Beat 'Em Up XR (VR and MIDI)

A mixed-reality shoot 'em up game for VR and MIDI Keyboard. The game is an experiment on playing video games by interacting with real-world interfaces. Here, as a proof of concept, a 25-key MIDI keyboard on the table is aligned with a white box in VR as its avatar. The player tries to shoot incoming enemies by using the white keys of the MIDI keyboard. The projectiles are fired in VR from the position of the keys in real life. The original idea was to overlay the game on top of the passthrough feature of Oculus Quest (i.e. a real-time view of your surroundings). This way the projectiles would fire right away from the keys you press on the MIDI keyboard. However, we need to run the game using Oculus Link for getting the MIDI input, and passthrough is not available when running Oculus Link. So we kept visuals within VR and kept the interaction with outside world.

Jam Site:

GGJ Istanbul

Jam year:

2022

Diversifiers:

Be Visionary - (Sponsored by Sony Interactive Entertainment)

Another Dimension

Platforms:

Virtual Reality platform

Tools and Technologies:

Unity (any product), Virtual reality head mount display (Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, etc.)

Technology Notes:

- Minis plugin by Keijiro Takahashi (allows getting MIDI inputs into Unity) - 25-key MIDI Keyboard (You can also use your own controller mapping and emulate the experience. You can do so by creating and assigning a new" Input Action Asset" in Unity.) - Oculus Link (Required to use MIDI inputs, otherwise it would require networking to pass MIDI input from PC to Oculus. It is also worth trying a Bluetooth MIDI keyboard.)

Installation Instructions: