As stated on my previous post, I am finishing up a prototype of an on-rails shooter for the meta quest 2. Once again, I’m going about it by delegating tasks that need to be done to an appropriate phase of development and putting an effort on trying not to overscope the project into the stratosphere.

I just want to talk about the current state of the project, after all I did want to document more of the gamedev journey.

what we got so far;

Using a lot of the code that I got together for the Marble prototype and in general just thinking out how to design a game before jumping into the game engine, I feel like I’m close to a minimum viable product.

So far, We have a basic title scene, an in-between scene that shows how many attempts the player has at the current level and finally a prototype-level scene. There are steel beams to dodge, a stationary enemy that shoots at the incoming player, a enemy with simple movement patters and a wall-type boss that’s essentially a damage sponge.

level block outs

i’ve been making quick prototype worlds to test out the rails system that I cobbled together and after a couple world iterations, I’ve noticed that if I make sharp turns in VR motion sickness becomes a problem. So I’m saying anything as far as 30 degree turns in any direction is the max.

For the basic heightmap of this level, I resorted to using some stamps from a free collection I found somewhere.

unity shenanigans

So in recent news, unity updated their pricing model. and it was a big ol hooplah over on the new twitter and I was pleasantly surprised to see that many a people were not having it and abandoning ship. Personally, we all saw this coming didn’t we?

From the news about how they’re merging with a company known for malware, and at the same time making year-by-year record revenue; From my humble position on the ground, it was a matter of time before things started going down the path of adobe and some of their business decisions.

Even if it may be a competitive new pricing strategy according to some figures in the space, my big takeaway is that daddy Unity Tech. can make and pull the made rug from its users whenever it wants. (linked is an removed archived version of the 2019 Unity TOS allowing for retroactive terms for the version of unity that you are using for your project.)

If there’s a rollback, it wont matter because the damage is done and my trust of the software company is almost nonexistent so I don’t think I’ll be making any more future projects on it.

Luckily, I haven’t truly done THAT much work on this and I can use the trello board to rebuild the prototype in godot step by step almost.

So… back to square one yet again.