VR Tactics

The beginnings of a turn-based tactics game for SteamVR. The combat system includes player- and AI-controlled turns that allow movement and attacks.

Background

My husband and I were really hyped for VR when it finally hit the masses. When we got the Vive in 2016, we were excited to find that developing for it was actually pretty accessible to non-professionals. With a new medium, everyone was starved for content, so indie games and experiences were really thriving. We love tactics games, and we thought we could do some really cool and innovative stuff with VR for that type of gameplay. The tooling was very bleeding edge and not optimized for ease of learning and use, but

Features

The controls are anchored to one hand and you point and click with the other, so you can walk around the stage wherever you want and the controls move with you.

The movement uses A* pathfinding to find the shortest path to the destination.

The game alternates between player-controlled units and AI-controlled units, and the AI units move to the nearest enemy and, if in range, attack.

Movements and attacks can be confirmed or cancelled. I added a state machine to more easily handle this functionality.

Challenges

One of the more difficult and interesting problems was handling asynchronous operations and timed events in a game setting. Beyond the technical trickiness, it required a different way of thinking. Sometimes you have to manually give the player time to process what's happening, and that means waiting an appropriate amount of time between things; waiting for animations to finish, or to trigger a new event. It's particularly important with AI-controlled units; all the actions they take can happen practically instantaneously, but obviously a human needs time to perceive all of that. I spent a lot of time doing real-time testing and tweaking wait times to make sure things felt smooth and responsive.

Another difficult lesson for me was deciding what to do and not do on my own in this project. I was really interested in every part of making a game - the 3D modeling, texturing and painting, rigging and animating, creating particle effects, and on and on. I ventured into every area, some only briefly, some for much longer. It was really fun, and I learned a lot, but if I had stuck to making every asset myself, from scratch, I never would have gotten anywhere. This project is a great reminder for me to look for ways I can use resources that exist, and to always evaluate where my time is best spent.