i think i mentioned it in the post of when i got the quest 2, but another product i wanted so badly to get was the tilt five board. they were having a sale and i finally caved and bought it. after a couple of weeks and a last minute hurricane, it arrived and a couple more days later n’ I have built my first tutorial-scope game.

here are my first impressions of developing for it so far.

tldr impressions – the good

• i think the tilt five board is what I was actually looking for in the quest’s feature set. and i say this because the first couple of weeks of me learning how to use unity/godot for the virtual reality headset was for making top-down/boardgame pov type games/experiences.
• and now, next to my pc is an augmented reality system that lets me test my game and switch back to the game engine without having to take anything off/wait for software to switch my pov to the simulated desktop environment.
• installing was stupid simple and getting a project going with a cube displaying wasnt complicated. ive only tried godot and unity but the winner for me in ease of setup and better documentation is easily unity.

quirks – the bad

• i will try to get a comfy workflow going in godot because i just like it more, but as it is, i’ll probably actually get more games completed if i make my projects in unity as its documentation and engine implementation is just that much developed.
• maybe im a dumbass so perhaps i didnt read the 10 warnings, but don’t touch your playmat people. your fingers will leave smudges.
• im chalking this one up to my old pc but if you’re using the usb converters (C to A) your connection might not be super solid and you might need to reconnect your cable every so often. sometimes its annoying, sometimes its not. im considering adding usb-c ports to my pc for this and dual-booting windows to be able to run the t5 games on my non-windows laptop.
• i got the best value pack of two glasses/gamepads with the XE board, and you really need some dedicated space. also i think the best angles are at coffee table height.
• super personal preference but the gamepad buttons have a bit too much travel to them.
• idk what happened, but i changed the audio source on my computer with the tiltFive in and now im not quite sure how to turn it back on for the glasses/speakers. will have to investigate.

last thoughts

at first i was a bit underwhelmed with the board but as ive made this first project and everything just happening without much resistance. not to mention the amount of joy i felt from trying other experiments and seeing the possibilities in my mind, im sold.

i’m going to go for a quick prototype approach to making games for it until i find a project i really want to go in on. or maybe i’ll just go at my own pace and make games like i used to make digital paintings when i was posting on deviantart. we’ll see.

until next time!