I had a chance to catch up with E McNeill at Oculus Connect about his design process for the Real-Time Strategy game called Tactera, which he developed for the Oculus Mobile Game Jam. He talks about some of the design constraints that he had by only having a single touch input, but he also wanted to simplify and streamline the gameplay mechanics in order to be better suited for virtual reality.
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One of the strategies that E is taking is to focus on creating a strong AI component so that the game holds up for playing it as single player. He’s also adding in multiplayer capabilities that will add another dimension of strategy, but he wants to be sure that the core game play mechanics can hold up while playing it as a single player.
E talks about some of the differences that he’s found in how he expects the game will be played on the Gear VR vs. the Oculus Rift. The biggest difference is that it’ll be a little bit easier to have more interesting perspectives given the positional tracking. E also says that it’s just really cool to put your head right into the action, and that it’s even cooler when you can her the 3D positional audio effects kick in.
E has also developed the Darknet Game for the Gear VR, and was told by Oculus that it’s one of the highest average play times of any of the other games that have been released so far. He says that it doesn’t feel like it’s fully launched just yet given that there hasn’t been an official Gear VR launch just yet. He says that between launching both Tactera and Darknet on both Gear VR and the Oculus Rift that he’s going to be keeping plenty busy from now until the official launch of them both by this Fall and next Spring.
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Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
