Something came up, and I had to skip working on the prototype this morning.
But while I was approaching the entry gates under Bond street station, I noticed for the first time something familiar on the ceiling...
The police, instead, noticed that I was shooting suspicious pictures. But that's a story for another day.
So, visuals. As I previously explained, I want the platforms to be the only "material" thing in the game, so that you don't have a high level of immersion broke by the unavoidable lack of haptic feedback.
This means that basically all the rest must be composed of wobbly, floating energy, which I plan to render with a lot of particles.
So, today is going to be about research (and hopefully initial testing) about the proper way to render a considerable amount of particles on Quest.
I left this as last major task knowing that I may well fail to complete it in the allotted time, because it might end requiring a significant amount of graphics programming work.
If instead I get lucky, I might able to do something that could at least vaguely give the idea of what the visuals of the real game will be.
I started by checking and organizing a long list of visual references and articles about the kind of effects that I look forward to implement.
It was stuff accumulated in at least a couple years, so it took some time.
Then, I unfortunately had to stop because of a headache. Maybe the need to wake up early to go out this morning affected me a bit (a headache is often how my body reacts to "you haven't slept enough"). What can you do? Stuff happens sometimes.
After a break (and some ibuprofen), I went back to my tests.
From my initial research, it looks like to have lots of GPU accelerated particles on Quest I need to use the Unity Visual Effect Graph (OH NOOO VISUAL SCRIPTING NOOOO) and not the "built-in" particle system, which I'm more familiar with.
Full disclosure: in the past, I have only added the dynamic handling bits (setting parameters via code) of particle systems prepared by 3d artists. I have never done the actual particle system setup myself, so one way or the other I need to dive into the documentation and/or find good examples to modify to suit my prototyping needs.
After some more digging, I found out that the Visual Effect Graph is not compatible with the built-in rendering pipeline, which is what I have been using until now (the Meta documentation and example use the built-in).
I also found on GitHub an example of an effect pretty close to what I had in mind, and under MIT license.
I wasn't sure it could run on Quest 2, and especially that it could run with enough performances, so I decided to try actually doing a Quest build.
I added to the project the necessary assets and configured a VR camera, and voilà, it worked:
This gives me some solid ground to build upon.
In the two remaining days that I have, I will basically try to make this kind of effect the primary visualization of my prototype, a process that should involve:
switching the project to URP so that I can use the VFX graph
use the effect I found on GitHub as a reference to build a visualization of my prototype, building a "particular" variant of all the elements I have in scene
hands
indication of current health/mana
fireballs
enemies
portal edges
health/mana pickups
tune the effects so that everything runs at good frame rate
It's not much time and I'm not sure I will be able to do all this, but I'm definitely going to try.