Post by BBIT-Solutions in Space Panic! VR jam comments

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Wow, just wow! Immediately gave me some Red Matter vibes. I tried v2, but even if you should maybe fixed or added some minor things, it's absolutely incredible what you created in one week. Definitely one of my favorites, wished i could give you more than 5 stars.

It has great and easy understandable controls. At the beginning i wished you also would support continous and not just snap turning, but actually got used to it after little time.

The graphics, the whole style and these little details are stunning (e.g. this frosted glass effect or that the narrator's gaze is following you)

It's a great story and all the puzzles fit very well in it. I like that the full "tutorial" is also integrated into the story and is even skip- and repeatable. Also the puzzles itself are challenging, but totally solvable (e.g. took a while for the computer code until i noticed "how" to read them (without spoilering too much for others) ).

I think even the gameplay is already very polished. E.g. thought at first time, the oxygen is ways too less. But exactly this gives you some time "pressure" what fits to the whole setting. And actually when "speedrunning" it completely is more than enough^^

One little bug: Once i dropped the computer code to fill up oxygen and couldn't find it anymore, maybe was somewhere in walls or so?

Also some little improvement suggestions:

Maybe would be good to have a restart-button or so.
Would be fun to see myself in the monitor when aiming

Btw: I totally understand the sentence " I'm going to have a lie down now." after the 7 days. Was same for me :-D

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IanLindsey335 days ago

Thanks a lot! Reading feedback like that makes it all worth while - it genuinely means a lot. I got quite attached to this little project after living with it full-on for a week and reading that made my day!

Yes, Red Matter is one of my favourite games on the Quest, can you tell?! I really wanted to do something in that style and I've researched a lot into the tech behind it (even though it was in Unreal and this is Unity)

As for smooth move turning, it wouldn't be too tricky to add as an option, however I did try it as a test and it made me feel quite sick - however, everyone is different so it'll be good to add the option regardless :)

I know what you mean about it seemingly like there's not enough O2 at the start, however (spoiler alert) I cheekily stop the O2 and energy levels from dropping while the hologram is talking, so you should effectively get the same 'game time' either if you listen to the messages or not and you can choose to speed run it if you so wish. It certainly helped while testing the game, that's for sure!

As for version 2, yeah I didn't add too much to it, just more tweaking things and some minor improvements. However, I plan on keeping going with this, so it's great getting all this feedback and I plan on implementing these ideas.

As for the other suggestions, great! No problem adding a restart option. As for seeing yourself in the reflection of the screens, I first thought 'how the hell am I going to do that?!', rendering the player into real-time cube maps would absolutely kill the Quest - but then I had a cunning idea that might just work instead. Which this space.... :)

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BBIT-Solutions335 days ago

Yes, i was actually really surprised as i watched your timelapse in discord, that it was made in Unity. Because of the whole look i would have bet it's Unreal^^

Also thought, if i would make this quality in Unity, then probably could make it maximally run on 30-40fps, and with especially this zero-gravity style this would even cause more motion sickness. The more impressed am i actually now, that i did not "feel" anything. So guess this snap-turning was then also definitely a good decision. But if you need testers for smooth turning sickness, I would be open :-)

For the rendering yourself, i would probably go with multiple camera's. Then you could maybe just assign a User-model/rig on yourself. But put it on a separate layer. With the aiming-gun-camera you could render it and show its output then on a texture, which you could place on the screen (what you probably anyhow do already?).
But with the VR camera/s you could just skip that layer. In this way your actual first-person look won't change (and you can keep just showing the hands, what makes most sense i guess), but you could see it from "outside" also. Of course just a quick approach, not sure how performant it is. And in the end, it is absolutely no "game-changing" feature or so. Just thought during playing, that would be actually also pretty cool.

Yes, i also definitely would encourage you going on with it. In my oppinion this IS already better than some stuff you can buy in the Oculus store. So when you add maybe few more puzzles or levels or so and polish it even a bit more, people will love it.

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