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VR Game Development: Best Practices, Technologies, and Other Insights

VR Game Development: Best Practices, Technologies, and Other Insights

Do you remember how hard the lockdown experience was when the pandemic started? In order to make staying at home more fun, people were massively purchasing virtual reality headsets for entertainment. According to Statista research, the gaming VR market has shown rapid growth, skyrocketing from $32m in 2019 to $1.8bn in 2022. These numbers are only projected to rise and are estimated to hit 5.4bn by 2027.

Naturally, the demand for top-notch VR games is rising accordingly. That’s why most foreseen entrepreneurs bet on VR game development. For those who also have the ambition to enter the promising market, this article will shed light on the fundamental VR game creation principles and handy game development services for more efficient project execution.

3 Essential Stages to Build a VR Game

Depending on the project type and business goals set, the number of steps can vary. Still, you can build an efficient workflow based on a universal VR game development pipeline. 

  1. Preparation

At the pre-production stage, the main goal of product owners and managers is to make everything possible to avoid misunderstandings, delays, and errors during a project execution. Thus, it’s better to make sure each of the following steps is accomplished before starting the development.

  • Analyze the market. Explore the market state as well as the offers of your competitors. Once you get their strengths and drawbacks, you can consider this when creating your product.
  • Choose a platform. When you produce a VR game, you should pick a particular headset to perform it on. Meta (Oculus) Quest is popular hardware for gaming experiences, so it makes perfect sense to develop a game for this device specifically.
  • Create concept art. Form the vision of your gaming content so game artists know what exactly to create. Provide specialists with references that you find relatable so that they come up with a unique design for each character, prop, and location.
  • Create GDD. All the essential information, like the development strategy, concept art, technical requirements, etc., should be kept in a single document called the game design document (GDD). Your developers should be able to access it at any time.
  1. Production

Basically, the primary stage of developing a virtual reality game consists of 4 phases. In order to perform those, you need a robust team of VR game engineers, modeling artists, designers, and testers.

  • Content creation & animation. Gaming assets, characters, and environments are created according to the agreed concept art. To make the content striking and realistic, specialists do 3D modeling and texturing. Then, rigging, skinning, and other animation techniques are performed to bring models to life.
  • UI/UX design. The user interface should be intuitive to players, as well as their experience mustn’t be overcomplicated. Thus, designers work on buttons, menus, maps, and other elements to make them fit and help a gamer get through a game easily.
  • Coding. Using programming languages, VR game engineers write programs for any user interaction with a game. This way, developers make every mechanic work properly and ensure gaming content responds to players’ actions according to a script.
  • Testing. Once all the gaming elements are ready, it’s time to ensure that a product functions without errors. All the bugs that testers find, developers should fix before the release. To do a thorough check-up, testers apply various techniques to test a game under different conditions.
  1. Post-production

The launch of a game doesn’t mean the work is over. Once a game is on the market, your product should participate in the race for the leading positions permanently. Thus, it’s vital to continue testing and fixing bugs that users find while playing your game. 

In addition, developers should add new functions and upgrade a game once in a while to provide your target audience with the finest user experience they can find on the market. Accordingly, updates and new features will entail new bugs to fix. Eventually, the post-production maintenance goes on while a game exists. 

How to Start Your VR Game Development

What do you need to start your VR game development project? There are only 3 essentials to take care of: a team of specialists, technologies, and a working environment. Yet, it mostly takes too many resources to get each of the mentioned aspects done. 

The process of finding and hiring in-house specialists is usually long and expensive. Setting up a working environment in the form of a comfortable office and equipping your team with cutting-edge hardware & software are costly as well.

Luckily, you don’t have to do any of those when you partner with an outsourcing game development company. Instead, you choose already selected and hired developers who are provided with decent working conditions and resources to perform your project.

 

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