After passing through several other studios, ForwardXP ended up with ownership of Please Don't Touch Anything 3D. It was released in 2016. VR has advanced considerably since then, so in 2022 we decided to give it some much-needed updates, bug-fixes, and modernizations.
It was a tall order! PDTAVR had been built with some of the very first VR toolkits publicly available, and updating them introduced all kinds of bugs that needed to be fixed. But once the hard work was done we were able to start adding new things. In addition to fixing bugs, my main responsibility was designing a new grab system.
Grabbing in VR is one of the most crucial interactions to get right. Originally you had to actually move your hand to objects to grab items, unless an invisible raycast was pointed directly at an object and you happened to press "grab" at the right moment (this system was dubbed the Finglonger by the creators, which I can certainly appreciate, even if it was basic). I took heavy inspiration from Robo Recall and added a ring that moves around and shows you which object you're going to grab. It finds all objects in a cone from your hand and calculates their grab priority by combining distance and dot product.
Video showcasing the new grabbing system
This is my first professional game where I'm listed in the credits! One of our QA members, Kate Barker, made amazing drawings for the main PDTAVR team members.
