A few days before launched Vertiginous Golf on Steam Early Access, a package I had eagerly been awaiting arrived on my doormat. It was the Oculus Rift Development Kit, and here I was burning the midnight oil to get the game ready for launch. I had no time to play with it.... okay I may have checked out a few cool demos, but essentially it sat in the corner of my office taunting me. But finally, after a spending a week getting a Steam update sorted, and with over at GDC, I could now plug the Rift into the game and walk, fly, and play around in the Vertiginousphere!
We've been keeping an eye on the Oculus Rift for a while. It's an interesting piece of kit, and we felt Vertiginous Golf would be a great game for VR. In fact, the Vertiginousphere is a Victorian VR world, brought to you by Edwards' levitation remote connection device. That means it's a VR world inside of a VR world. Perfect!
So I read through the SDK guides, checked out the Unity demo project, and then got to work implementing the Rift into the game. It wasn't all smooth sailing to begin with - for those who aren't familiar with the Oculus Rift, there are essentially two monitors, one for each eye. I tried to attach these viewpoints to the existing game cameras, which resulted in a single image being shown, which works great if you close one eye, but otherwise the result is useless. I quickly sorted that out so I could see with both eyes, but rotating my head didn't rotate the camera view. I won't bore you all with the details, but I finally got everything working and was beyond impressed. Walking around the Vertiginous Golf shop was a surreal experience, it was so awesome to really feel a part of the environment that we've created and played with for the past year in a totally immersive way.
Intergrating the Rift into the main game proved much easier after I got the shopfront running smoothly. I was a bit apprehensive about how it would feel to rotate around the ball to aim your shot, not to mention having the camera fly off and follow the ball at high speed. I'm not going to lie, my body did some strange things when using the headset at first. My stomach lurched when looking over the huge drops off the edge of the courses, but after a while I can honestly say it feels pretty amazing to be flying around the Vertiginousphere. I haven't thrown up onto my PC once yet!
The current developer kit does have some caveats. The limited graphic quality of the unit means the visuals don't look anywhere near as crisp as we'd like, but the experience of playing the game in this way takes it to a whole new level. The gameplay feels more natural, I actually find the Influenza Bug easier to use for instance, and once Oculus improve the visual quality with their HD unit, then the sky's the limit.
Now that we're allowed to mention the awesome news that we're PAX East. We've got a new driving range course to test your skills on, and there will be a few chances to win some goodies.
Now if you will excuse me, I'm going back into the Vertigousphere! - Paul