As I said in the video, I found it easier to critique the various details of the implementation than to give meaningful input on the overall concept, so I wanted to take some time "offline" to think properly about it and write up a response since you had asked for my input. This is a bit of a challenging concept.
The actions you're performing in the core gameplay are quite mundane, but I think perhaps that sort of thing can work well when you have something going on over the top of it, if that makes sense. It seems like you've left a lot of room for thematic or narrative elements here with the themes you started from. If you can deliver thematically interesting things to the player over time as they go about their more mundane tasks, maybe in a way that "justifies" the tasks and provides a drive for players to want to continue doing them and progressing. I'm being intentionally vague about how exactly you could do that because of course there's a lot of ways. It could be as simple as delivering a story bit by bit, or it could involve events that affect gameplay, or it could take the form of more formal mechanics always present in the game.
I think the concept of being able to deliver thematic elements over time is stronger than the idea of a constant race against the clock, so perhaps it would work better to tone down the time pressure considerably, to the point of it being less of a challenge to beat the clock and more of a "regular obligation." You might even do some subtle things like make the feds forcibly take the money from you if you have it but didn't get to the point of paying yet when you run out of time, or let the player go into debt once or twice on their rent before being taken away, just to put some padding around the point of running out of time so it's less of an instant lose situation.
It does leave open the question of what to do with the multiplayer.
As I mentioned in the video, I really want to see the fact that you move between the VR and real worlds have some gameplay significance. That's an interesting puzzle to consider. I think you would need to have some kind of connection between the two, such that things in the real world could somehow affect things in the VR world and vice versa. Maybe if you go too long without eating IRL the fatigue would start to affect your ability to function in VR. Maybe if something breaks down in your IRL apartment you have to do something specific in VR in order to get the resources you need to fix that. Things like that.
Putting these two things together, the idea of getting "interrupted" out of VR by an emergent event IRL that you have to deal with is really cool. In the current demo, hearing the knocking on the door while in VR subtly hints at that kind of thing. Imagine suddenly something scary starts happening right outside your window. The amount of tension you can create just with audio, suddenly yanking you out of the colorful world you were absorbed with and forcing you to reconnect with the gray, oppressive reality you were doing your best to escape from, that can straight up spike your adrenaline. On an emotional level there's great potential there.
By the way, I'm not trying to encourage you towards scope explosion. This seems like something that would easily go in that direction if you weren't very careful. But what I shared here is what makes sense to me for this concept.
Fun idea. Here are a few things that need to be fixed:
* The shop keeper says "I can trade my good here" on inspect instead of "goods" * Need a prompt for hopping out of VR with Esc instead of insta hopping out * If you hit continue while speaking, it should finish the current dialogue first instead of moving to the next part of dialogue. Once it's at the end of the current dialogue (through hitting continue or naturally) then continue should go to the next text * The required rent goes up too fast to catch up with, should be much more gradual, or even just go up every time you pay it maybe * The detection radius for interaction goes away if you do an action and level up so you have to move away and come back. It should never technically go away, just hide the action box if you're currently doing an action. * The detection radius for interaction can be walked through and missed sometimes like with doors if you try to walk in a shop. Either show the interaction as a shape on the ground, or make sure that you can't accidentally walk through/past it
Comments
As I said in the video, I found it easier to critique the various details of the implementation than to give meaningful input on the overall concept, so I wanted to take some time "offline" to think properly about it and write up a response since you had asked for my input. This is a bit of a challenging concept.
The actions you're performing in the core gameplay are quite mundane, but I think perhaps that sort of thing can work well when you have something going on over the top of it, if that makes sense. It seems like you've left a lot of room for thematic or narrative elements here with the themes you started from. If you can deliver thematically interesting things to the player over time as they go about their more mundane tasks, maybe in a way that "justifies" the tasks and provides a drive for players to want to continue doing them and progressing. I'm being intentionally vague about how exactly you could do that because of course there's a lot of ways. It could be as simple as delivering a story bit by bit, or it could involve events that affect gameplay, or it could take the form of more formal mechanics always present in the game.
I think the concept of being able to deliver thematic elements over time is stronger than the idea of a constant race against the clock, so perhaps it would work better to tone down the time pressure considerably, to the point of it being less of a challenge to beat the clock and more of a "regular obligation." You might even do some subtle things like make the feds forcibly take the money from you if you have it but didn't get to the point of paying yet when you run out of time, or let the player go into debt once or twice on their rent before being taken away, just to put some padding around the point of running out of time so it's less of an instant lose situation.
It does leave open the question of what to do with the multiplayer.
As I mentioned in the video, I really want to see the fact that you move between the VR and real worlds have some gameplay significance. That's an interesting puzzle to consider. I think you would need to have some kind of connection between the two, such that things in the real world could somehow affect things in the VR world and vice versa. Maybe if you go too long without eating IRL the fatigue would start to affect your ability to function in VR. Maybe if something breaks down in your IRL apartment you have to do something specific in VR in order to get the resources you need to fix that. Things like that.
Putting these two things together, the idea of getting "interrupted" out of VR by an emergent event IRL that you have to deal with is really cool. In the current demo, hearing the knocking on the door while in VR subtly hints at that kind of thing. Imagine suddenly something scary starts happening right outside your window. The amount of tension you can create just with audio, suddenly yanking you out of the colorful world you were absorbed with and forcing you to reconnect with the gray, oppressive reality you were doing your best to escape from, that can straight up spike your adrenaline. On an emotional level there's great potential there.
By the way, I'm not trying to encourage you towards scope explosion. This seems like something that would easily go in that direction if you weren't very careful. But what I shared here is what makes sense to me for this concept.
Fun idea. Here are a few things that need to be fixed:
* The shop keeper says "I can trade my good here" on inspect instead of "goods"
* Need a prompt for hopping out of VR with Esc instead of insta hopping out
* If you hit continue while speaking, it should finish the current dialogue first instead of moving to the next part of dialogue. Once it's at the end of the current dialogue (through hitting continue or naturally) then continue should go to the next text
* The required rent goes up too fast to catch up with, should be much more gradual, or even just go up every time you pay it maybe
* The detection radius for interaction goes away if you do an action and level up so you have to move away and come back. It should never technically go away, just hide the action box if you're currently doing an action.
* The detection radius for interaction can be walked through and missed sometimes like with doors if you try to walk in a shop. Either show the interaction as a shape on the ground, or make sure that you can't accidentally walk through/past it
thanks helps a lot :D