Week 2: Lots of work to do

Hello there again!

First of all, thank you for all the feedback on our last blog post. It was really motivating!

So what did we do with this motivation, you ask? Mainly, we worked on the movement system. It now works as intended! You can accelerate while going downhill so that you will be thrown in the air when you run over the top of the hill. You can even tilt your body to change the direction, which gives players more control and a natural feeling, just like you would be skiing. It has never been more fun to accelerate!

But your controls are not only limited to the ground, through flapping with your arms like a bird you can now extend your air time and when you lean your body to the side while spreading your arms, you can also change the direction and therefore glide through the blue sky just like a bird.

Experiencing virtual reality without virtual hands feels very strange. That's why we included a hand system with grabbing animations for an even more immersive experience. After some time, we thought that it would be nicer to have some sort of angle wings instead of hands, since the player can glide and flap. That's why we implemented wings instead of hands, that we realized via inverse kinematics. So that the wings are not just some 3D-Object sticked to the controllers, instead they have real joints and just feel good! In the image, you can see that we even added a trailing effect to the wing, that we unfortunately decided to remove in the end.

Additionally, we have also tried out different art styles. The ground textures now really bring you into our desert setting! This is a screenshot of our test world.

We decided to use a rather simplistic design, as it will help to keep the performance, just like the users concentration and is also our favorite style in terms of aesthetic.

Even more desert feeling comes from our new cacti 🌵. But be careful, or soon they'll stop your run!

That's the work we were able to complete this week. What do you think about our design? Please let us know if you have any feedback!