The graphics in Pollen look amazing, and there is a very detailed blog post on Unity’s site talking about how they’ve been able to achieve high-end visuals within Unity 5. Road to VR also did a pretty comprehensive hands-up write up on the experience that you can find here.
Olli talks about some of the considerations that Mindfield Games took into account for VR locomotion, and how they’ve been approaching locomotion within a room-scale Vive environment. They considered using the type of Blink locomotion system that Cloudhead Games is using, but for now are opting to use a combination of using the thumbstick controller as well as walking around in a room scale environment. Time will tell to see if this is a viable approach in the long-run as I suspect that this will not be 100% nausea-free as the Blink approach promises to be. VR locomotion is still largely an open problem within the VR exploration genre, and so I expect that this will be an area in VR that will continue to have different approaches and potential solutions.
Olli also talks about designing the first-person control mechanisms for both the gamepad, mouse and keyboard, as well as the Vive and the Half Moon Oculus Touch controllers. They’re considering experimenting with some of gesture capabilities within that are made available with the Touch, but likely not going to be a vital part of the gameplay considering that it wouldn’t be possible if people were playing with a gamepad or Vive controllers. Olli describes how they’re trying to make the interactions as natural as possible whether using a gamepad, mouse or 6DOF hand controllers.
They’re also designing a 2D version of the game, and he mentioned that there will be things that you can do in VR that you can’t do in the 2D version like look underneath a bed. There are definitely design restrictions and considerations like this when trying to develop a game for multiple platforms, and so it’ll be interesting to see whether or not it’s worth for VR game developers to make 2D versions available and how much that 2D version would limit the VR experience.
Olli is excited to see more medical applications of VR, and he’s really grateful for the amount of community and information that’s available on /r/oculus. You can get more information on Pollen on their website here.
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Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio