Glop Shop

Overview

Glop Shop is a Virtual Reality experience developed to observe the players interaction with problems in their environment. The player has to prepare the shop for opening as they go through a series of minigames/puzzles in order to progress.

Gameplay Showcase

Physics Based Buttons

When first brought on to this project, Glop Shop’s performance even on PC VR was extremely poor. Framerate were very low and the choppy gameplay not only made it hard to play but also induced motion sickness. I reconfigured architecture of the game and optimized core features to bring the game to a stable framerate that even felt good on stand alone VR devices that have a lot less computing power.

VR is about immersion and feeling like you are truly interacting with the world. Because of this I put some care into making sure that the way you interact with the buttons on the cash register felt real. When pressing the buttons you have to actually push them down like in real life, and only after that the press will register, adding realism and satisfaction to that interaction.

Takeaways

Glop Shop was a project I was brought on to around half way into development. When I first joined the team, the game was extremely choppy, unoptimized and not user friendly. I spent a lot of time cleaning up redundant code, configuring the engine to run smoothly on the Quest 2, and rebuilding some gameplay systems in order to create a smoother and more realistic user experience.

I was not able to get to optimizing everything, but working on this project has helped me drastically improve my understanding of codebase and graphics optimization. This experience also showed me the importance of modular code, and the Open Closed principle due to the fact that the initial spaghetti code made it very difficult to scale the project to it’s final demo form because all the systems relied on each other. This made creating new puzzles and editing old ones very difficult.

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