How to Make a VR Game: The Ultimate Guide | Game-Ace

6 min readSep 13, 2022

Virtual reality is undoubtedly a revolutionary technology allowing people to experience almost anything they want without binding to a location. The capabilities of VR have entirely transformed the way we work, study, and entertain. The last mentioned is one of the key industry players, as the global VR gaming market is projected to grow from $7.92bn in 2021 to $53.44bn in 2028.

Hence, many entrepreneurs have ambitions to enter such a blooming market as a virtual reality game development company. However, it’s vital to launch an outstanding product so that you can compete with an enormous number of current offerings. So, how hard is it to make a VR game?

In order to learn about the basics and best practices of how to make a virtual reality game, you are welcome to explore this article. Let’s jump into the essentials.

Essential Steps to Build VR Games Efficiently

Do you want to know how to make VR games so that you can stay within budget but satisfy audience needs? A workflow described below can help you organize the process of creating a VR game in the most optimal way.

Preparation

Getting ready to create a VR game takes time and careful work of the entire team, from marketers to testers. Since the carefully conducted pre-production stage can save you plenty of time and material resources on the project, it’s vital not to skip it. So, there’s an essential checklist of things that should be done before any action is taken.

Unique idea generation. Along with a product owner, marketing specialists analyze the VR gaming market and develop a concept that should engage a potential audience. It’s not strictly necessary that the idea should be brand new, however, there should be something distinguishing your project from competitors’.
Platform selection. Find out which virtual reality headset is more prevalent among VR users, and you can increase the number of your game’s potential players in advance. A careful analysis will help you in this crucial decision. For example, the Oculus Quest 2 device was way ahead of other brands and models by sales from Q4 2019 to Q4 2020, according to Statista research.
Drawing talents to a team. Having experienced pros in your project is a must because non-qualified specialists are one of the most common reasons for launch delays as well as excess spending on mistake fixing. Besides, it’s unnecessary to overpay for employees with high compensation expectations, as there are plenty of other, more optimal options like outsourcing or hiring foreign experts with a lower price per hour rate.
Game design document creation. Technical requirements, game logic, visual concepts, and the like should be determined and recorded in a GDD (game design document). This paper is also a detailed strategy that is thought out well, so your developers should follow it in order to achieve an expected result with minimal divergences.
Test design document. Similar to GDD for developers, testers should prepare a detailed strategy for quality control as well. Usually, this document consists of technical information about a project and the general formulation of testing tasks. This step is in advance to start testing once a first code unit is ready.

Production

So, once you know the theoretical part of how to create a VR game, it’s time to take action. Depending on the tech stack your team would work with, the workflow may differ slightly. Usually, most specialists choose one of the two popular game engines to make a VR game without excess difficulties — Unity or Unreal Engine (UE).

Basically, these pieces of software are similar in capabilities, but they are still used for different project types. Making VR games with Unity is more suitable if you want to create a virtual reality game as a mobile application. At the same time, VR game development with Unreal is primarily suitable for high-quality consoles and desktop experience creation.

Aside from this, the key stages to building a VR game are similar to any software chosen. 3D modeling artists create visual content (environments, characters, props, etc.), animating it according to the game requirements, as well as the other front-end parts like user interface design, menu section, etc. Both Unity and UE offer marketplaces of ready-made assets so that you don’t have to create content from scratch but simply customize the ready one.

Then, the back-end work takes place, which means combining all the visuals and actions according to a script and transforming them into code language. When you create VR games in the game engines we’ve mentioned before, you can use many tools and SDKs to set up the environment and get the finest virtual reality product. In addition, once a part of code is built, it has to be checked on bugs with the Unit testing type.

Post-production

Once developers assume their code is ready and works well, testers prepare their litmus papers (testing techniques and tools) to check the functionality and sustainability of a game under different conditions. Testing VR games, specialists are searching for bugs that are unexpected results from interaction with a product in order to return some code units to developers for fixing.

A game that’s carefully tested as well as proved its excellent functionality and user experience is launched on the market. However, the development team’s work isn’t even close to being finished. The hard work of improving a product and maintaining the high quality goes on permanently. Developers add new features while testers do regressive testing to ensure the code isn’t broken by constantly modifying separate units.

5 Best Practices for Making VR Games

There’s no secret that any process has the best ways of accomplishing it. Usually, the knowledge of helpful details comes with experience — multiple mistakes made to find the best solutions for particular tasks.

Luckily, the internet era makes it possible to save time on mastering game development on your own, as plenty of experts are sharing their knowledge for free. Thus, specialists from Game-Ace have highlighted the top 5 tips for beginners of VR game development and beyond.

1. Make a decent interactivity level. This may sound obvious, but VR games require a special focus on interactivity. Since VR technology is designed for getting an ultimate experience, gamers must feel in a realistic world where objects that look interactive are actually like that.

2. Consider VR limitations. It’s wonderful if you have excellent ideas for a VR project, but it’s better to ensure they suit virtual reality capabilities. Simply put, mechanics and gameplay that are good for desktop games are not for experiencing with VR headsets.

3. Don’t design levels too complicated. It’s harder to orient in a fully immersive and new environment than in a PC, mobile, or even console game. Some users may feel anxious in case they can’t figure out what to do or what to do next. Thus, it’s preferable to create levels less complicated than AAA ones and add some extra hints to potentially confusing game parts.

4. Use positional audio. Basically, positional audio is when sounds come from a source it aims to be from. So, make sure to adjust the audio so that it would correspond to the distance and position of the player in relation to the sound object for better immersion and a more realistic impression.

5. Conduct real-life testing. VR games use most of the human senses, so it’s crucial to test a game in an actual headset, tracking not only gaming user experience but also health state. If a tester gets motion sickness after 10 minutes of the gaming process, that something should be fixed, be it camera settings or mechanics.

Making a VR Game with Professional Support: What to Expect

If you are new to VR game development or simply lack some resources for an efficient process organization, it’s a common practice to partner with a professional company providing outsourcing or/and outstaffing services. In fact, this option has multiple benefits like:

there’s no need for you to conduct recruitment to find the best-in-class specialists, as they are already checked and hired by a specialized company;
outsourcing companies already have all the hardware and software for efficient VR game development;
cost savings on full-time salaries, PTOs, perks, office rent, training for in-house employees, and the like.

In order to get the VR development off your shoulders, opt for Game-Ace — a pro-innovative and robust game development company with 17 years of experience. Being experts in Unity and Unreal engine, we design VR games of the next generation that provide its gamers with an outstanding experience.

Originally published at https://game-ace.com.