Project 3: Proposal

VR Foosball

Target platform would be the HTC Vive via SteamVR (like we had done for project 2).

It would be developed in Unity3D and would utilize Blender and maybe SketchUp for modelling.

Why VR foosball? I wanted either a table hockey or foosball game to play at home, but none of my friends live near me so it would be a waste of space and money. The summer of 2018 I interned with Discover Financial Services and lived at the Residence Inn with some of the other interns. So there I had friends, but no table. I started developing a foosball game and achieved a decent amount of functionality but I had encountered a physics issue and couldn't solve it because I had got busy with the internship. Also it just didn't feel playable using a keyboard to select a rod and using the arrow keys to rotate the highlighted rod. Playing it via VR on the HTC Vive would be SO much better! And since I built the foosball table using real life dimensions for everything it should be scaled correctly to add to the realistic experience.

So we would have a good base to work off of for project 3, though there's a lot of work to still be done. We would need to finish functionality, add menus and link options selected in those menus to gameplay (Number of goalies on goalie rod, jersey color, etc.), add an environment and sound effects, and of course, the hardest part of all, making it able to accommodate 2 players at once. We would still need to make a decision on exactly how to implement that but my current train of thought is: 2 players in the same virtual environment at the same time (standing 3 feet away from each other) solves the issue of not having a table, but what about not having friends in close proximity? We could also set up multiplayer to be 2 people who are miles apart, playing in their own virtual environments but having player 1's effects on the game's state (turning rod) update the game's state in player 2's game (player 2 sees player 1's rod turning), but this may not be feasible with network lag. Also both of my computers have garbage graphics cards (NVS 300), so I wouldn't notice true performance issues until testing on the class PC (Which I plan to do a few times). To resolve this we could initially have some kind of AI play against the player, until we implement multiplayer.

Despite the issues that need to be resolved and the decisions we still have to make, I feel that as we are given almost a month to complete it, it's still doable.

I envision it to be similar to, but hopefully with more options and more fun, than this:

Steam - https://store.steampowered.com/app/779730/Foosball_VR/

Their website - http://www.foosball-vr.com/