Chicken Tendies VR

This turned out… interesting. After my honors thesis got screwed up by COVID-19, I didn’t want the assets from my dining hall reconstruction to go to waste. I repurposed these for my final Game Programming project into a parody arcade game depicting the wild Thursday night lines for chicken tenders at Worcester dining hall. I really rushed this one, so only the most basic wall/floor assets made it into the game.

This was my first time using the preview of Unity XR Toolkit, as well as using Mixamo. It took time to figure out how to properly import animations from Mixamo in such a way that I could reuse them across multiple avatars, as well as have their root motion working properly so they don’t slide across the floor.

In the end product there are 3 customer types:

• Regular customers (give them a plate with 2 tendies)
• Dancing customers (throw a tendy in their mouth)
• Line cutters (knock them out with a plate or they teal 5 tendies)

You also have to manage the quantity of tendies and plates. You can request refills of each by ringing little bells behind you. The goal is to serve as many tendies as possible within 90 seconds.

I enabled GPU instancing on the materials for the tendies and plates, which gave a huge performance boost. I ran into a bug with the XR Toolkit preview, in that it got very angry when I tried to destroy any XR components, especially XRBaseInteractables. I’m not sure how developers are expected to remove such objects from their scene, so I just let the errors pile up. The game’s performance gradually worsened over time, which I suspect has something to do with that bug.

If I had more time I would add more assets from my Worcester reconstruction, and properly consolidate their meshes and materials to make the environment more performant.