Building your expertise is the name of the section this week from Entering the Metaverse. The key components discussed this week is documenting, sharing projects and community. This is an interesting thing to talk about because I’m in the process right now to develop the community around me and sharing my experience. Three big myths that are tackled in the reading is I need to be a good writer to blog, Myside projects aren’t worth sharing and I’m starting completely from scratch. I will be the first one to admit I believed in these myths before. When blogging it doesn’t have to be giant articles, it actually is better to keep things short, sweet, and on point with what your discussing. Writing down your experience with either an application you checked out, a tutorial you went through, events you attended, or just the process you took to overcome a problem are all reasons to blog. “My side projects aren’t worth sharing” is one mistake all programmers face. It’s one thing to have the project but the main focus of documenting everything is reference back and also showing that you understand the process and how to achieve the end goal. Everyone starts from scratch at some point even when working with new technology/tools. It takes time to learn these tools and by documenting all of this you and others can see the progression you make throughout your journey.
While going through your journey its ideal to start finding and building up the community around you. One thing about game development and VR development, it’s a small group of people in the world growing rapidly. Conferences are great ways to meet new people and get new connections. I have started going to a few different types of VR, business, and game development conferences. I’ve met people which I wouldn’t have ever thought about meeting. One of my personal goals is going to more conferences and making connections.
Genres of VR inside Virtual Reality Insider does a great job showcasing how VR games can impact our world. A genre that became quite popular with The Walking Dead was narrative or interactive narrative. The example that was mentioned about interactive narrative was quite in depth. It sums up the player takes control of a character and must react in real time to the actions happening as the character would. If the player failed it would fade out back to a point before the action was required. This would be a great way to let the player really feel in the games universe. VR theater was another section which personally I don’t see much happening. Development for theater would be very time consuming and for filmmaking I think is a difficult to create proper stories. I’m not saying theater shouldn’t be done, I’m saying I don’t see a huge market for it. When it comes down to exploration games I have had personal experience. To keep the attention span of a user developers will need something more than dropping the player in and letting them go. Having no objective is boring. Having created a few experiences and playing multiple games, I’ve found that exploration games are best kept linear. I tend to think a lot about different experiences in virtual reality and about two days ago, I was curious more about tabletop games. My inner child came out and I started thinking about Yu-Gi-Oh! which the book also references. Growing up watching the show and playing the card game with the different monsters, graphics, and strategy behind the game was entertaining. Yu-Gi-Oh Forbidden Memories was a PlayStation one title and really help the connection of player and their monsters with visuals. If this was brought to VR having the player stand in the dual stadium, deck of cards, playing field, opponent on the other side, and being able to see the monsters spawn when playing would create the best Yu-Gi-Oh! experience yet! But for the players that are more about the huge world and really becoming someone different it comes to RPGs. I won’t go in depth about this because the book does a very good job but for RPGs the biggest task is taking away grinding and making the game less bland. Most RPGs lack story and being in a new world there should be some story around or some lore. This is similar with it comes to MMOs and when we get to a point with VR we can implement these genres properly we will have the Oasis.
Taking away from the gaming side of VR we get into things like simulations, porn and non-entertainment VR. Simulators are a great way to train different work forces. In the medical industry, they are constantly looking for the best thing. By having a scan of a patient then having the doctor do a simulation run would help reduce risks of operations. We have seen simulations with military and with the leap VR has taken we can help bring training to a whole new level. These training spaces can feel like the real deal and that’s part of why the porn industry is pushing VR. There is no doubt that porn is a huge market. People look for different ways to satisfy themselves and having just about the closes thing to real sex is quite appealing to that industry. There is already different technology that has been pushing towards this approach. So, overall VR has a huge impact just about everywhere we look and it’s just a matter on how we implement it in the end.