Greetings fledgelings! Welcome to the first ever Bird Quest VR developer update. I’ve decided to start writing these in an attempt to create some accountability for myself, and to keep the game’s development going smoothly and coherently.
Well, as coherently as possible when one’s main gameplay mechanic is throwing flaming chickens into the vast expanse of outer space.
Watch out for Space Sharks. They’re like regular sharks, but in space.
Why is this happening?
So, the first thing to address is what exactly I’m trying to do here. The current version of Bird Quest VR (BQVR) is just a tutorial level that I put together over the course of a month as a capstone project for my Nanodegree in Virtual Reality Development.
Working on it made me realize that this is what I want to do. I want to make games, VR or otherwise. Most of all, I want to tell stories. I want to create experiences. So I’ve decided to continue to work on BQVR for a little bit and then launch it on Steam. I already have voice lines for a second level recorded, and it would be a shame to let those wonderful performances go to waste.
Your character may survive, but will your dignity?
No more VR for the sake of VR
I have a lot of opinions about how VR is being used these days. In short, I think there is a strange obligation to the medium that is only doing it a disservice. I’ve caught myself thinking up new ideas for games and immediately wondering about how to make them work in VR. This is a dangerous mentality. Not every game needs to be VR. The medium should serve the experience, and not the other way around.
So why does Bird Quest VR need to be in VR? Well for one, it’s in the name, but that’s a stupid reason. Mostly, I want to embrace the silliness of the whole thing. People in VR games look ridiculous, so how can we play that up? Easy: turn the player into a chicken, make them eat out of unreasonably low bowls by bending over. Make them crawl around on the ground. “This is art!”, I proclaim loudly from the corner of a Starbucks.
There is a resounding lack of VR games that allow you to be a caged chicken
The game will be free (as in beer)
I’ve been using Unity engine for BQVR, as it serves my purposes nicely. I enjoy coding in C#, and really appreciate the engine’s extensive documentation and community. The Unity Asset Store, along with Google Poly are chock-full of free assets for me to use.
On that note, I will be releasing this game for free. I would feel terrible charging money for something that I made using free assets. I also plan on eventually making the project open source. In this day and age, everyone should have access to the inner workings of my Chicken AI.
What the future holds
I won’t get too into how each component of BQVR works right now, as I want to keep these posts short, but future updates can touch on different components of the game. If anyone is interested in any particular component, please let me know, and I can write a post about it. For now, I plan on doing one about the Chicken AI, one about the Level and Sound Managers, and maybe something about the process behind writing and recording all the voice lines.
If you’ve made it this far, thank you for coming along on this strange journey!
Until next time,
Michael aka “The Goose”