This study sought to assess difficulties involved in implementing a virtual reality SDK inside an existing C++ game engine. After succeeding around halfway through development, personal VR curiosities led to adding positional audio. The study compared Rift’s LibOVR to Vive’s OpenVR and the mobile Gear VR.

Hembleciya has players explore a traditional but heavily data-driven roguelike, themed around dreams. The game applies the AI behavior system’s extensibility to add absorbing and terraforming abilities to dream enemies, overwriting a portion of the map with a developer-made dream map parsed from XML.

SimplerMiner emulates features deconstructed while directly observing the sandbox game Minecraft. With the exception of libraries to load audio and image files, the C++ codebase implements the 3D game’s core from scratch, then supplemented by gameplay elements like villages and other dimensions.

This links to an in-progress journal of research and development into finding a meta-model for coding game studies structures into a game. Diving deeply into model-driven engineering and its young games application of "model-driven game design," the broad goal is to improve theory's usefulness to practice.