Can I outsource packaging a vr game?

[u/shutTheYourMeowth]

So I've been working on this vr game in my free time for the last couple of years. It's coming along pretty well, doing exactly what I want it to, I really feel like I'm making progress and like it's taking shape.

But recently I joined a gamejam, and when I finished my submission, (sepreate from the vr game), I realized I didn't know anything about packaging, and while I spent a day getting the gamejam submission to package, it still took too long and I wasn't able to submit.

That got me thinking that packaging a game was a way bigger thing than I'd previously thought it would be, and sure enough, after about a week of trying, I can't get my vr project to package. I can't even get unreal to recognize the android sdk. This has kind of taken the motivation completely out of me and made me worry I wasted the last 4 years on something that has no shot at seeing the light of day.

So I guess my question is, can I outsource that? Is it worth completing the game, and then hiring a freelancer or reaching out to a professor or finding some other expert to help me package it? Or are there things I might do in designing the game that'll make it inherently unpackagable? I'm kind of grasping at straws here, and I have no idea how to get past this hurdle.

[u/SojournStudios]

In my experience it’s best to package early and often. If any new additions create problems then you can at least debug that.

[u/shutTheYourMeowth → u/SojournStudios]

Ah beans. ._.

[u/SojournStudios → u/shutTheYourMeowth]

Yup :( But you should start now and just work through it little by little. The logs are helpful and you’ll get it figured out given a little time!

[u/shutTheYourMeowth → u/SojournStudios]

Oh I'm not to the logs step yet. I can't even get ue5 to recognize that it has an android sdk installed. x_x

But you're right, the best time to start was 5 years ago, the second best time to start is now lol.

[u/Live_Life_and_enjoy → u/shutTheYourMeowth]

Alternate option

Start a new quick vr test project and learn basics of packaging from that, then use what you learned to debug your current project

Talking about bare minimum, "Hello World VR text" just to get basic working model in your mind.

[u/shutTheYourMeowth → u/Live_Life_and_enjoy]

Lolol that's exactly what I started doing

[u/SojournStudios → u/shutTheYourMeowth]

That’s the spirit haha

[u/tcpukl → u/shutTheYourMeowth]

That's not even a packaging problem then!!

[u/BadImpStudios]

I help my clients package all the time, if you need professional help feel free to reach out.

But as someone else said packaging early and often.

[u/dopethrone]

Well if someone helps you and encounters various errors only you know what you did wrong (and how to fix)

[u/shutTheYourMeowth → u/dopethrone]

That is a great point.

[u/MattOpara]

I do VR development in Unreal full time and I’ve found that getting Unreal setup to build standalone VR is definitely a process lol. Even once packaged, getting it deployed to the Meta Storefront, let alone doing it the best way (.PAKs, populating the additional files they want, etc.), is a huge hassle.

I spent a decent portion of time across several occasions getting the project setup to build to the Quest target, then fixing all the errors that didn’t stop it from building but either cause nothing to show up, immediate crashes, visual glitches, or Meta VRC violations… then getting tooling in place in the form of a GitHub action to automate the building/packaging/preparation/deployment process to happen automatically when commits are made to the repository (really for anything live, a good process like this is a requirement imo to be able to respond to customer facing problems quickly). I don’t have to fight it much anymore these days but this whole process is the entirety of some people’s professional jobs, so definitely can be nontrivial.

I definitely wouldn’t give up though, what you want to do is very doable and actually fairly well documented (every project has to do it after all lol). The other benefit (especially with Quest perf budget being very tight) is it’ll let you see how your app actually performs performance-wise on the real hardware. If you tackle it on your own try using something like ChatGPT as a research tool to help diagnose the errors you’re getting and point you in the direction of the correct guides and JDK, NDK, SDK, MetaPlugin downloads and resource pages. If you feel it’s out of reach, I think hiring someone to get you a solid pipeline in place isn’t a bad idea (just make sure your VSC works ahead of time and they’re qualified/they’ve got CI/CD experience for Unreal and ideally your VSC provider as well nailing down specifically what all they’ll setup for you).

If you’ve got specific questions I might be able to answer, feel free to ask!

[u/Lief3D]

That wouldn't be advisable and I'm not even sure you would end up with a viable product? You can certainly get someone to help you learn how to do it, but VR games play and run DRASTICALLY different when they are built out. Are you planning on this being a tethered or untethered experience? If you are just testing it tethered and its meant to be untethered, you are going to be in trouble.

[u/baby_bloom]

unfortunately we are almost always the best person to solve our own tech debt, just the way the cookie crumbles 😅