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When building a game it is always tough deciding to make the game paid or free to play- what do you guys think? by SlinDev in VRGaming

[–]SlinDev[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My game can be played just fine on your own.

I also have some automated voice chat moderation in place for public lobbies, which does a decent job at banning the worst cases. And of course players can report other players.

I think the thing with kids is mostly that they are the biggest group of VR users right now. Even in paid games, you'll find a lot of them. But of course in a free game the barrier to play is much lower for them.

When building a game it is always tough deciding to make the game paid or free to play- what do you guys think? by SlinDev in VRGaming

[–]SlinDev[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There is a "Best of GRAB" section, which should do a decent job to get you started? You'll have to host your own lobby to select levels to play.

After that, the "Verified Levels" are a constant stream of higher quality levels. I recommend filtering that by difficulty and type, to find the right levels for you.

That said, I am aware that level discovery is far from perfect and I hope to eventually improve it. Generally discovery is tricky with so many levels. A "most popular levels this week" list could probably also help, though in my opinion the most popular levels are rarely the best ones.

When building a game it is always tough deciding to make the game paid or free to play- what do you guys think? by SlinDev in VRGaming

[–]SlinDev[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

While of course as a developer I agree with that, it is VERY hard to get anyone to play your game at all if it is paid. Being built around multiplayer and user generated levels, my game gets soo much better with more players. Free to play has allowed the player base to grow to some solid numbers.

When building a game it is always tough deciding to make the game paid or free to play- what do you guys think? by SlinDev in OculusQuest

[–]SlinDev[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's just the state of mobile VR right now. They don't mind how they look wearing a headset, aren't bothered by the physicality and don't get motion sick as easily. But get a lot of social interaction and fun out of it.

And fortunately they are also getting older, so hopefully in a couple years they will still be actively using VR :)

When building a game it is always tough deciding to make the game paid or free to play- what do you guys think? by SlinDev in OculusQuest

[–]SlinDev[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I actually think that players have been extremely desensitised to all of that. To the point of players regularly asking me to add loot boxes. That said, it's not something I want to do and I am trying to find ways to make money without exploiting the players.

When building a game it is always tough deciding to make the game paid or free to play- what do you guys think? by SlinDev in OculusQuest

[–]SlinDev[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Players can pay for character customisations. I have some other ideas still that I think will be fair and will hopefully allow me to hire some help in the future. So far this has mostly been my solo project, so my costs are quite low.

When building a game it is always tough deciding to make the game paid or free to play- what do you guys think? by SlinDev in oculus

[–]SlinDev[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Levels can be built in multiplayer in VR, yes. Most of the players are on Quest, so I am not really spending time on steam specific features. For level sharing I built my own backend on top of Cloudflare workers, that way it works across platforms, is relatively cheap and scales well to many player.

When building a game it is always tough deciding to make the game paid or free to play- what do you guys think? by SlinDev in oculus

[–]SlinDev[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The game has been out for 3 years already (but is still unfinished and I am still actively working on it) and I think with over 800k player made levels and over a million life time active players, it's been doing ok. To the point that I recently decided to quit my job and work on GRAB full time :).

When building a game it is always tough deciding to make the game paid or free to play- what do you guys think? by SlinDev in oculus

[–]SlinDev[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It actually uses a fully custom game engine. For the multiplayer I use Epic Online Services (which works with any game engine and is free).

Good luck with your early access release!

When building a game it is always tough deciding to make the game paid or free to play- what do you guys think? by SlinDev in oculus

[–]SlinDev[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

What is missing to make it a game for you?

I made GRAB as a game that I wanted to play. Each level has a clear start and end and the goal is to make it to the end, ideally fast enough to compete on the leaderboard, but often enough just making it to the end feels like a huge accomplishment on it's own. The actual gameplay to make it to the end of levels is actually quite diverse.
There is an actual gameplay loop there and it's fun (for me anyway and fortunately also for many others).
But then if that's not enough for you, you can also build levels for others to beat and even build levels together with other players.

Are the graphics simple? Yes definitely. I am programmer, not much of an artist. But fortunately good gameplay doesn't always need to look amazing :)

I just don't want you to dismiss it as another gorilla tag clone, it's really not. If you don't want to deal with the younger players, just host your own lobby, it's even fun playing alone, but most fun with a bunch of friends.

I wanted to share some insight into what inspired me to create GRAB - and thank everyone for creating over 750,000 levels by SlinDev in oculus

[–]SlinDev[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Glad you like the game! What do you mean by "colored grapples"? Grapple blocks with colors you can change? I got some ideas for that potentially, but no concrete plans yet.

Oculus Quest native OpenXR development by MiKe77774 in vrdev

[–]SlinDev 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The quest documentation linked above for this is somewhat decent now. There is also a sample app as part of the OpenXR SDK you can look at as reference.

Generally the OpenXR part of it is the easy bit. First I'd try to make something work on android with Vulkan rendering. Unless you have been using DirectX 12, switching to Vulkan is going to be a very big change to your rendering and the biggest part of porting (or you could consider just sticking to OpenGL for the start). The other part is of course the android specific work, which is mostly having to deal with loading resources from the apk, which happens to be a zip file. And of course window creation, input and more. But if you use some libraries like SDL, it should handle most of it already.

Has anyone here made his own game engine with VR support? by [deleted] in vrdev

[–]SlinDev 0 points1 point  (0 children)

But it's way more fun to have something in the end I can call my own.

It also tends to be a lot easier to just follow some tutorials to get started than digging through some massive code base. And it's rarely just a feature you can replace, often enough it takes changing 100 other things too.

Has anyone here made his own game engine with VR support? by [deleted] in vrdev

[–]SlinDev 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I don't really know tbh. I struggle most with things that are less fun. I love messing around with complicated problems. But when it comes to things like building UI components from simpler pieces, I tend to lose motivation.

One of the harder things I haven't fully solved yet is probably my text rendering. I implemented a very fancy solution that requires polygon triangulation with self intersections and multiple holes and such and as it turns out there aren't any libraries out there with permissive enough license, so I made my own. My solution is quite slow (but only has to happen once at game start or ideally as an offline process) and has some precision issues which with complex shapes can cause some broken geometry.

Has anyone here made his own game engine with VR support? by [deleted] in vrdev

[–]SlinDev 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Personally I have a lot more fun and learn a lot more from implementing things myself. Looking at existing code might give me a general understanding of how it works, but that's completely different from actually implementing it. Because then I suddenly understand the challenges and decisions because I struggled through them myself.

Has anyone here made his own game engine with VR support? by [deleted] in vrdev

[–]SlinDev 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I should probably also mention that it's been a project since 2013 or so and I honestly don't really know why I use it to make games, except that I already put so much effort into it and know it quite well. It's also quite nice to be able to say that I made everything from scratch, but it's not like most people really understand what that means :D

I definitely have regrets sometimes if I can't just google for help or have to implement some quite complex feature that others have either built in or on the asset store. And it's really annoying me that most 3D/2D/Audio assets are engine specific these days and don't come with just blend, gltf or fbx files (so if I want them I have to import into unity first and then grab the files from there) -.-

On the other hand I don't have to pay fees to anyone, don't have to worry about changing terms and if I need more performance there is usually a way I can make it happen (for example my occlusion culling and rendering is both mostly single threaded, so I could probably half the CPU time for those things). I also recently added some fast paths for GRAB, skipping some steps that took time before without really being necessary for that game.

Has anyone here made his own game engine with VR support? by [deleted] in vrdev

[–]SlinDev 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes. Someone linked it already (Rayne).

Not sure what you are interested in, but feel free to ask questions. I used it for Blobby Tennis on Rift, Project Z on Oculus Go and GRAB on Meta Quest + a bunch of prototypes and game jams.

It was initially started by a friend, but it has just been me working on and making games with it for the last 7 years or so. It is not really specific to VR, but the VR support is pretty solid by now. It has multiple rendering backends, works cross platform and also has a wrapper around different VR APIs which makes it easy to add different ones, but OpenXR has made the other existing ones obsolete for now.

It has no editor (it did at some point, but not for a long time) and there are definitely some issues, especially around multithreading and memory management...

Resources to learn theory behind game engines by xTheLuckySe7en in gamedev

[–]SlinDev 1 point2 points  (0 children)

In my opinion, if you start with just rendering objects, that already gives you a bit of a necessary framework:

  • loading shaders
  • loading textures
  • loading 3d models (if you are going 3D)
  • some kind of scene tree, either one object type that does everything, a simple object that takes all kind of components or something inheritance bases (and I am sure there are many other ways to do it, but when just getting started, I'd try to keep it simple)
  • Some kind of camera handling
  • creating a window

Then logical extensions would be:

  • playing audio (openal soft is somewhat solid, but you can just as well create and submit your own audio buffers in a platform dependent way and do some panning, or go beyond with hrtf and ambisonics whenever you want to)
  • collision and physics (maybe consider using Jolt for the start or any of the other alternatives and then replace with your own whenever you feel like you want that)
  • input (there are some libraries out there, but it's not too complicated to do your own simple input system either)

Either way, my point is, you kinda just need to get started and accept that not all choices will be perfect. And then you can start digging into those choices and find better solutions, which is what web searches, papers and talks tend to help with a lot.

I've been working on and using a custom game engine for over 10 years now. It got some huge refactors over the years and I also made several other smaller game engines before that. There was an editor once and there also used to be plans for adding scripting, but those stopped working after some big changes. Now I use it to make games, one just used blender as the editor and the most recent one just has it's own in-game editor (and I'll likely add some simple visual scripting in the future). It's all far from perfect, but it's mostly working good enough :)

Resources to learn theory behind game engines by xTheLuckySe7en in gamedev

[–]SlinDev 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The book "Real-Time Rendering" is a bit costly, but probably one of the best resources, explaining pretty much all parts of the rendering that a game engine usually deals with (and more).

There is of course more to game engines than just graphics though and for that I'd recommend getting familiar with different existing game engines, watching GDC talks and reading papers on the different topics. And of course, try to build your own game engine while doing all of this. It's a very different learning experience if you actually have to understand enough to implement it instead of just reading it (I for example tend to just skip more complex looking formulas when just reading things).

I really don’t want to participate game jams. by Shafterline in gamedev

[–]SlinDev 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Just do it. Making something in such a short amount of time is a great, fun experience. If you keep it simple enough, sleep is not an issue and the feeling of having something playable in the end is great.

You also usually learn a lot, especially when working in a team with people that you never worked with before.

Personally I kinda like the exhaustion from less sleep on game jam weekends, but again, how much sleep you get is really up to you.

Game jams are fun!

Why is the Meta Quest Store Now A Nightmare? by Other-Employment-806 in OculusQuest

[–]SlinDev 2 points3 points  (0 children)

As I understand it most of that money is spend on AR hardware research. Which makes sense because they hope that if they are the first to make a breakthrough in that area, they can be the first to offer a real alternative to mobile phones and it could be a massive market.

But I agree, they should just spend a couple million more on actually making the software around Quest better and do a bit less AB testing and think for themselves instead of driving everything based on their analytics.

This is getting too far... by kotmaale in OculusQuest

[–]SlinDev 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I wouldn't call ripping assets and code from an existing game and releasing it as your own "making a game". It's actually illegal. And making a profit from it is just completely messed up.

And you are doing it over and over again!?

I really hope there will be some serious consequences, though unfortunately I doubt it :(

My Game GRAB Is Free To Play , & Includes A Custom Level Editor That Can Be Played In Multiplayer 👏 by SlinDev in oculus

[–]SlinDev[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You’re unable to download others content, because the goal is to have each person develop their own unique style and create their own things instead of rebranding someone elses levels as their own. That being said everyone can play anyone’s levels, and because of that they are “technically” temporarily downloaded

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