I really don't like smooth turn. Having locomotion options I feel is a must. That said the hands in this one felt pretty good. The buttons and all the other interactions were kind of interesting but also didn't really work all that well. There were several instances where the buttons would get stuck on other things which like I said was rather interesting but it did make the game harder to play. I feel like the overall concept was interesting but at the end of the day it did just kind of feel like a chore simulator. At first I couldn't get the boxes to grab the items, they kept falling through the box and I got really confused. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to close them. Then when I put the boxed item on the launch tube it wouldn't let me launch because I got the color wrong, there are definitely two purples so that was super confusing as well. I also was able to grab the box as it was being launched which caused me all kinds of issues. One such issue is I tried to put the next item in the same box, you know recycle, reduce, reuse and the item fell down into the tube but I couldn't range grab it with the ray interactor so I bent down to pick it up and in doing so I got myself stuck in the tube, forever more. There's a lot of neat little interactions like the button and slot mechanics. I do feel like having 3 launch tubes was unnecessary, felt like the room layout could have been more to one side because that rotation felt horrible, I know it's a vr game so you can make use of the space but it feels like if there was just one tube you could have fit it all on one longer table, or just a big U shaped table, since turning around is annoying with smooth turn and also to turn in real life is tedious as you have to keep spinning back and forth.
Viewing post in Instant Delivery Service jam comments
Thanks so much for the feedback! Definitely a lot of good things in there that I never noticed or hadn’t thought about.
Sorry about the smooth turning being such an issue! I actually did include snap turning in the game. The select/menu button on the oculus controller brings up a pause menu where you can change your settings. But I added that on the last day and forgot to actually list that anywhere. Totally my bad.
Do you know what button that maps to on an index controller? Cause my menu button on my index controllers just bring up my steam menu.
Edit: I looked into it a little bit, I guess the oculus has different functionality mapped to the left and right menu buttons but on the index both are reserved for opening the steamvr menu. Not sure if there's anything that can be done about that. That's unfortunate. I decided to make my menu button one of the face buttons in my game, but I think in the future I might do a wrist attached virtual button to open the menu. I did in the past for a previous jam but I wanted the menu button to be accessible to all. Though it had the drawback of people accidentally pressing it.
Edit 2: Also did you end up making the buttons yourself? I feel like I did something similar before or I've used buttons similar to this. It's just a vague memory but it kind of seems like you rolled your own sockets/buttons and if so I think that's really cool. Like you are just taking the difference between the position of the button and where it should be and if it goes past a certain y index then it counts as pressed or something? And then just lerping it back to 0, 0, 0? I actually had to come up with something similar for my bullet system. I think if you lock it on the x and z axis then it will work a little better and you can further lock it to only moving a certain amount in the y axis so that it won't go too far down or too far up.
Dang, didn’t know that about the index controllers. I’ve ever only used oculus ones. Definitely good to know going forward though!
And yeah, I made those buttons myself, mostly! I based them off of FistFullOfShrimp’s video on YouTube. The button mesh has a rigid body, and there’s a trigger collider that’s a little underneath the mesh that gets triggered whenever the button is pushed into it. And then there’s a joint component that’s also applied to the button that makes it rebound back up.
And yeah, I think I tried constraining the movement on the x and z axis, but due to another issue I was having with them I took that away to figure out what was wrong, and just never turned it back on. They were very much a “I’ll get back to that after I do x” kinda thing lol, and just kept getting pushed back. It’s definitely something I’d like to refine for future use, as the overall implementation is pretty straightforward.