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About Henchman for Hire
Henchman for Hire is a VR game developed in the EAE Capstone program of 2019-2020.
In Henchman for Hire, you play as the henchman of the evil Dr. Bad, carrying out evil tasks on your state of the art moped. The main gameplay involves navigating the level on your moped while completing tasks assigned to you by Dr. Bad. The gameplay is comparable to a playable amusement park ride; somewhat similar to experiences provided by Disneyland, but with control given to the players to allow them to roam the environment.
My primary role while developing the game was Lead Designer. As Lead Designer I was in charge of most gameplay related decisions, along with managing a team of designers that ranged in number from 2 to 6 throughout development. Due to my experience in VR, I was additionally in charge of implementing most programming that directly interacted with the interfaces provided by the VR headset such as the character controller and VR abstraction layer.
The game was created in Unity, and supports Oculus Rift VR headsets, and any headset which supports Steam's OpenVR standard.
The Moped Character Controller
The game required a VR character controller that operated like a moped, motorcycle, or electric scooter.
Creating a VR Character Controller for a moped provides some unique challenges. At the beginning of development I created some initial design specifications:
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The player must feel like they're moving fast without experiencing motion sickness.
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The player must experience no motion sickness when hitting walls.
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The player must be able to turn quickly and navigate with no motion sickness.
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The player must be able to steer accurately without getting stuck.
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The player must feel like they're driving a moped (or a scooter).
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The player must be able to let go of the handlebars with one, or both hands (and drive one-handed).
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The controls must be intuitive to learn with minimal instructions.
In addition, the player needed to be able to interact with elements other than the scooter, performing actions such as pressing buttons and pulling levers.
I implemented the character controller under these specifications, then tweaked various parameters while undergoing user testing in order to reduce motion sickness to a minimum. This character controller proved to be relatively successful, with players able to drive after about 30 seconds of play, and able to drive accurately after about one minute of play.