Frog Restaurant

Grabbing an Ingredient

For this project, I designed the grabbing mechanic in a way that is both fun to look at and gives the player instant feedback in several ways (visual and audio cues).

I also solved some problems like:

• Accidentally grabbing something when you are just looking around (admiring):

  Since head movement is being used for both camera view and interacting with objects, if the interactable objects are designed in a way that you can grab them by making a swooping gesture (through the object), then there is a high probability that the player will accidentally grab something when they are simply admiring the environment.

• Accidentally grabbing something when you are looking at an object (just curious):

  The other method VR games use, to act on an object, is to trigger the object when the player looks at it for a brief moment (say 0.5 – 2 seconds). But if the game features beautiful assets, which the player might like to take a look at closely, the object will trigger although that is not what the player intended.

• Controlling everything using head movement only:

  Constraints brood creativity, with just the head movement as input I managed to develop a fully functional toy and it also played a big role in the design of ingredient dispensers (Frogs).

• Making it satisfying to grab an object:

  I designed the ingredient dispensers to mimic frogs to justify the pull and hold motion required to grab an item. This works well as the players sees it as pulling the frog's tongue and applying force to detach the ingredient from it, accompanied by frog's arms and eyes moving based on how far the player pulls the tongue and elastic stretching sound being played makes the simple act of acquiring an item very pleasing.

Pull and Hold Motion

As mentioned, the pull and hold design makes sure that the player doesn't accidentally grab an item while also giving the player some agency. Starting from top side of the ingredient and then pulling makes it feel very natural.

Graphics

All materials feature Unlit shaders (I made the models and textures in Blender), there is no light in the scene, this improves performance on mobile platform.