Head into the desert wastes. Just you, a gunslinger versus the swath of scorpions coming at you. Blow ’em apart with Dynamite and touch virtual reality with the Hardlight suit.

Trailer

Development

Desert of Danger was an independent demo developed at NullSpace VR.

It is primarily shown at public events and during business meetings to prove the value of haptics in VR.

Desert of Danger was built in Unity for the HTC Vive and the Hardlight haptic feedback jacket.

It features a slew of different haptic interactions such as gunfire, hit notification, spider sense (alerting you to enemies you can’t see), dynamite, desert whiskey and more.

Constraints

When you’re designing around public demos, you must account for a wide range of criteria.

  • Comfort – All VR experiences must be comfortable. Motion sickness is a spectrum and you can’t let your experience blindly turn away potential fans.
  • Prior VR Experience – The quickest way to turn away potential fans is to not make the experience new user friendly. Since VR is a growing field, this is many users first experience.
  • Fully utilizing haptic opportunities – No sense having fancy hardware if you don’t make the most of it.
  • Accessibility – The suit is designed to fit just about everyone. That isn’t worth much if the game experience doesn’t allow for a handicap, short, tall, large or small user to enjoy the game.
  • Demo length – Do you have 30 seconds of interest or 30 minutes. We designed around a quick runtime because it lets us hit a higher level of quality per minute.
  • Fatality of Bugs – If something goes wrong, will it ruin the experience? Zero tolerance for crashes or frame drops.

Assets Used

It leveraged a number of assets from the Unity Asset Store to expedite development at points. This isn’t an exhaustive list.

  • SteamVR Plugin by Valve Corporation – Big surprise here.
  • VRTK by TheStoneFox, published by Sysdia Solutions Ltd – An excellent toolkit to accelerate prototyping and production
  • Volumetric Fog and Mist by Kronnect – Great for a desert sandstorm
  • Toony Colors Pro 2 & Cartoon FX Pack by Jean Moreno – High quality stylized assets, good for hitting VR performance constraints.
  • Desert Scorpion by Glen Riley – This initial pack was a little limiting. I expanded the color sets and made custom projectiles.

Reception

Desert of Danger has been greatly received at events like these PAX East, IMMERSE 2016, Worlds Fair Nano and more.

At PAX East we were featured during the Hidden Gems of PAX East panel – ‘worth waiting in line for’ (9 minutes in).

 

I hope you’ve enjoyed this write-up, I enjoyed working on and seeing the endless positive reactions to Desert of Danger.

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