The longest project I've worked on with ForwardXP was for the port of Arashi: Castles of Sin - Final Cut. I was on the project for over a year from November 2022 to January 2024. It was quite an experience! Originally made in Unity for the PSVR1, we were tasked with making ports for PSVR2, Quest 2, Quest 3, Pico, and PCVR. We were also asked to add new mechanics to each of the bosses.
I was mainly in charge of the PCVR port. In addition to fixing dozens and dozens of bugs both old and new, I added localization support using the Steamworks API and hooked up several of the bosses to use their new mechanics.
I'm most proud of a hack I discovered with the VR service we were using for PC: OpenXR. For some reason the API provides absolutely no way to know what model of headset you're using, which was a problem because we wanted to show device-specific button hints in the tutorials. After a lot of investigation, I found out that certain functions meant for debug-purposes only could be used to divine the specific headset being used. Doing the impossible felt pretty good!
Unfortunately, the game did not perform very well. The criticism was mainly that the game just felt really old. VR games have advanced very rapidly, and a lot of the old practices just don't feel very good to play anymore. Despite our studio recognizing this problem very early in development, we weren't given permission to modernize the mechanics.
I learned a lot from this game. I think my three biggest takeaways are:
1) Try to make things yourself rather than combining a bunch of asset store plugins.
2) If possible, don't have two separate version of the project for high-fidelity and low-fidelity that you have to duplicate changes between.
3) Haru (your pet wolf) is a very good girl.
A screenshot from the Steam page for Arashi: Castles of Sin - Final Cut
My dogs would fight every morning in standup and it became tradition to take a blurry screencap
