Kids These Days... Are Making VR Games?

[kcarbotte]

When you were 14, what was your greatest accomplishment? How many of you can say you wrote an app at 14? Maybe some of you have made a mobile app, but what about a room-scale VR game? I know of one young man who can make that claim.

Kids These Days... Are Making VR Games? : Read more

 

[bloodroses]

Hmm, this looks awfully similar to something else that was already out there, especially if you look at the mods that have been made for it .....

http://store.steampowered.com/app/465780/

They both even have gameboy emulators in them.

 

[kcarbotte]

Hmm, this looks awfully similar to something else that was already out there, especially if you look at the mods that have been made for it .....

http://store.steampowered.com/app/465780/

They both even have gameboy emulators in them.

The primary function of VR Home is to create a virtual room, or building. The GameBoy games and other activities are secondary to the core concept.

 

[LORD_ORION]

Psssht... programming has been dumbed down enough to the point that any "Bro" can be a programmer if they know the IDE's "write my code for me" features.

No internet, a C book, and turbo C libraries, yet made a program... there is a 14 year old who knows programming.

 

[bloodroses]

Hmm, this looks awfully similar to something else that was already out there, especially if you look at the mods that have been made for it .....

http://store.steampowered.com/app/465780/

They both even have gameboy emulators in them.

The primary function of VR Home is to create a virtual room, or building. The GameBoy games and other activities are secondary to the core concept.

You can do the same with New Retro Arcade: Neon as well. It's primary focus may be on video games, but there are other things in there as well such as couches, chairs, pool tables, etc. Floors, walls, ceilings and room layout can be changed/created as well. IE, it the same as VR Home. Especially if you add user submitted mods. The only difference at all is the marketing.

 

[Juusukun]

If stuff like this is popular and it grows, we may find ourselves in a Matrix of our own creation

 

[bit_user]

Belfast, Ireland

Um, does the UK know about this?

Last I checked Belfast was in Northern Ireland. Similar accent, different country.

 

[bit_user]

Psssht... programming has been dumbed down enough to the point that any "Bro" can be a programmer if they know the IDE's "write my code for me" features.

No internet, a C book, and turbo C libraries, yet made a program... there is a 14 year old who knows programming.

Yeah, it's definitely not like the bad old days. The tools are easier, and there's a lot more information that's a lot more accessible. Not just youtube, but stackoverflow, and even google, itself, is a huge programming aid (as in: googling error messages, and searching for instructions on how to do something).

That said, I don't want to detract from his accomplishment. I just think the article plays it up a little too much, since even grade school aged kids are attending coding camps and workshops.

IMO, the article should stick to the facts and not try to grade his effort on a curve. If he's going to put it out there on Steam and charge real money for it, then he should be ready for real critiques and feedback.

Based on the article, I don't see what's compelling about it. It's not a game, per se, and all of the activities listed would be better enjoyed outside VR.

BTW, kids have one advantage working adults don't - free time. I wrote a lot of bad code, when I was around that age, but I could brute force my way through inferior approaches and get them working by virtue of having a sharp memory and lots of free time.

 

[bloodroses]

Heck, I remember when I was programming back in the days, we didn't have engines at all. Instead it was commands like 'Poke' and 'Peek'. After that is was just brute force C (lack of libraries such as opengl, sdl, etc). While there were simple game engines available on the C64, it really wasn't until Doom came around that the idea of a serious, customizable game engine that the average person could use came around.

 

[bit_user]

Heck, I remember when I was programming back in the days, we didn't have engines at all. Instead it was commands like 'Poke' and 'Peek'. After that is was just brute force C (lack of libraries such as opengl, sdl, etc).

Exactly. I had to write my own polygon rasterizer, and taught myself assembly language for that.

Ah, good 'ol VGA mode 13h. Michael Abrash was a god to us, back then.

 

[cryoburner]

"He quit sports to make time for development"

Are we sure that he didn't make time for development just to have an excuse to quit sports? : D

"single-handedly built a room-scale sandbox VR game"

With only the help of the Unity asset store and whoever paid for his expensive VR setup. >_>

While it's certainly cool that he put together a piece of VR software and got it on Steam, being in VR doesn't necessarily make it any more of an accomplishment than if it were any other piece of software. There are plenty of teenage developers and modders, and I imagine there must be other games on Steam (and elsewhere) made by developers in a similar age group. They didn't necessarily put any less effort into their games just because they didn't have access to VR equipment.

 

[mrface]

Seems some people on here a just a little salty when it comes to this young adult. Critiquing the application he has put together is extremely fair and should be taken as criticism and to be expected. Railing on the guy because he took the time to do something, however, is ad hominem and stinks of sour grapes.

Congrats to the guy for doing this, especially at his age, I wouldn't buy the product as I don't think I would ever use it. I do, however, hope it succeeds in his goal.

 

[randomizer]

Headline is a question. Betteridge's law of headlines states that the answer must be "no."

 

[ffrgtm]

According to the dev, he received a $100k internship at stanford for his development efforts. Was that not deemed a worthwhile inclusion in this article?

https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/631252/thanks_from_the_dev_of_vr_home/

 

[cryoburner]

Seems some people on here a just a little salty when it comes to this young adult. Critiquing the application he has put together is extremely fair and should be taken as criticism and to be expected. Railing on the guy because he took the time to do something, however, is ad hominem and stinks of sour grapes.

I don't think people were "railing on him", just pointing out the sensationalism of the story here (The headline didn't help). There are plenty of 14 year olds programming, modding and making games. Judging by the quality of most games in Steam's early access, I would guess that a fair number of them are made by highschool kids. : P Is this a particularly well done game? It may or may not be, but even with the publicity it got, it still only has 15 Steam reviews. It's cool that he's released a VR game, but the article seems to imply that 14 year olds are incapable of such things.

According to the dev, he received a $100k internship at stanford for his development efforts. Was that not deemed a worthwhile inclusion in this article?

This article was written almost two months ago, and only updated the other day to mention a release on Viveport.

 

[bit_user]

just pointing out the sensationalism of the story here (The headline didn't help). There are plenty of 14 year olds programming, modding and making games.

I'll add to this. It seems to be a common trope to write about "whiz kids" doing amazing-sounding things. Sometimes, it turns out the kid isn't really doing anything that amazing, though these types of articles are often too thin on information to tell if they are.

In my experience, the smartest kids are typically quietly skipping grades and entering college at a young age, perhaps winning a few math & science competitions along the way.

Anyway, I posted up software on BBS', when I was a kid. I wasn't very good and didn't attract much interest. I'm not actually saying his implementation isn't good, but based on the description, I just don't see the point of it.

 

[Tech_TTT]

I made my first game at 12 (1992).. that time it was only 2D , and was a plane that drops bombs on fixed / moving targets and with wind effect (wind speed and direction slowing down or accelerating the horizontal bomb speed) ... The player must guess when to release the bomb to hit the target ..

Levels were :

first levels : fixed targets , they get smaller size each level making them hard to hit.

after 30 levels : Moving Targets start appearing ... also change size with leveling up

Wind direction and speed was random each level ... but can become very fast as you level up

 

[bit_user]

I made my first game at 12 (1992)..

That's cool. What language?

I tried to make games. I always wanted to get my friends involved, but none were as motivated as I was and it always ended up fizzling out. The furthest I ever got was making a nice 2D map editor for a sort of Zone 66 clone, if anyone's ever played that. I even had ideas about RTS games, before the genre really blew up.

I also had ideas & even a few cool routines I wanted to make into a demo, but never could get a group together. Probably the best things I did were my poly renderer and my ray-casting clone of the Mars demo (except mine supported looking up & down). Other things included animated fractal rendering (could animate different seed parameters at low zooms, on a Pentium) and realtime pseudo-Perlin noise that was the only software I think I ever actually got money for (an acquaintance of my friend saw it and wanted to pay me for a copy + a few features).

Back then, it was pretty rare to meet people, in person, who knew anything about computers or programming. In my high-school graduating class of 500 kids, I was probably the biggest graphics/game programming geek and one of only a half dozen or so decent programmers. Nowadays, I imagine you could hardly swing a dead cat without hitting a couple kids who fancy themselves the next Mark Zuckerberg.