this video is nowhere near where I thought it was gonna be when I first started recording all
of this stuff it started out as a tutorial about how to do a vr bowling game good
Saturday morning or whenever you're watching this this is what I do on my Saturday mornings
so we've learned how to set up an XR rig and we've learned how to animate vr hands so now
let's start to make some games and I'm going to start off real simple we're going to make bowling
or it's real simple in my head at least and then it turned more into a devlog where I would
walk through the highlights of each little bit that I did for the game and now it's turned into
a word of caution for new developers and also some tips and advice and uh
things I would do differently for this project if I were to do it over again and I'll end up doing
a lot more projects in the end so this is by no means a make or break thing for me it's just kind
of the way the cards fell on this uh project I was so tempted to really clean up this game and
make it super nice and almost like a releasable version of bowling I kept running into issue after
issue and I didn't want to show that on camera and I was I was really tempted to just clean it all up
and edit it and post and make you guys not really see the the downsides of this game that I made
but that's not really who I want to be on this channel it's not what I want to show you I want
you guys to be able to see my development process and the things that went right and the things that
went wrong and hear my thoughts about what i would change and what I would do different and that kind
of stuff so that's more of what this video is about it's not necessarily a how to do bowling
because I kind of failed at it and didn't spend the time to go back in and fix it it's more of a
what are the techniques that I use to learn how to do some of these mechanics and also what are the
some of the things I would do different in the future for the next games vr is without a doubt
the hardest version of game development to get into it's a very very unique player input system
and you have to take in a lot of things into account of how is the player gonna move how are
you gonna move them without them getting sick um all these different things that you don't have to
think about when you do a first person shooter or a third person RPG game or anything like that it's
a lot of different factors and then you have to deal with well what about the hand clipping
through walls and all these different factors you have to think about when you develop for a vr that
you don't necessarily have to think about when you do first person or third person games or even
especially 2d games as you guys know I'm still a beginner in this vr development stuff too so
I'm still learning how to do unity and how to use that and what are all the tools and buttons and
the right processes of doing stuff and I think unity's still trying to figure out unity a little
bit because during this project I started out just doing you know normal object oriented game objects
with mono behaviors and all that kind of stuff and then I saw this really cool thing of oh there's an
event system I can start to use that a little bit maybe that would optimize my game a little
bit more and so I started to grab pieces of an event system and learning how to do that as well
as learning how to do this object oriented stuff and trying to do unity learning how to do that and
about halfway into the event system when it wasn't quite working out and I was starting to get bored
of it and couldn't quite figure out how to do it correctly i saw something on YouTube about how to
do unity dots and that was the newest greatest fastest most optimized thing and you can have
millions and millions of objects in your scene and it's totally fine and everything runs with
physics and everything so I'm like oh okay cool we're gonna start to switch over to the unity dot
system and using ECS and all that kind of stuff so I started to learn that and go down that
rabbit hole and in the end like I'm just making this really small bowling game that doesn't have
to be optimized I'm learning it that's the whole point of me making this game it's not necessarily
for me to release it to anyone or show anyone or anything like that it's for me to learn how to do
vr game development and me getting sidetracked down oh let's use the event system oh
let's use unity dots and doing all that was really just sidetracking me and I wasn't focusing on the
problem which was learning how to do a basic game and just getting that from start to finish in the
end though I don't really feel bad about not finishing it it fulfilled its purpose I learned
a lot of stuff about object-oriented programming I learned a lot of stuff about events and how
to use that and I learned that dots is still in preview and is very hard to work with right now
so I will not be going to that quite yet it does look really cool and I'm very excited to get into
it once it starts to get a little more stable but for right now I'm gonna stick with object
oriented programming using events sometimes and use what I learned in this project take it to the
next project and when I start I can build a good foundation and build up from there so I actually
did learn a lot from this project it wasn't organized learning per se at all it was kind
of just me trying to build a game and honestly I feel like that's a really good thing to do is just
start to build a game and whatever interests you something that's small bowling just a few
mechanics a little bit of math to figure out the lanes and what roles and all that kind of stuff
but something that will kind of push you a little bit and say okay well if I was gonna actually
combine all of these mechanics into a game how would I actually go about doing that because it's
one thing to learn how to do all the mechanics but it's another thing entirely to put them into a
game and make it fun and interesting and having to use different mechanics at different times to do
different things it really just makes you think in a little different way and so I really encourage
you guys to start to build a game and do some stuff and add some fundamentals together to make
a cohesive whole and then you'll actually learn a lot because this was an organized learning for me
but it was really just like I would build up until I got to a point where i needed to learn something
else and I'd go research that and I'd come back and be like okay I know how to do this part now
and then I did that up until the point where I just spiraled off into nowhere and it didn't end
up getting finished but I mean even though it's not a commercial game that I'm releasing it's good
and it it ended up getting me to where I needed to go to get to the next step in my developmental
career of vr development and learning how to do that kind of stuff so moral of the story
I'm still learning just like you guys are and I'm going to keep putting out videos about me learning
my goal is not to be the best vr developer out there there's other vr developers on YouTube
that are amazing my goal is to be a vr developer that continues to learn continues to get better
and I'm going to continue to put out videos about me learning and the things that I learn and the
stuff that I think is cool and then eventually once i get to a certain point I'll start to put
out bigger and better games that you guys can play with and you can have the source code for and I
just want to learn vr and I want to teach vr too because me teaching it to you guys is helping me
learn a ton I'm learning more than I ever would if I was never doing these videos it really motivates
me to keep going and keep doing stuff but my end goal is not to be the best or be number one or
have the best vr game it's to just be better than I was yesterday and to keep going really the the
end goal is to how do I make this sustainable how do I build that snowball up so it keeps
going and keeps going and then in the end I can just do this full time that would be incredible
in order to do that you guys have been putting a ton of comments down in the comments section
and I absolutely love it there's a ton of ideas down there and if you come up with any more ideas
please put them in the comments because I love seeing that and I reply to every single comment
we're starting to build a good little community in the comment section and I'm really excited for
that vr is cutting edge and we are the innovators we'll be there to make it mainstream and I'm
really excited to be a part of that community with you and I'll see you in the next one