Theresa Duringer is a developer on the VR jam game entry called Bazaar, which is a silver game winner in the Oculus mobile VR Jam. She talks about getting into VR development with some of her co-workers and experimenting with different
They noticed that a lot of people tend to look up while playing VR games, but yet there’s usually not a lot of things happening in the sky. They decided to use constellations as part of their puzzle gameplay mechanic.
Another interesting insight that Theresa shared is that it’s difficult for her to judge the merits of the actual gameplay of her VR experience because VR is still so new. With her other console games, it’s a lot easier to know the impact of their game but with VR it can sometimes be difficult to know whether people are responding to experiencing VR technology for the first time or they’re really enjoying the actual game.
When asked about doing future VR development, Theresa said that it in the short-term it really depends on whether or not they win a prize in the jam because there’s not a clear way to make money yet as a VR developer. It can still feel fairly like a high-risk venture for developers to invest time into a VR project when it’s still unproven whether or not it’ll be a viable ecosystem for developers.
For more information on Bazaar, then check out their game jam page here.
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Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
