Postmortem

Successes:

The main world building was a primary success of our game, VR Meal. We created a cohesive look to all levels and scenes by incorporating 3D models that all had the same polycount and aesthetic. Each team member was assigned a world to build- Heidi built the second world, Percy built the third world, and Emily created the first world. This division of labor was intended to have each member fully responsible for a certain area, to be responsible for fully fleshing out all three levels. The visuals of VR Meal and the division of labor were one of the foremost successes of the game. Because our skills leaned more towards visuals and world-building, we tried to make the game more visually appealing to cover up our lack of skills for coding.

Difficulties:

One main issue that we incurred throughout the creation of VR Meal was Github and issues with building out to the Oculus. Due to this being the team’s first time building VR spaces, the primary issue was getting the settings correct enough to build at all. This difficulty ate a whole week of our time. Another issue that we had throughout the development of the game was due to a small lack in communication into who was on the game at the time. Due to this, there were several setbacks in world building, as work had been deleted and overwritten a few times. We also had difficulty with trying to play test a game after building. Usually, after building our part, play testing would help figure out what we need to fix in our game. But because a few of us didn’t have the VR headset, it was hard to know if we made a mistake in our game build or not. 

There are some coding/technical difficulties where the player controller is kinda buggy that the direction of the walking is the opposite direction,  the speed of walking decreases as the player enter the next level or player wasn't able to move in the level, having a hard time trying to make our mechanics work and etc. The basic mechanics worked( timer trigger, switch scenes, scoring systems) but I wasn't able to connect all of the basic codes together in order for the player to pick up an object then triggers the timer and scoring system ( to true) then check the scoring system along with the timer---once timer is up, check if scored 100%-- player wins, if not, players lost and can't move (stuck). Frame rates and high expansive mesh texture is another challenge that the game lags so much that create motion sickness for the player. I tried to reduce the mesh texture, reduce expansive textures or large files that we can delete to minimize the file size but it still lags really badly.  Building models in blender is another challenge and I didn't recognize that it took so much time to learn but overall it was a fun experience.I was also working on the hand controls and they were really fun to explore, altho at the end we didn't get to include it since it creates a lot of bugs that I wasn't able to fix.

Troubles making the build was because of hand control experiment in the VR head set and it messed up some of the unity setting with oculus.

What’s Next:

Though there were difficulties, there are always points that could be improved. In the future, to possibly further VR Meal, we could develop the world a lot more and tried to make the mechanics function so it is playable. We worked with one package of 3D models, so it could be a good idea to import different foods from different cultures to further create the world. We could also incorporate a larger playing area, so the player has more places to explore. There could be places that can be entered as well, like going into a gingerbread house or bakery. There could also be more ambient lighting as well as animations to add more to the game feel. All in all, it would benefit from a little bit more time and game feel.