Tuesday, April 4, 2017

20170404 Unexpected first playtest

Tonight we accidentally stumbled into our first playtest! We were testing hand capture, and added a few spheres to allow for small-scale juggling testing. As we were working, a colleague brought a few of his friends in to check out the office, and one of them happened to be a keen juggler.

Before we know it, she's asking to check out juggling in VR. This was really useful to us, as we'd been testing out the juggling/throwing/catching for a few minutes, and were having trouble figuring out why it felt so inaccurate. After 30 seconds or so, she had figured it out - our system to joint the spheres onto the controllers was creating joints not in line with where the hand typically would be holding something. As a result, when players chose to release the sphere, they were releasing it on a trajectory that did not match their desired angle, resulting in the sphere most often moving out forwards from the player.

This was great, however the real excitement came from her playing with the primary mechanic of the prototype. An initial question I had been exploring with this mechanic was related to something I'd considered regarding medium-scale player populations in locations such as social areas in MMOs - When server data is not available, could it be possible to feed players their own actions on a time delay and have them believe they are watching someone else?

The answer is yes.

No comments:

Post a Comment