Hotdogs, Horseshoes, and Hand Grenades — ALL the Shotguns
Ok we talked about four really fun VR shotguns so far. But it would be insane to talk about shotguns in VR without mentioning Hotdogs, Horseshoes, and Hand Grenades. This game is basically a gun range simulator at its core.
If you are a VR developer—and especially if you don’t have real-world experience with guns—you owe it to yourself to jump into this game and play around. The game is a literal library of guns, all of which operate realistically.
Not only is this a great way to get a starting point for how you might want a weapon to work in VR, the game also has a number of incredibly unique shotguns you just don’t see anywhere else.
These are all the shotguns in the game. Yes just the shotguns.
There’s so many cool options that other VR games haven’t explored yet,
Like just look at this sawed-off revolver shotgun.
And you know I love a pump-action shorty—this one has a magazine!
Or how about a drum-fed two-round burst?
And I don’t even know what the hell this thing is… but what’s stopping you from exploring all these unique options?
Hotdogs, Horseshoes, and Hand Grenades is your ticket to heaps of inspiration for making the next awesome shotgun—or any gun—in VR.
Feedback Makes the Experience
Ok so we talked a lot about shotguns and what makes them feel great in VR. But I promised you that if we could figure out what it is that makes shotguns feel great, we can figure out how to make anything feel great in VR.
So the core takeaway here is feedback. Feedback comes in a million forms, but it’s always an immediate response to some action from the player.
This could be sound, it could be light, it could be haptics, animations… whatever it is, feedback is the game constantly telling the player: yes, you did something valid in this world.
If you want something to feel great in VR, start thinking about where you can add feedback.
You can make something as boring as a literal bottle feel great in VR by adding feedback.
Examples include:
- A small sound effect when the player grabs or releases the bottle
- A sound effect when the bottle hits the ground after being dropped
- A sound effect when the bottle is shaken to imply what’s inside
- A sound effect if the bottle is dragged against a surface
- A animation to show the bottle’s effect when impacting other objects, like breaking glass
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You can do this exercise with literally any object in VR, and you’ll find that the more feedback you add, the better the thing will feel when players interact with it.
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That’s not to say that you’re gonna d this for every single item in the game. What you want to think about is what are the items that are most important. And usually that comes down to: ‘what items are going to be held by the player for the most amount of time over the course of the game?’.
Literally just go down the list—one, two, three four—of the items the player is going to interact with the most, and start asking yourself: are there additional opportunities to add feedback to the various interactions players can have with them.
The game Fujii really drives this idea home for me. It feels like anything in the game you touch has some way to give you interesting feedback.
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Either with sounds, animations, or haptics. And as a result, this game just feels so freaking good all around.
Everything you interact with feels reactive. It makes the whole simulation feel… alive.
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Once you start to see opportunities to add feedback… you’ll be able to make anything feel great in VR.
Enjoyed this breakdown? Check out the rest of our Inside XR Design series and our Insights & Artwork series.
And if you’re still reading, how about dropping a comment to let us know which game or app you think we should cover next?
