Our MVP presentation didn’t quite go as expected. In hindsight, I understand that there were too many things going on at once, and it lent that particular sprint to a wide set of failures. For one thing, we changed over an entire scene, meaning that the entire 3D environment was built up from scratch with new assets, new lighting, etc. Even with keeping it very simple, collecting new assets, building and then passing between team members proved time consuming. On top of that, we rebuilt our interaction system to utilize grabbing with hand gestures. This proved to be more complicated as expected because our initial set of VR plugins (the default Oculus OVR set) proved insufficient for that task. We went through two more before settling on one that was robust and lacking significant bugs. We then had to rebuild our puzzles and retest, and these last two steps are proving extensive; we are still going through these to eliminate any bugs and confirm a consistent and polished experience.
In terms of personal management, I certainly put too much on my plate at once and needed to reduce the expectation for the MVP; considering that our first demo worked well and was a complete playable scenario, it seems silly that the second demo was exponentially more complex. At the same time, I feel that the success of the first demo may have made us inflate our ambitions for the second demo. As it is, now that we have the scene laid out and interactions placed in the new demo, we are consciously trying to limit the features we add one at a time and testing thoroughly in between. Though the project is currently in a buggy state, I am confident that we’re in good shape for a workable project as we can focus on debugging our current features (without adding much new) and then polishing as much as possible.
