In-game screenshot of Beat Saber
Thought Process
I have always found rhythm games to be very fun, and as such I have always been a big fan of spending time at the arcade ever since I was little. Games such as Beat Saber always seemed to draw my attention, and even though I have never personally owned a VR headset, I got the opportunity to try out the game at my friend’s house a few years ago and was instantly hooked. The only issue at the time, though, was that I still had no headset and there was no other place to play it, so my interest in the game died down a bit. Soon after though, the Gameworks near Westlake that I had gone to tens of times in the past had reopened after covid-related closures with a brand new Beat Saber machine.
The reason I chose Beat Saber was partially due to the fact that I was already familiar with and interested in the game, but also because our group project for the same class ended up having a theme of “arcades”, meaning I could do a bit of research and work for my arcade of choice: Gameworks.
Further research for the game included both playtesting for personal experience, as well as finding videos/images of gameplay online to best illustrate my points.
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Problems
As I, again, did not and still do not have a VR headset, it meant I had to find alternatives to recording gameplay myself. Luckily, there is a pretty strong-going Beat Saber online community that posts gameplay videos on YouTube and such, so finding what I needed ended up being not as hard as I initially thought. Furthermore, some gameplay elements and UX/UI elements are present in one version of the game and not the other (i.e. portrait mode arcade screen vs. at-home landscape screen), so finding a way to combine those experiences into one thought took a bit of effort.