Exploring Riveting Gameplay in Virtual Reality

With our custom game files in place, it's time to start making some decisions about gameplay. In Server 17, the player takes on the role of a futuristic hacker trying to crack open a corporate server and plunder its secrets for personal gain. So, how might we present this in VR as an experience? Before we think about that, let's do a bit of research and discovery. The best way to learn which mechanics will challenge and entertain our players is to first look at the unique elements that VR brings to a game. After that, we can take a look at which titles are being played right now and why. Armed with that information, we can then make some decisions about how best to design our own gameplay for Server 17. We have a lot to discover, so let's get started!

In this chapter, we'll cover the following topics:

• What does...

What does VR bring to video games?

VR is the new frontier in games and entertainment. It's able to put the player in the shoes of their favorite heroes, or in a front-row seat for some of their favorite experiences. In most experiences, player movement is translated into near one-to-one movement inside the game—something that's usually impossible in traditional video games. VR also has the power to immerse our player in an alternate world and make them truly feel as if they're there. It's these special abilities that mark VR as the future of gaming.

It's important to understand that the input and controls in VR can go beyond the locomotion methods that we discussed in the last chapter. Each controller for the Vive or Oculus brings at least six different buttons that can be mapped to different functions within a game. Each of these can then be...

Popular gameplay mechanics

In the last few years, many developers have embraced VR technology as their chosen medium. This has lead to a variety of VR games spanning many different genres and ideas. Each game has approached the input and immersion that VR brings in their own way. Some, such as Bethesda and ID Software, chose to use the technology to bring their blockbuster games Fallout 4 and Doom into the VR era (to mixed reviews). Others have found more success building their game specifically for the medium, such as Beat Games' Beat Saber, and Schell Games' I Expect You To Die. For our research into what might work for Server 17, we're going to look at seven different types of gameplay:

• Shooter experiences
• Action/adventure experiences
• Vehicle experiences
• Physics-based experiences
• Puzzle experiences
• Rhythm experiences
• Educational experiences

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Designing the gameplay for Server 17

Now that we've discovered some of the great VR games that our potential users are playing and dug deep into how VR helps to make them unique, let's look at how VR can really make the experience that lets Server 17 shine. This is where we move from the Discovery and Empathy phases of our design process into the Ideate phase. Ideate is where the magic happens and where ideas are brainstormed and transformed into something more. For our user (first-time VR user, sci-fi fan, and nostalgic), we need to take into account that their status as first time users will mean that a basic locomotion scheme is important. We also want to make sure that the gameplay is intuitive and easy to learn. Current VR controllers are capable of several button-based functions, but we'll want to keep our control scheme simple to lower the learning curve...

Summary

Wow! What a ride. We began this chapter with some interesting discussions about gameplay and ended it with creating a whole game prototype from scratch! In this chapter, we explored the many different types of gameplay that successfully implement the mechanics that VR is uniquely capable of. Using that knowledge, we designed our game elements to take advantage of the near one-to-one translation of player movement into the game and the ability to have the player interact with the world from a true first-person perspective. Through the rest of this chapter, we built all of our systems from scratch from hand interactions to VR buttons, and even a puzzle box for the player to solve within a time limit.

In the next chapter, we're going to expand our gameplay by discussing the user experience we've created so far and how we can improve that experience through the...