The Idea
For my second year at university, we were able to decide our own project to work on for one module. This was that project. The design concept of Hybrid Hands stemmed from the idea that the one core way the player is represented in VR is with hands, and as such, can hands themselves become the core mechanic of a game?
Development Process
Hybrid Hands was supposed to be primarily a system and not a full VR game experience. The core concept was the player would be able to build their hands out of certain pieces, and depending on how they were built, they would gain access to different functions. I had 3 different hands I wished to develop – a basic hand for pushing and pulling objects, a sword for slicing them up, and claws for climbing walls. From there, I created 3 different obstacles that could only be solved with certain hand types, and presto! I had the workings of a game system.
What I Took From It
I wanted to push myself with Hybrid Hands to get better at coding. Creating a gameplay system from the ground up was an engaging challenge, especially when I began the process of linking all the systems together to form the idea I had in my head. I learned about object-slicing systems, socket usage, and boolean registration to create a pseudo z\state machine of sorts for the hands. I can safely say I am much more confident coding in C# thanks to this project, and am looking forward to developing this system possibly into a full fledge game at some point.