Balloon Pop VR

Balloon Pop VR gameplay

Balloon Pop VR started as a virtual reality sandbox of sorts for me to tinker with code eventually destined for my The Gate application. As it progressed, I realized I had created a little mini-game in its own right.

You have three types of weapons you can use to shoot the balloons: a pistol, a sniper rifle, and an assault rifle.

Each weapon uses its own color of ammunition (which in The Gate represents conventional ammo, magical ammo, and tech ammo, respectively). Walk near the ammo to pick it up.

You can also use the joystick or touchpad to slide around the map. (Granted, there isn’t much to do outside of the area you start in.)

Unfortunately it doesn’t seem as though SteamVR and WebGL play nicely together, so I’m not able to present a web version. But if you want to try it out, you can still download the standalone executable file: Balloon Pop VR direct download.

Upcoming Features

The ‘lag’ that carried objects have when you slide around with the joystick really bothers me, and that is high on my priority list to solve. Setting your ‘hand’ as the parent of the held object would fix it, but then you don’t get the built-in physics interactions, which I like. Perhaps I need to bite the bullet and write my own hybrid physics…

You can currently grab the larger weapons with both hands, but there’s a lot of broken functionality there. That’s all up for a re-write.

Its also really tough to use the sniper rifle specifically, since the scope is completely opaque. I’m planning to make the scope actually function as a scope.

A radial menu as another mechanism to switch weapons, which will be expanded for The Gate to include any sort of wield-able object, such as items or magic-slingers.

Finally, I should probably set the ammo to respawn, since once you run out of ammo there’s not much to do other than restart.