How I made and published a VR game in less than 4 weeks

For a while I had this idea of creating a VR experience for people with Arachnophobia or fear of spiders. The idea is for the person to experience the presence of spiders in a simulated environment to face their fear and overcome it. Psychologists call it ‘immersion therapy’. A psychological technique which allows a patient to overcome fears by experiencing the thing they fear in a safe and controlled environment.

The repeated exposure with no negative impact normalizes the experience and removes the fear, or so the theory goes. Apparently it can be quite effective and VR is the perfect medium to make it happen.

A few months ago I set my self a goal to build 12 games in 12 months. The first game took so much effort that I needed a long break after just one game! There was a lot to learn and progress was slow. I still have a few months left but I might have to reset the goal to 3–4 games in 12 months. My second game however took a bit less time. Mostly because I have been on leave from work and have had the time and energy to dedicate to making games but also because I am now more efficient with the tool I use, Unreal Engine.

To make and publish a game in a short amount of time you will need the following:

The game making process has many aspects to it. To do it all you will need a lot of diverse skills. I would call the different aspects out as Storytelling, Visual Design, Building and Publishing. It is important to figure out which aspect you are best at and enjoy doing the most and hot to source the rest. Given that you are reading an article about making games I’m guessing that you are a primarily a builder.

Before you begin you need some vague idea of what you are going to build. There is no need to flesh it out in detail before you start but some starting point of inspiration is required. Once you start the game will emerge as you figure out how to make things happen and solve problems.

The ideas just present them selves like when you were a kid and saw a creek to play in. There was a creek, there was water, there were rocks and the rest took care of it self. Making a game is similar to that. The vision is there to keep you excited, like being by a creek.

The Storytelling is not easily outsourced though. Sometimes a story you read is your inspiration but you can’t use it without the authors permission. We are all able to tell a story but to do it well is a skill. I have not found a way to outsource this and it shows in my games.

Spider Fear is a game intended for a practical purpose. It is made with people who are afraid of spiders in mind and gives them an opportunity to be in an immersive space with spiders that they may find scary in a completely simulated environment. Exposure therapy is an approach to treatment of psychological conditions that psychologists commonly use to help people get over their fears. The idea is that if you experience the things that you are afraid of again and again with nothing bad happening then eventually you stop being afraid.

This approach can be very effective. A friend of ours has a child that was afraid of dogs. They then got a dog specifically to help their child get over their fear and now the child will confidently handle a dog twice their size.

This is a common sense approach to dealing with fear that psychologists use with supervision and in a structured way. Spider Fear is a casual way to allow anyone who is afraid of spiders to do the same thing at home and have a little fun while doing it. A word of caution though, immersion therapy is best done with professional oversight.

My game is called Spider Fear. It is made using Unreal Engine and 3d models from the Unreal Engine market place. You can choose different software to build a game or even just use a vanilla language like the Minecraft team did when the chose Java. However, today there are a lot of tools that make the process easier. The two most popular are Unity and Unreal Engine.

Unity is the more popular tool as the time required to get started is shorter but Unreal Engine is the more mature tool. Choosing Unreal Engine has meant that I have had to dedicate more time to learning about the coding in more detail and possibly has also made it easier to make mistakes but it was a learning investment I was keen to make as I feel it will be the more powerful tool to learn.

Both tools allow you to make a game using visual design interfaces. You can make a whole game without ever writing a line of actual code. This makes it really easy for people with no coding or computer science background to get started on game design.

The tools are there to do the heavy lifting. They are the rocks. My current tool of choice is Unreal Engine. It has loads of built in capability that allows me to very quickly do things that I can’t believe I can do. Unreal has a very steep learning curve and I have had to dedicate a lot of time to learn how to build using the tool. There are simpler tools that get you started quicker but I like the maturity of Unreal Engine and enjoy learning to use it.

There are many places where you can purchase or download for free artifacts to build a game. The Unreal Engine Marketplace is one and TurboSquid is another. The same goes for sounds and some specific in-game behaviors. Using these can bootstrap your development further to shorten the development time.

In the case of SpiderFear I spend most of the effort animating the spider and giving it some sensible enemy behaviors. Unreal comes with a great tool for building AI behaviors. Spider Fear uses the ‘sight’ component to move towards the player when they are close enough.

My VR headset is HTC Vive. Unless you have multiple types of headsets you will only be able to test on that device. This will limit what devices you should release for as you don’t want to say that you support devices you have not tested on. The main options today are:

Steam is the only platform that all the devices can use but each device that is not OpenVR compliant will have support requirements that need to be considered. Oculus has the most headsets in the real world and currently Oculus Quest is the headset of choice for casual use. However the Oculus distribution platform is only open to large software vendors.

Publishing a game is a craft. Figuring out the mechanism is not too hard and some of it is just an extension of the building process but getting it noticed requires business skills and marketing. These days there are publishing houses for games. However, for a game you made in 4 weeks part-time this will not really be a concern, just putting it somewhere for download will be a win.

In this case I chose to publish on Steam. Steam allows anyone to register an account and publish a game for about $100. Releasing on Steam makes your game available in a store. You can reference it and it will present as a finished product. This is a great way to give your game presence and put it in front of people who will be interested in taking a look.

A word of caution though, the gamer community will not take kindly to a product with little investment of time and refinement. Be ready to be judged.

A friend of mine worked in the game industry for many years but always dreamed of making his own game. Eventually he took a year off to make his game. He worked really hard. Once the year was up he shelved the game and gave up. He was too afraid of what people might say about the game to release it.

Spider Fear is not a refined game but I chose to release it for two reasons; firstly I wanted to to learn about the process of releasing a game and what it might take to actually make a commercially successful game. Secondly; I wanted to make the game easily available to those that might be looking for a way to deal with their fear of spiders.

To release a game on Steam you will need to register for a partner account. This will be a different account to your normal Steam account. You will pay a fee to register and you can release one game with that fee. Each additional game will cost just over $100 to release. The fee goes toward paying for the manual review process that all game registrations have to go though before being released.

This process takes a fair bit of time for a hobby developer so you might want to start the process early if you are looking to keep to a short time frame. You will need to create various visual artifacts and a video to show the game play, put in various descriptors including legal stuff and go though an internal Steam testing and review process.

It is very possible to make and release a game in a short period of time. As with all software development however there is a lot more time spent refining various details of your product than you anticipate in the beginning.

Good Game Design relies much more on artistic qualities than other types of software creation. Although UX/UI are important when making applications they are not the very core ingredient. In Game Design they are.

Commercial success in the gaming space requires an obsessive amount of dedication to your vision. It also requires that you bring together people with different skills; coding, storytelling, visual design, modelling, music and sound effects as well as commercial marketing skills. One person can not do a good job of all these specialized areas that need to come together to make a good game and stock artifacts will never come together in a cohesive enough way to make a good quality game.

Virtual Reality is still at an early stage of its life cycle and it shows in the availability of solutions and even design patterns available for VR. This is what I find most exciting.

Related posts:

Reason one - get more customers. Sounds pretty simple but we know that the main way in which most people are set to get more business is to increase the number of customers that they bring to them…

Pengen deh jadi Designer Grafis, tapi skill apa saja ya yang harus dimiliki jika ingin menjadi Designer Grafis ? Nah, sebelum menjadi Designer Grafis yuk kita bahas dulu, Sebenernya apasih Designer…

You bite your lip as your finger traces the edge of your phone in a nervous gesture. All of this thinking because your friend dared you to get a treat for yourself instead of working through the…