Half Life Alyx’s amazing VR gameplay
Around the same time a new chapter of my favorite game franchise was launched; Half Life Alyx, which made me super hyped for VR. And so, I set myself the challenge to build my own VR game during the lockdown. It was a decent challenge, as I had no prior knowledge on how to make videogames at all. And the only programming skills I had was a bit of HTML & JavaScript coding for UI prototyping.
The great thing of working at TomTom is they really support personal development. I knew I could utilize the same skill set for my new position and therefore I got the ability to also spend some working hours on developing these skills.
So, in 2020 I basically learned to code in C# through working with Unity.
Adding the third dimension
For my first ‘VR game challenge’, I decided to build the apartment I just bought in VR. Not really a game, but it would force me to learn the basics. Unity’s learning platform helped me a lot with this, kudos to them to make it freely available when the pandemic started. When I signed the contract for the apartment, I only had a 2D top-view blueprint of the place, not even a 3D rendering or impression (only my imagination). But several weeks later I was walking through my future apartment in VR! And boy, that was interesting…