VRcade Game Demo

The second half of this summer has consisted of working on two separate virtual reality game projects for the Oculus Quest, the first of which is now in a playable state. The goal of VRcade was to simulate playing some traditional physical arcade games in VR. We talked about making that basketball hoop shooting game, maybe air hockey, but we settled on the classic game Skee-Ball.

My artist and I instantly started tackling the game from both angles: I worked on basic aspects of the game such as spawning and picking up balls while she worked on modeling an accurate to-scale Skee-Ball machine. Once the basic model was finished, I started combining the systems I had made with the model until I could start throwing balls down the runway towards the backboard.

Everything from here on out consisted of lots of minor tweaking to collisions, weights, physics materials and of course designing the core game loop system including keeping track of score. There was lots of daily testing and frustration that went into making the game feel as natural as possible. I was also keeping in mind that eventually someone other than me was going to play this game so I had to make it intuitive for someone not as accustomed to throwing the balls as I was.

We were both pretty happy with what we made especially considering it was both our first time making a VR game in Unreal Engine and her first time making assets for such a physics-heavy game.

I hope you will give this game demo a try if you have an Oculus Quest or any PC VR headset. Packaged versions for both platforms are available over at https://github.com/averyfollett/vrcade/releases