🔗 BigBalloonVR’s GitHub

🔗 BigBalloonVR’s dedicated server GitHub

Introduction

As part of a first-year Master’s course in mobile development, we were tasked with developing an app over a period of 3–4 months. We only had a few hours a week, and the constraint of asymmetry. Based on this premise, one of my classmates and I decided to create a multiplayer game inspired by the famous tower defence game, Bloons Tower Defence. To meet the asymmetry constraint, we opted for a Mobile vs VR duel, in which one player takes on the role of the ‘balloon factory’ and the other plays a defender who must pop them.

Results

We have therefore produced a multiplayer game with a dedicated server using the open-source Godot game engine.

As this game was a university project, it is far from complete, but it enabled us to gain hands-on experience with the new technology of VR and also mobile game development, while also continuing to make progress in multiplayer development.

Through Big Balloon VR, I was able to create, learn and develop my skills, and I carried out the following tasks:

  • Implementing the game’s multiplayer functionality, for both mobile and VR
  • Developing the code and architecture for the dedicated server
  • Implementing movement via arm gestures in VR
  • Developing the entire VR gameplay section

Here is a demonstration video showing what we managed to achieve in this project

Conclusion

Le projet Big Balloon VR m’a permis de mettre un premier pied dans le développement de jeu VR, ce qui était quelque chose qui m’intéressait beaucoup et sur lequel j’ai pris beaucoup de plaisir. Ce fut aussi une première expérience de développement de jeu en réseau avec un serveur dédié, et non P2P, qui m’a permis d’apprendre de nouvelles choses sur le développement en réseau. Pour un projet d’étudiant, le projet a abouti là où nous le voulions et j’ai pu apprendre énormément de chose à refaire ou non. Ce qui, pour moi, est une réussite.

The Big Balloon VR project gave me my first taste of VR game development, which was something I was very interested in and really enjoyed. It was also my first experience of developing a networked game using a dedicated server, rather than P2P, which allowed me to learn new things about network development. For a student project, it turned out exactly as we’d hoped, and I learnt a lot, mostly about what to do again and what to avoid. For me, that’s a success.