What does the other 10% entail, when creating a VR game vs. a (first-person) 3D environment for PC? I'd never pondered this, and am curious exactly which elements are any different whatsoever. The only obvious thing that comes to mind is making the camera smooth and flexible in terms of variable degrees of leaning/bending/crouching.
You actually want the opposite, as little artificial camera motion as possible. The VR SDKs feed you the camera transform and settings against a reference point so you don’t need to do anything special except render a view from that. The organic platform comes with all the motion smoothing built in. If you watch VR footage you’ll get a feeling for how wobbly people’s heads actually are.
In terms of level design VR has a looot more fidelity of input so the interaction design is richer and consequently there is more to setup. Game spaces tend to be less cluttered and have some slightly distorted dimensions. Both are more noticeable in VR. Games tend to have more fixed sight lines, the player is stood, crouched and maybe prone at most. In VR people will stick their heads everywhere.
Particularly when players have any level of knowledge about what kind of complexities or edge cases are likely involved (eg. any software developer or QA, even if not part of the gaming industry). Or... hell, maybe it's even worse when you have ignorant players who expect the VR environment to mimic real life so perfectly that they get frustrated and can't understand why certain actions aren't supported/working.
The first VR game I got to experience was one of the haunted house horror games, and you're damn right I bent down and tried to shoved my head into an open cupboard just to see if the collision detection stopped at the outer box of the model, or whether my head would be allowed to enter the space. Then repeatedly leaned/shoved my head against VR walls at various angles to see if I could get the camera to clip or bounce/reposition jarringly. Poor, poor developers who have to try and nail all that logic perfectly. It must be so rewarding to see final results when everything works out well, though. :P
