Welcome to my first AAA videogame- Artemis: Astral Archery
In order to complete my Game Design minor at Carnegie Mellon I took one final course during my last semester titled “Research Issues in Game Development: Designing for XR”. Admittedly, I can’t say I was too keen on game development for AR or VR as I always struggled to take those platforms seriously (at least for gaming), but in retrospect I’m super glad I was able to dip my toes into this!
By this point in time I had already developed a couple of games with Unity and had a decent feel for game development, and my group members felt similarly, but it only took until week 2 of the course that the “Issues” part of the course title became apparent. It wasn’t just that none of us had experience developing a game for VR (Meta Quest 2), but also a lot of the documentation and tooling for that platform were confusing and/or lacking. Granted, I understand that this platform was still somewhat cutting-edge at the time, I even remember one of my groupmates never having even tried VR before until this class, so I’m sure developing this must have been quite the whiplash for him!
To say I learned a lot from this course would be an understatement. Me and my groupmates had to not only figure out game development on this new platform from a technical perspective (we had a lot of fun bugs to deal with), but also a design one as well. Prior to this I had only played 2, maybe 3 VR games and couldn’t really tell you what exactly made a VR game “good” or not. Now, I can determine based off a gameplay demo how likely a VR game is to be fun or not.
Anyways, that’s just some backstory/context on the game. Here’s the actual gameplay demo for it! I will return to update this post once I’m able to find the project’s source code. Until then, wish me luck!