VR Development, Thoughts so far.

VR is a new medium to me, not in experiencing as Ive played games in VR for a few years now, but in developing. With everything new, it takes time to really understand the best workflow, and it’s been a slow process. The biggest change for me is just the speed of development. Normally I start working on a new feature, test by hitting play, throw in a couple debugs if things are not working as intended, and fix the behavior. Rinse and repeat for a few hundred hours and eventually you have a game sitting in front of you. But VR is….well diffrent. For starters, everything is a lot slower. You can’t just hit play, to test your program. Every time you have to build to the headset. Which is usually 1–2mins just to get it running. That doesn’t sound that bad, but if you need to test 5 times, you just ate 10 mins of your time just waiting for everything to load. I feel like a lot of what Ive been doing is waiting, so I try and make every play test count. The next is debugging. I plan on researching how everyone else is debugging, and I’m hoping I can track down a virtual console, but at the moment, debugging has been diffrent from my usual Debug.Logs. Since I cant read the console in the virtual space Ive been having to get creating. Changing objects colors depending on certain states, hiding mesh renderers, changing scale, pretty much everything has to be visible. Hopefully I can find a more efficient way soon. While I find VR development very exciting, it really is a slower pace of programming. I will continue to plug away over the next few weeks and hopefully I start finding ways to be more efficient.