I'm making a VR game where you're a wizard who can cast spells with your hands. It's really awesome to be able to use your own hands and have them show up in the game. It creates an extra layer of immersion, which is pretty awesome. The problem with VR is that you've got goggles strapped to your face and they cover your eyes so that you can't see where your mouse and keyboard are. Moving your hands back and forth between leap motion controlled virtual hands and back to the mouse and keyboard is really a bad game design solution because you can't see where to place your hands. You have to fumble around for the mouse and keyboard and hope that your fingers return to the standard WASD controls. I want to get away from the mouse and keyboard completely, but that comes with some changes in game design and input.
I've been trying to figure this out for months and still have no good ideas: What's the most intuitive way to make a player controlled character walk around in game if the only input method is through the leap motion controller?
Is it even possible? Is this a severe limitation of Oculus Rift + Leap Motion? With other VR setups (Vive), you have body position tracking and hand held controllers. You can move your character around by walking in the real world, or by using the D-pads on the controllers.
What I don't want is a character moving around on rails. That's just dumb and undermines the whole point of being able to use your hands. The addition of hands in a game should be something which adds to the game experience, and the designer should not have to subtract from the game design to compensate for any input limitations. As a gamer, I'd rather be able to move my character around freely in the game world and not have the novelty of Leap Motion controller input,
Anyways, here's my scenario:
You're a wizard. You walk around and cast spells. You can create a fireball by closing your fist. Then, you pretend to throw it by moving your closed fist through the air. When you open your fist, you release the fireball and its movement trajectory is based on your hand movements. Fancy. It works and it's fun. You throw your fireball (and other assorted spells) at zombies, which are slowly wandering towards you. Eventually, you'll want to move yourself to get away from the zombies. Now, the playing field is limited to a graveyard, which is surrounded by 4 foot walls (to keep the player in).
Here are some ideas I've come up with:
Magic Carpet: Since you're a wizard, you can ride a magic carpet. You control the carpet by rotating a magical globe, which gives the carpet velocity in the rotation direction. This sucks because you will glide too much and you can't take your carpet indoors very well. Also, if I was a wizard riding a magic carpet, I'd just float to about 20 feet above ground and throw fireballs at zombies with impunity. The zombies could never reach me, and that's no fun for the zombies.
Horse Riding: Similar to the Hollow game, you ride a horse around. You steer the horse with reigns. Is it easy to do? Not really. Also, creating a fist would get confused with spell casting. Are you trying to cast a spell or steer the horse? Also, horses don't work well indoors. They poop everywhere.
Finger Pointing: You just point your pointer finger in the direction you want to move. How does character rotation work? I don't know. But you can't move and shoot at the same time.
Has anybody else figured out a good movement solution which is responsive and makes sense to the player?
I'm starting to think that the Vive Controllers or the Oculus Rift controllers would be a superior input solution because it gets past the limitations of using just your hands. My spell casting system just wants to know when the player initiates a spell and what the hand velocity is. If I wanted to add tracing runes to select spells or some sort of hand gesture, LM might be the best bet, but... that design also may be too complicated for the majority of the player base and add more frustration and detract from the focus of the game (killing zombies with magic spells).
