Introduction

Perkunas is a sandbox game where you get to let your creativity free and at the same time learn about the circle of life. Your goal is to shape and populate the world as you desire. You are able to shape the terrain to create mountains and valleys. Plant trees and help them grow by summon rain clouds above them. The only thing your lush forest world now misses is animals. Spawn deers as you please, but make sure that they have enough food to eat.

Goals and motivation

We wanted to create a colorful and immersive VR-experience where you get to feel like a god. We wanted the experience to be relaxing and to be a good showpiece for casual VR-games. No one in the group had worked with VR-development before so everyone was eager to try to test the limitations and possibility of the technology.

Technologies used

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Why Unity and HTC Vive?

The HTC Vive was used to bring in the elements of interaction that we wanted with the objects of the world, such as grabbing objects, shaking them and terrain modification. Once we chose the Vive, Unity became the obvious choice as it had great support for it with SteamVR. Also, we were eager to try out this game engine. As for the graphics we wanted a low-poly style that looked cartoony.  Other features such as weather effects and animations were added to make the world feel alive. This would make the world feel like a canvas and you the painter.

Challenges

None of us in the project had any experience with VR-development and less then half of the group had experience with Unity or Unreal Engine. There was a lot of things to learn and not only technology, we also needed to learn how to work together in a group. We chose GitHub to host and manage the project. This worked very well and helped us during the development. Our 3D-modeler had never used a 3D-modeling software before so that was also a challenge.

Obstacles during development

The main problem we had was putting it all together. There were a lot of issues when exporting fbx files from Blender to Unity. There were also performance issues with the terrain modification feature. 

User testimonials

“This was fun!"
"This is so freaking scary"
"This was so damn cool"
"It feels weird"
"This was fun! You get so much freedom"
"I like how the objects interact with each other."
"I really like the creativity!"

Lessons learned

We have learned a lot from this project. Project management is a huge part in order to complete a stable project on time. There are a ton of learning resources for software like Unity and Blender so it's actually pretty easy to start developing VR-games.

Related work

Super Island God VR

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URG (You are god) AGI16 project