When you first pick up a motion controller, there are two things everyone wants to do with it – use it as a sword or lightsabre, or use it as a gun. Developer Stress Level Zero discuss the challenges that surround creating guns for virtual reality that work and feel fun to the player.
Stress Level Zero are the developers behind the first-person shooter Hover Junkers, a multiplayer arena battler for the HTC Vive. In a video, one of the development team, Brandon, speaks of how the team wasn’t really interested in developing for VR until the tracked motion controllers were available as an option.
Brandon said, “It seemed like the best thing to do was to start small, and that the easiest thing to do would be to start with a handgun.” He also speaks of debates in the development community about if introducing force-feedback recoil would interfere with the tracking on the controller.
“We decided to relegate two-handed guns to the final expansion of Hover Junkers to give ourselves more time to get it right. That let us focus on getting handguns right.” Brandon says. Going on to speak about the progress that other developers made subsequently on creating two-handed guns gave the team a basis to start from, and improve upon.
“The sniper rifle seemed to be the hardest gun to get right, because you have the scope you have to aim down, so we shifted our team for that on to Duck Season and instead focussed on the shotgun.” Brandon said, then comparing the various forms of PC motion controllers and how useful they are for the process of creating VR guns, including the as-yet unreleased Knuckles Vive controllers.
You can watch the full video below.
VRFocus will continue to report on new developments in VR hardware and software.