When tasked with designing the gameplay the team decided to, due to time constraints, apply the philosophy that we should design our game around the strengths of VR and avoid the pitfalls.

During testing of other products we found that movement never felt good enough. Either movement was really slow (to avoid nauscea) or solved using teleports. We designed our game around a stationary character.

We also found that the most enjoyable things in VR was to muck around with stuff. Lots and lots of stuff. Manipulating objects we found to be the most satisfying interaction.

After some prototyping we found picking up, dropping, cutting, pouring, stirring and hitting to be our favorites.

We also tried throwing, bouncing, using a mortar and several other activities where you use your hands. We decided not to go further with them as the satisfaction of these actions relied heavily on physicality of the objects. Since virtual objects have no weight or resistance when manipulated the was a cognitive disconnects between the action, the feeling and the expected results.

We decided on a game where you make magical potions á la carte. Looking up recipes (and making sure the customer isn’t allergic to any specific ingredient), gathering and preparing ingredients, cooking up a stew, pouring it into a flask and (hopefully) delivering the finished potion.

When grabbing a book from the book shelf we needed to open the book in a magical fashion.

To counter the lack of mobility and the large amount of ingredient-types we gave the player the magical power to “force grab” objects from afar.

Our highly detailed opened book could not fit on the shelf, so a closed version was created. This closed book needed to open and close to the correct page every time and the switching between the two versions needed to be seamless and invisible to the player.

To make the illusion work we use a total of four meshes. The back and the sides of a closed book, which is what is seen when the book is standing on the shelf and the full opened book, which is just one mesh with the texture of the current information needed from this particular book (a recipe).

To cut ingredients into pieces we developed a system where we cut procedural meshes with a plane at the point of collision and angle of the knife. The cut was immidiate and gravity effected the slice immidietly.

However, there where issues with communicating the slice to the player as many slices didn’t visibly move from their original position.