VR Locomotion in our upcoming game!

As I've mentioned previously, locomotion in VR is always a challenge.  For games with a smaller game area, you might not need any form of movement;  Games with larger worlds, however, have to either use teleportation or artificial locomotion (when the player's head camera is essentially moved.  Similar to how FPS cameras work, just in VR).  Teleportation can sometimes break immersion, and artificial locomotion (AL) can cause motion sickness, so what do we do?

Well, after much trial and error with different types of movement systems, we've decided on "Walk in place" locomotion.  While this might sound ridiculous (and the implementation in many games have been quite silly *ahem* LA Noire VR *ahem*), but with some tweaking, it can prove to be really cool.  It's highly sensitive, so you don't need to swing your arms wildly to go anywhere, you can sorta just sway in place to move.  Because your body is actually moving in the real world, there is less vestibular disconnect when the camera is moving. (Which causes motion sickness.) As someone who is usually extremely sensitive to VR motion sickness, I must say that it works really well.

​The other issue is jumping: I've noticed that very few VR games have a jumping mechanic.  Doom VFR has a really good jumping implementation, where if you move your hands up by your head quickly, you'll jump.  This works well and feels great to do, but its easy to confuse normal movements for jumping movements, and that gets annoying fast.  What I've done with this game is if you hold the grip buttons on both controllers at once, then essentially pull yourself into the air, you'll jump.  Almost as if you are propelling yourself from an invisible slingshot.  The amount you jump is directly proportional to the amount you pull yourself, so it's easy to get the hang of and is very accurate when jumping from building to building (*spoilers!*).

In terms of objects, unlike in Oh Captain VR, where objects just become a child of the controllers, allowing them to clip through other objects, the objects in this game track with the controller movement, meaning that they move with physics and collide with each other and other objects in the scene.  This means you can duck behind cover, holding a gun against walls/corners/counters and shoot blindly at enemies--it's a ton of fun.

I'm super excited to share more info with everyone as the development progresses!

Thanks for reading,
​- Judah