Space CleanUp VR

Mobile VR game
Simulation

The project: Developed during my master's second year with another 2 colleagues. We had to make a narrative driven VR game where the theme was the environment, and opted with using google's cardboard VR due to lack of a better option. In this project I acted as the main designer, programmer, writer and also made the satellite's model.
The game's about collecting trash around the earth's orbit. The story is set in a near future, where we are put in the shoes of a space cleaner, tasked with collecting debris from various spacecraft, and even things like defunct satellites.

The game has 1 level, where we must collect a defunct satellite and clean up the trash around it.
The game contains cutscenes at the start and at the end of the game, and multiple dialogs during gameplay. All of the voice lines during cutscenes are voiced by text-to-Speech software.
Unfortunatly, because the game is on mobile, we never ended up releasing the game to the public.
Gameplay: The player can do a single button press to start moving where they are looking and press again to stop. To interact, the player must do a long press while looking at the object they want to interact with.
Resources are oxygen and health. Oxygen depletes over time and can be replenished in the player's ship. Health must be considered as there are debris flying around space. The player can see their incoming trajectory and must move to evade them.
When collecting debris, they go to the player's backpack, which has limited space. When the backpack's full the player must go back to their ship and store their backpack's contents in the ship's safe.
When the player deposits trash in the ship's safe, they receive money which can be used to upgrade oxygen capacity and backpack capacity.
Development Challenges: The biggest Design challenge was designing the game not just for VR, but for a VR platform that only has 1 button. The head tracking allows for camera input, but we had to make the most out of that 1 button, which is why there's a single click/Long click system for movement and interaction. Menus are also all done ingame through objects inside the player's ship.
This was also my first time creating a complete story and multiple dialogs for a game, which was a challenge in itself. I don't consider myself much of a writer, but it didn't come out all that bad.

I wanted to give the game a sense of scale and dynamism, so I tried to create a moving skybox by making placing a model of the earth, the moon and the sun. I then placed 6 cameras attached to an empty object that rotated around the earth. This created a skybox that moved. But because I was using a cubemap skybox, you could clearly see the seam when an object was passing through the edges of the cameras. The final effect looked really good, but I could never fix the problem with the seams.