Developer Perspective: Insights for Porting from Oculus Go to The Rift Platform

To get our maiden VR release running smoothly on Oculus Go, we had to do a lot of research: you may have already seen some of the available articles from Unity about optimizing your game for mobile hardware, or this OC5 video presentation about porting your Rift game to Quest. At Thunderbox we always try and do something a little different, so this post is going to feel a bit like those... only backwards.

How hard can it be to take a VR experience designed to run on a mobile device, and upgrade it for a ninja PC? Not that hard actually... provided you know what you are doing, and focus on delivering maximum user bang for your dev buck.

Our title, Tsuro: The Game of The Path, is based on the family board game of the same name, so the core gameplay is quite simple: players take turns to put tiles on a board, the game pieces follow the paths on those tiles, and are removed if a path takes them over the edge. The winner is the last player still in play. The virtual version of Tsuro is 70 times larger than life, and set in an ancient Japanese temple. Because of the aforementioned simplicity of gameplay, we focused on improving the immersion and environmental fidelity.

As you can see below, Tsuro has a great low-poly style, that looks awesome on Go; today we will outline the steps we took to make it worthy of the extra horsepower on the Oculus Rift...

The first thing we tackled was 6DOF head tracking and the Oculus Touch controllers. We built Tsuro on a PC, we already had most of this implemented to speed up our iteration time, but there were a few finishing touches needed. As our environment had slopes, we scripted a simple height adjustment so users could walk around the rooftops and ramps. As the Go version of Tsuro had been designed to work with a single controller, we also had to make sure players could easily switch between left and right-handed control at will, along with having the option to choose Oculus Touch controllers for Rift or Rift S (auto detection is currently scheduled for v 1.38 of the Unity Integration).

Ultimately the most crucial update to the controllers was adding decent haptic feedback. The explosion below is so much cooler when you can feel it…

It’s fairly easy to use your existing audio files to drive the controllers’ haptics, but we found that a more exaggerated waveform felt much better, so we used a state-machine to directly control the rumble, and generated waveforms on the fly using our tweening system (the one for the explosion is shown below). This gave us precise control over the force feedback, with a faster iteration time. If you want to learn more about the custom tweening system, check out my previous Oculus developer guest post: Insights from Creating an Oculus Go Puzzle Game.

I cannot stress the difference good haptics make to a game - once we implemented this, everything felt so much more “real”.

On a separate note, at this point you should have a version of your game that will be pretty tight on Oculus Quest. This would be a good time to branch your repository accordingly.

Easy, eh? Alas no... the change in lighting response meant that our diegetic UI was totally unreadable. We had to carefully tune the lighting (more on that later), tweak the UI materials, and recolour a good chunk of the interface, just to get it legible again. Once we had the UI back, we tuned the material properties of certain elements to give a little more polish, and replaced the mobile water shader with something a bit fancier. Watch out with water: reflection and refraction require specific shader tweaks to work in VR.

Now that you have those fancy shaders, you can leverage them even further by adding dynamic lights. Oculus recommends a maximum of 3 dynamic lights, but, as our environment was optimized for mobile, we were able to get away with even more. These were used for torchlight effects and to make the game pieces cast their own glow. We experimented with Forward and Deferred rendering, but there didn’t seem to be much of performance difference either way.

We switched out our mobile skybox to a dynamically generated one, with drifting clouds, a sun that is in the correct place for the lighting, and a tunable gradient for smooth fog blending. Then we swapped most of the low-poly, unlit effects for higher detail versions with fancy, lit shaders (most notably on the petals, dust motes and cauldrons).

Finally, you get to use image post-processing! This is easy to set-up and can make a massive difference to the look of your game. Again, the trick here is to not go overboard: a lot of these effects can look really bad in VR (depth of field for example) but we deployed careful colour grading and a subtle bloom to give Tsuro a more dream-like vibe for Rift.

The Oculus Debugging Tool is extremely handy for showing performance data while playing your game; weirdly, we noticed that our title ran a lot smoother when launched from the Oculus menu, as opposed to running the .exe directly.

Once you are confident that your game is hitting 90FPS, it’s time for the final squeeze...

As an added bonus, with a little optimization this enhanced menagerie managed to find its way back into the Go version.

Finally, we took a little time to create some Custom Items for Oculus Home. We used Boxshot to convert the standard FBX format (usually used for our game assets) into GLB files that we could test locally, then upload to the Oculus Dash. We linked the items to some of Tsuro’s cooler achievements, and now players can unlock the Tsuro board game and some lovely Japanese dioramas to decorate their virtual space.

...and if you don’t want players to have to work for your beautiful Custom Items, you can now assign them directly to your game.

We are thrilled to present “The Game of The Path” on Rift, and hope the enhanced experience will enthrall gamers even more than its mobile counterpart already has.

If you’d like to learn more about making great, accessible VR experiences, leave a comment below, follow @Thunderbox_ent on Twitter, or drop me a line on dan [at] thunderboxentertainment.com - I’m always happy to chat!

- Dan Taylor

Design Director