VR and More Gravity

(Click or tap to enlarge)

As I continued experimenting with gravity bubbles, a recurring challenge was the difficulty in perceiving (on a computer monitor) whether they were changing size or changing distance. To mitigate this, I spent some time updating the VR build, and can now run the game on my Meta Quest headset. This has made diagnostic work much easier, and should help facilitate a VR release sometime later in 2026. Meanwhile, notable changes in this demo would include:

• Gravity bubbles can be inflated by holding the right mouse button. They will be held at their current size when the button is released, and will detach and begin to deflate when the right button is pressed again.
• The size and resolution of the health and energy meters has been slightly increased.
• The homing range of the energy orbs has been doubled (they’ll come to you from farther away).

It should also be noted that there is a known bug which will cause the game to lock up if you shoot a cube which is inside a gravity bubble. You’ll need to Alt-Tab out and close the process from the task bar if this happens. This will be fixed in the next release. I’m also seeing some initial hiccups when the first gravity bubble is spawned, and I’ll need to figure out what is causing that (it doesn’t recur, even when the game is quit and restarted, so something seems to be getting cached at the OS level).

The gravity bubbles themselves are still very much a work-in-progress (most of my work has been elsewhere), but they are kinda fun to play with right now, and can break the game in some rather interesting and possibly entertaining ways.

Other under-the-hood improvements:

• The game is now capable of running at different frame rates, without affecting the speed of the physics simulations or other systems.
• I performed an audit and clean-up of the 3D models used by the game - these files had become cluttered and inconsistent as I moved between different file formats initially.
• The game logic now has easy access to the color, transparency, and other aspects of the objects being rendered. I expect this to bear much fruit next week.
• Overall code quality and maintainability has been further enhanced in many areas.

Download link is available from the Ko-Fi post.

(Archived gamedev post from 2025-09-05)

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