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#POPMJam Submission Suggestions

Zbornox
Retired Support

Thinking about entering the #POPMJam competition we announced last week? While you’re testing out the new interaction features (Physical Hands, Weight Simulation of Held Objects and Player Movement code blocks) and Featured example assets in the Asset Library here are some submission suggestions you may find helpful:


  • If Physical Hands and Weight Simulation of Held Objects are the features being used in your world we suggest:

    • Checking out the Pushing Examples and Hitting Examples worlds as well as the Interaction Pattern: Pushing tutorial doc
    • Playtesting the new Physical Hands and Weight Simulation of Held Objects features by:
      • Dragging the Pushing and Hitting example assets (listed under the Featured category) into your world and testing them out
      • Creating your own objects, enabling physics on them and pushing them around with your hands
      • Changing the object’s physics properties like gravity strength, mass, drag, friction and bounciness
      • Enabling Grabbability and Weight Simulation then tuning the spring stiffness & damping values to adjust the feel of moving the object when held
      • Editing the object's center of mass to adjust the feel of moving the object when swing
      • Scripting spring forces on the object using a looping event with the spring push/spin code blocks

 

 

  • Per Person Physics Objects
    • Designing your gameplay so that each person is interacting with their own set of physics objects instead of shared objects (think golf or bowling vs ping pong or volleyball). This will ensure that objects can be locally owned/physics simulated and locally scripted to each player for responsiveness.
  • Focus The Experience On Physics Object Interaction: 
    • World design which focuses most of the moment-to-moment experience on some physics based object interaction(s) (pushing, flipping, balancing, punching, holding/swinging, hitting, manipulating etc) that is compelling to do using your hands or a held tool.  
    • Combine these interactions with an appropriate environment to create a sandbox/roleplay world or optionally with some objective/game loop (How fast? How accurately? etc) and game structure. 
  • Design for Room Or Table Scale Interaction: 
    • Require minimal or zero player thumbstick movement - use spawn points and Snap Destination gizmos to design for room scale interactions like pushing, hitting etc. Consider designing smaller scale, near field environments (desks, work stations, cockpits etc)  with a high density of grabbable physics objects within direct arm reach. 
    • By doing this the gameplay focus can be on hand and tool interaction without being broken up by needing to artificially locomote.
    •  If your world is designed to best be experienced standing or has a minimum space requirement communicate that clearly in your world’s description. 



 

  • Example Types of Possible Gameplay Genres:

    • A common real world location (eg convenience store, office cubicle, restaurant kitchen) or more fantastical location (zero G space station, underwater) with interactive objects which are tuned and scripted to behave as expected in that environment and gameplay based on contextual objectives (serve customers, fix broken components, mine for treasure  etc)
    • Social games/spaces which use physics interfaces (eg game shows) or physics objects (eg. carnival arcade games) as the focus of gameplay
    • A single physics object interaction or tool that has skill depth to how you can perform it (e.g. hitting a golf ball) combined with an interesting objective and scoring plus high score board that rewards improving your skills.



 

  • If Player Movement code blocks are the feature being used in your world we suggest:
  • Design For Comfort

  • Trying to make whatever kind of movement mechanic you design as comfortable as possible for as many people as possible. Everyone has their own comfort tolerance in VR so having other people playtest your mechanic/world while developing it can help you better understand how comfortable others might find it. 

 

 

  • Animated vs Physics Movement

  • Choosing to build either an animation based movement mechanic (using the movePlayerTo and movePlayerBy code blocks only) or a physics based movement mechanic (using the set player velocity, set player gravity etc code blocks only). If combining both animation and physics be aware collisions are ignored and physical velocity is conserved during animated movement. 

 

 

  • Tutorialize

  • Including a clear tutorial for new users to understand how your mechanic works and is intended to be used

 

 

  • Create a Playground

  • Creating an interesting environment in your world that is designed as a playground to show off the best of how your movement mechanic specifically enables people to move around (eg. small gaps to try to fly through)
  • Optionally creating objectives for people to try to complete using your movement mechanic (eg. tag, collect these, race from A to B)

 

 

  • Tag Your World’s Comfort

      • Tagging your world appropriately for the intensity of the custom player movement mechanics you’ve created (Comfortable, Moderate, Intense)

 

 

  • Example Types of Possible Gameplay Genres:

    • A compelling scripted player movement mechanic (eg. hand direction based thrusters or zero G climbing) that all players use instead of Teleport/Sliding combined with an interesting environment to explore or objective to complete using movement.
    • A interesting game structure (eg. Fast Hunters) where a difference in player movement abilities creates unique gameplay.

 

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