By Mario Rodriguez
Cohort 25
When thinking about creating a video game, there are multiple questions that pop to your head almost instantly:
- What engine will we be using?
- What are the main mechanics of the game?
- What kind of art style do we want to achieve? etc.
When creating a VR game, these questions come 2nd. First, you have to answer the following and more:
- (If creating a room scale game) Do we have the space?
- Will we have enough equipment for the team to test the game on?
- If we do, how do we prevent problems like losing tracking?
- What is fun in VR? etc.
These were some of the questions we had to answer when we were creating our first VR game, Mouse Playhouse, even before we thought about what engine or what mechanics we were going to have in the game. I was the producer for Mouse Playhouse, the first VR game created at the SMU Guildhall.
Before we created the game, we tasked our level designers to play as many VR games as possible in order to understand the hardware. We wanted to capture what was fun in VR while maintaining the scope we had for our project. After we solidified our idea, completed several prototypes and moved on to production. However, we had to worry about several aspects that were different from our previous experience of creating traditional video games.
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