So, with the advent of of my acceptance into the Oculus Launch Pad program and their generosity in providing me with Quest (1) – I’ve been trying to spend as much time seeing how I can port my Rift/ Vive game over to mobile VR.
Lemme tell ya’, it ain’t easy folks.
A common complaint among gamers is ‘how hard is it to make a VR port?’ often echoed by RPG fans who long to play their beloved 200 hour hack-n-slasher standing up, swinging their broadsword while hewing foes left and right… I just had a minor panic attack just thinking about getting that to work in VR.
I have come to the conclusion that I will slap people upside the head with a freshly caught haddock if they even mention porting games – I nearly burst several blood vessels in trying to port my VR game to ANOTHER VR system. It already HAD VR support built in! Just switching from PC build to Android caused me to have to rebuild dozens of systems that I thought should work with zero problems.
Playmaker? Hello? Why do I have to rebuild FSM’s that work in another project? I’m not changing anything! Why won’t my assets work? Why is Unity asking if I’m missing a reference or an assembly – I ADDED IT, NITZ!
All this time, I’ve been doing this because the launch of Quest 2 might just be a huge explosion of the VR market – since its cheap, easy to lug somewhere to show grandma and the folk at SideQuest make it ridiculously easy to sideload apps to the device. Since I’m doing this whole game dev thing to donate part of the proceeds to autism awareness, I gotta get the proceeds – and that means getting my game in front of as many eyeballs as I can muster.
I finally got it uploaded to SideQuest. yesterday. And already there are a dozen problems with it.
And my poor game languishes off to the back of the room, wondering when I’ll get back to it…