#cardboardproject

On 23rd of April I was on DG Play, a little games festival to showcase a preview version of my vr game. Here is a little summary of what happened.

For me it was the first showcase possibility outside of a university context. So I was very eager how everything would turn out. I got there a lot feedback from a lot of different people. Even trough this event was more an geek and e-sport festival, a huge range of different people showed up. A mother who played my game with her son just said “It's strange” while her boy enjoyed it. Another child said he felt like a Jedi (Star Wars) and some people also come back for a second run to get all the points. That was really heart-warming especially that nerdy Jedi comment. I had some discussions about mobile VR and motion sickness in general and some people were also surprised how good mobile vr can work out. Of course there were also a lot of people who didn't try any vr game at all and they liked my game, too. But that's no surprise because people who try vr the first time mostly instantly like whatever they see in vr. But overall the feedback was very good and some people gave me useful hints on what to improve.

What I learned on that day was that QR codes are not a good way to lure people somewhere. In preparation for this event I created a newsletter system to keep interested people updated about the game. For this I printed a QR code with some additional information on a paper and put it next to my game setup. It was hard in general to convince people to register or keep in touch - and those who wanted, didn't know how to use a vr code. I also put a shortened url next to the qr code as alternative solution – but also that didn't really work out. Instead almost everyone asked for a Facebook page – but I didn't had that back then.

Hello Everyone.

I guess it's finally time to write something about the game that I'm working on for round about a month now. I already finished some prototypes, but first I want to lose some words on the concept itself and how it started.

Since I had to postpone my last project, I thought about what my next “big” project could be. So I did some evaluation on some of my ideas and looked for the opportunities I had. Slowly two things came together: First, I always wanted to do some mobile vr game for cardboard headsets, and second I had a prototype for some kind of maze-exploration game lying around. The concept of this game would fit perfectly for a virtual reality game and and so these “ideas” were merging at some point. So now I make a virtual reality maze-exploration game for mobile phones.

The scenario of the game will be a little bit like in the “Myst” games: The player wakes up in a surreal world and has to solve several puzzles to find her way through. The interactions in the game will only happen through the focal point of the player. This has two reasons: First I think it's an very interesting mechanic game design wise, and second I want to make the game accessible to a lot of people. I don't want to offer the game only to people who own a specific mobile headset with buttons (like the Gear VR). I want that also people with a cheap cardboard can play it.

So approximately for the next five months I will work on this game and will write about the development process here as well as on twitter. Last but not least: Here a little picture of the prototype I made back then in 2014. The game I make now will be much different, but this picture might give you a small glimpse of what I’m aiming for. Cheers.