The Home Stretch: Testing, Testing, and More Testing

This week has been devoted to testing and tweaking, for both hardware and software. Upon first test, I immediately realized that the Oculus wire was both too short and at too low a height to allow players to properly spin in a chair. To this end, I used hdmi and usb extension cables and ran them through a lighting boom to create a cable origin above the player’s head. However, I found through this process that, when only using an hdmi extension, the Oculus signal is not powerful enough to actually reach the headset. Thus, an hdmi repeater was also needed to amplify the signal and allow for visuals in the VR headset.

After ensuring that the hardware functioned properly, testing became an iterative process. Non-VR players said they felt like they weren’t doing enough, so I added new responsibilities (switching ammo) and created decoy asteroids to necessitate greater communication. Testers also said that the difficulty was too easy to start and ramped up too fast, so I adjusted spawn interval values to create a smaller, smoother curve. Testers complained about not being able to see ending text, so I made it smaller and moved it back. Though iterating like this was a very time consuming process, it ultimately allowed me to hone in on individual issues and create a more polished game.