Bendy is not dead! And he's pretty cheap...

Here's a look behind the scenes of BendyVR development. Having got passed the "fundamentals" of a VR port (UI / input / stereo / movement / world scale) its now to tweak the specific weapons and systems of the game. First up is the motion controlled axe. 

In the original game the axe is just an animated object whereby a ray is cast from the player camera (not even the axe) forward by a certain distance at a defined point in the animation. This needed to be entirely changed. 

Having put the axe as a child of motion controller, scaled and positioned it to feel natural I now had to rig the system to perform a collision check at the right point.

Step One in the video show how I am looking to make sure the ray is correctly originating at the top of the axe. The white sphere (dynamically created) shows both the position and size of the ray that is cast (matching the size of the axe head). The red ball shows the direction is is cast and the range. A green ball indicates a hit on a surface or similar.

With that correctly placed, Step Two shows that instead of a long animation based attack, I had to radically shorten the attack cycle and have it triggered by the movement of the controller. I did this via calculating both a positional and angular velocity and setting a threshold for each to trigger an attack. Attack cycles are again shown by creation of a dynamic sphere in the scene. Both of these thresholds can be altered via the VR options, so players can decide how much effort they want to put into swing to perform an attack.

All those things coming together you can see the final product of being able to use the axe as if it was made for VR, with hits being exactly where performed. For those ever looking to get into game development and wondering what is needed for this type of thing the answer is quite boring: A lot of math. 

That's the last "feature" I wanted to put into BendyVR before the Patreon Exclusive 1st Early Access release for mid-tier and up. I now need to prepare the build itself with instructions. It will be the first chapter only, but games you create can be continued normally when subsequent releases come out. More on that very soon. 

This is pretty good timing as Bendy and the Ink Machine is now in the Steam Scream Salefor around £4/€5/$4.50: https://store.steampowered.com/app/622650/Bendy_and_the_Ink_Machine/

I would recommend anyone who wants to play grabbing this now, as you do need the full game to play. If this is unclear it is a PCVR port, so you do need a decent computer. It does not run natively on the Quest. 

-BaggyG