PunchDown is a Virtual Reality(VR) 3D parkour platformer. The project is my attempt at designing a movement system that was fun and new in VR. There was and still is much learning to do on this project. I had gotten an oculus for development purposes in December of 2017. Immediately I moved to finding what felt fun and what did not.
I was immediately reminded that fun movement is what drew me to games. I remembered watching Mario jump over long gaps in Super Mario Bros. 3 and Tony Hawk get unthinkable air time in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2. That was action packed and fun, so my first thought was to create that kind of experience, with you in the drivers seat. The original concept for PunchDown was a spell based game where different hand combos come together to enchant your hands. The first and only remaining concept that was thought up for this iteration of the game was a nameless spell that gave you Iron man like flight, propelling you in the opposite direction to where you were pointing. After accounting for scope and agreeing that magical themeing is a little overdone, the punch mechanic was born. Pressing the trigger allows you to punch in any direction and making contact with a wall launches you in the other direction. Recently we have added a trick system
Once we established a core mechanic we wanted the feel and theming to be soft and welcoming. We thought back to the early days of the original Monkey Ball and wanted to put a modern spin on it. To emulate this we started making abstract levels out of rectangles and simple objects. The skybox became a simple gradient and we wanted to bring in hints of reality here and there. One thing that is important about this VR game is that the user at no point should feel like the current experience is real. We found that the more immersive you make the platforming gameplay, the more likely nausea is to occur.
The fist question I get whenever I show people this project is "How do you handle the nausea?". The answer is simple: iterate and test constantly. Accessibility is our top priority. It is important that every user gets a full experience when playing. Currently we hard cap speed to what we feel is suitable. Additionally almost all movement in the game uses physics that are visually intuitive. This takes tons of fine tuning. We found multiple sources showing that change in speed over time is what caused nausea in VR. Because of this, we try to always set your velocity as opposed to accelerating. We also tried to design a core set of mechanics that prevents you from looking down when flying through the air. With that we just need a solid pool of testers that are nausea prone and a few glasses of water(the water helps a lot). We deal with nausea on a case by case basis and improve every day.
