R34 Airship Project - Week 9 - Player Enjoyment

There were some things when working on this project that made the VR experience unenjoyable, some things left the plaer feel disorientated, while others simply felt bad while using the headset, This week I focused primarily on these things, so that when this game is used, it is as enjoyable as possible.

Orientation

The first thing is actually something that I learned a few weeks ago, originally, my scenes only had a plane as the ground, and whatever I was testing at the time, the problem with this was that it was easy to be disoriented, when looking around everything looked the same this made the experience feel disorienting and slightly unresponsive.

There was a simple fix to this however, having something in the scene that is easily scene gives the player a better sense of their orientation. In my example above I have used red objects that stand out, and allow you to clearly see that you are looking around, this can be done with anything though, if the scene is a big field, the game could use people standing waiting to help the airship land, it could be done with fences, clouds in the sky or houses. these simple changes chould make the user experience much better.

Transitions

Previously, when switching between the scenes, it would instantly change between them, I found that this happened so suddenly, it could cause confusion and generally felt really bad when it happened. Because of this I knew I needed a transition when switching between scenes.

I decided to have the screen fade to black when the player interacts with the UI, and then when the new scene opens it will fade in from black. To do this I attatched UI to the camera. Then instead of just switching scene, interacting with a button will trigger an animation on the UI that makes it fade. I think that this greatly improved the user experience when switching scenes.