Someone made a VR Animal Crossing in Unity and it’s hilariously bad
A Japanese YouTuber created a VR version of Animal Crossing, the trailer of which went viral as soon as it was posted on October 26. The catch is, the developer is a complete novice, and the development period of the game lasted a total of seven days. The game has been making the rounds on social media for how gloriously it fails at almost everything.
Japanese VR enthusiast and YouTuber @mirais_vr set out on a challenge to create a Unity game in only 7 days as a complete beginner at game development. His experience up to that point included having “set up an avatar in VR Chat” and having once “read 10 pages of a book on Unity.” For the project, he decided that creating a game from scratch would be a bit too challenging, and settled on creating a VR version of Nintendo’s Animal Crossing.
As mentioned, mirais_vr used Unity to create his masterpiece, as well as a Meta Quest 2 headset. He seems to struggle before things even start, as choosing the right version of Unity proves more confusing than one would imagine.
To recreate the environment of Animal Crossing, he uses free assets from the Unity Asset Store and BOOTH generously, successfully getting a forest, cottage as well as bootleg versions of Roald, Rosie, Resetti and other characters set up in the world. The characters don’t really interact or do anything, but the developer makes it so that you can carry them and rub them together as a form of communication.
As for gameplay elements, there is unfortunately no interior design to be done as going into your house makes you clip into emptiness, but other fun activities such as catching bugs with your net, watering the flowers and fishing can be done. Due to some difficulties in getting things to work, the watering can and net for catching bugs are both gravity-less, so letting go off them makes them enter an infinite fall. Also, accidentally touching bugs with the handle of the net makes them disappear into thin air. Getting too close to the flowers with your watering can can make them roll off the screen like tumbleweed. The developer also prepared a variety of eerily realistic fish to be caught, but they seem to just kind of be suspended above the sea.
As knowledge of C# is needed to do programming in Unity, mirais_vr had to make use of ready-made scripts available online for his game, but as there were inevitably scripts he couldn’t find online, he tried having ChatGPT do some of the coding instead. He mentions that having no background knowledge of the programming language made it difficult to correctly prompt the AI, so getting the artificial intelligence to come up with scripts proved quite challenging.
An instance where he had to give up having a legitimate script was the element of chopping lumber with an axe. In absence of a proper falling motion for when the axe cuts down a tree, mirais_vr made it so that trees lose their gravity when you cut them, which results in the trees launching off like missiles as soon as they make contact with the axe.
A personal favorite element shown in the trailer is the shovel, which takes the word “dig” to a whole new level. The smallest attempt to dig the ground with the shovel results in the entire island getting dug out from underneath you, after which you fall into an endless abyss. The only way to recover from this state is to end the game and restart.
The developer also adds some original flavor to the game, adding a Pachinko machine into the world, most likely in absence of a slingshot asset (the word for “slinghot” in Japanese is also “pachinko”). The Pachinko machine can’t really be used but you can grab it and throw it to tear down a Balloon Present, though there will be parts flying about.
As soon as the trailer for this revolutionary VR title dropped, it gathered a great response from users, who reveled at the comical ways it fails at most things it attempts to do, especially the aggressive ways objects react with each other and randomly get launched into the distance.
At the same time, given that the developer has 0 experience and invested only 7 days into the project, it’s honestly quite impressive. The more detailed work-in-progress video tells of his struggle against relentless errors popping up, and he also showed a delicate attention to detail in creating a relaxation spot, where he placed a bench and individual trees that sway with the wind together and even added soothing sound effects.
It’s important to note that the game mentioned is fan-made and not intended for release.
