’t enjoy following tutorials. I don’t learn anything about what I’m doing and end up just mindlessly following the steps. I import assets, configure settings, and adjust values until my screen looks like the instructor’s. I’m more of a tinkerer. I like to dive into the tools and find out what’s happening to get it working. I use Magento at my job. It is a massive pile of PHP spaghetti code. Here’s the usual process of debugging. If something on the front end is broken, I check the template to find the child block, then check the child layout to find it’s block, then check the block for the function. If I can’t find that function then I check the block’s extended class for the function, then follow the rabbit hole up the chain of inheritance through core classes, checking for any third-party rewrites along the way, until I finally find the line that I’ve been looking for. Some may find that exhausting, I find it kind of exciting.
When I opened the Sample Project of Steam VR, I saw all the possibilities. I created a fresh scene, added some VR prefabs and pressed play. I put on my headset and started teleporting around. I didn’t set up the camera correctly so my player moved around while my camera was fixed. But then I saw what I was dreaming up in my head the night before.
Finding my ghost
I love the Portal series. Portal 2 is one of my top 5 favorite games of all time. Puzzle games are rarely replayable but every few years I reinstall it and do a playthrough. Playing a game like Portal in VR sounds like the most nauseating gaming experience. It took me a few days to get used to sliding around with a joystick without getting motion sick, so I can’t imagine how flying around with a portal gun will make me feel. But I feel like physics-based puzzle games would be great in VR. They can be slow paced and require the player to just look around at their surroundings. While moving in VR is hard to accomplish, teleporting is a widely implemented form of movement that doesn’t make players feel as nauseous. So I thought of a game where teleporting is a core gameplay mechanic. But what if instead of teleporting the player between points in 3D space, you could also “swap” between two places?
I recently introduced one of my friends to Portal 2 and played through the co-op campaign with them. Some puzzles use 2 players by simply requiring 4 Portals to get to the solution. I preferred puzzles where each player had a different role to perform. An example would be where one player would enter a maze that requires the other player to hit various buttons to move walls in order for the first player to make it through. These kinds of levels are a major inspiration of what I have in mind for my game.
This is the first time I’ve really been excited to bring one of my ideas to life. I don’t believe there is any other VR title with this concept yet, but I haven’t actually researched to see. I know that there is an Escape Room genre, but from what I’ve seen it’s mostly exploration based. Regardless, I plan on moving ahead with this project. See you soon!