Pirate Rush VR

Overview

Slice inbound fruit with a sabre, shoot barrels with a flintlock, dodge cannon fire from the towers around you, and chain clean hits into a score multiplier. Pirate Rush VR is my engineering thesis: a standalone arcade high-score game running straight on the Oculus Quest 2 as a sideloaded APK, no PC tether. Because the thesis centred on comfort, I added configurable locomotion, snap and smooth turning, and a comfort mode that reduces simulator sickness.

📄 Read the full thesis (PDF)

Technical Highlights

• Runtime mesh slicing with the divergence theorem. The sabre cuts arbitrary fruit meshes live along the blade’s swing plane using EzySlice, then gives each half its own collider and rigidbody so the two pieces fall apart naturally. Scoring a clean cut on an irregular mesh is the harder part, since a bounding box tells you nothing about where the blade passed, so I compute the mesh’s exact volume with the divergence theorem (one signed tetrahedron per triangle) and compare both halves against a tolerance tuned per difficulty. Code in Sabre.cs.
• Analytic ballistic aiming. Cannon towers solve for launch velocity from kinematics (v_y = sqrt(-2gh) for a target apex height) to loft projectiles at the player along configurable arcs, in CannonShooting.cs.
• Data-driven projectiles. Each projectile is a ScriptableObject carrying an effect chain such as damage, heal, or freeze, so a new behaviour is a new asset rather than new code. See Projectile.cs.
• Stable swipe velocity. Valve’s VelocityEstimator samples the blade tip into a circular buffer to give a reliable slash-speed reading, which the XR toolkit does not expose directly at the resolution the slicing needs.
• Slow motion without breaking input. SlowMotionManager runs its freeze ramps on Time.unscaledDeltaTime, so the effect stays wall-clock accurate even while Time.timeScale is bent.

Learnings

Authoring gameplay as ScriptableObjects (difficulty tiers, projectile effects, combo sequences) held up well through iteration, so late rebalancing came down to editing data rather than touching code.