I only got to play the Ranger and the Barbarian since I joined so late.
As a Ranger, I was a bit annoyed that the arrow can only be pulled back at a fixed angle. The angle the Bow was relative to the controller made it hard for me to aim straight. The way The Lab implemented archery felt much better and in control because both hands were used to determine the arrow’s trajectory. Another thing I found less intuitive was when I pulled the arrow half way, I expected the arrow to shoot with less strength (shorter distance, slower travel). But nothing shot out and I thought I was lagging. I think as long as the arrow was pulling on the string, the arrow should fly…However, with the ranger’s current implementation, they would be able to rapidly fire. A way to prevent this could be forcing the ranger to reach for their arrows from a quiver.
At first, I didn’t think the ranger’s trap was a trap. It looked more like a shuriken, but that’s not a big deal. The problem I had was that I dropped it and teleported away. And then it was lost forever . A respawn timer on it might be a good idea.
As a barbarian, it was pretty straight forward, but the small little rabbit monsters were annoying to hit since they’re so small. This made me realize how mob size is a huge factor to consider when making a VR game. I’d suggest either making them bigger overall, or at least make the hitbox bigger. They were even hard to hit as a Ranger.
I’m not sure how in depth you want to go with combat, but being a melee character and simply swinging the controllers to attack isn’t very fun. Adding some shielding mechanics or parrying mechanics would make it much better. I think the implementation in Vanishing Realms did a decent job on it, but it’s not exactly perfect in that game either. Detecting intentional swings from other movements is a really challenging task, and making it feel right will take a lot of play testing.
I’m assuming the inventory is still in development, because I wasn’t able to interact with any of it. But it did look nice! I think what could be helpful is to have the other menu button on the vive controller to bring up character stats or instructions on how to use the current class. I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve already thought of this.
Unfortunately I didn’t get to try the runemage because the server got shut down. While this isn’t exactly a priority in Alpha testing, a simple notification of server shutting down would be nice, or simply booting the player. I was wandering around wondering why my spells weren’t casting and everyone was frozen.
Hopefully I wasn’t able to cast spells because the server was down. If I was suppose to be able to do so anyways, I wasn’t successful at all. I’m not sure how you implemented drawing recognition, but you might want to look into this plugin: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/64218
It’s using a neural network so you just have to pass in multiple amount of the same gesture to train it. But it’s currently really dependent on how the gesture is drawn. So drawing a line from top to bottom is different from bottom to top. A way to work around this is to have a simple animated gif of how each spell should be drawn when teaching the players how to cast spells. It’s a pretty expensive plugin so the choice is up to you. I’m planning to create my own gesture recognition similar to it because I’m a cheap dude .
Anyways, this is a pretty neat demo and I can see myself playing a game like it in the future. I wish you luck!
edit: My thoughts on the locomotion–
It’s pretty standard for VR right now to teleport around. I was a little annoyed with the cooldown because 1. I didn’t know there was a cooldown, 2. The cooldown bar wasn’t intuitive/labeled, and 3. There was a cooldown. I understand that the cooldown is there so players can’t zoom across the map instantly. I personally liked how Vanishing Realms implemented it by making the distance of the line grow over time.
edit edit: Haptic feedback would be great!