Project Details

Year: 2024

VRider SBK is a Virtual Reality racing game developed for Meta Quest 2 and Meta Quest 3.
It puts players in the seat of a superbike rider, racing in the officially licensed WorldSBK championship.

Players can choose from 5 official superbikes, compete on 12 real-world tracks, and play as one of 23 professional riders from the actual championship.

Key Features

• Single-player modes:

  • Quick Races against AI
  • Time Attack
  • Endurance
  • Tournament
• Synchronous multiplayer on dedicated servers
• Asynchronous multiplayer

The game was built mobile-first, with performance as a priority, fully optimized for standalone devices.
No Quest Link required.

Development Challenges

Performance Optimization on Standalone Devices

Achieving a stable 72 FPS on standalone VR devices like Meta Quest was a major challenge, especially for a fast-paced racing game.
We dedicated a significant amount of time to profiling and performance optimization, working on:

• Reducing draw calls and overdraw
• Optimizing materials and shaders
• Baking lighting and occlusion for large scenes
• Aggressive LOD and culling strategies

These optimizations were crucial to delivering a smooth and immersive experience without sacrificing visual quality.

Motion Sickness Prevention and Immersive Controls

In a high-speed VR racing game, minimizing motion sickness is absolutely critical to ensure a comfortable experience.

We focused heavily on UX and control design, iterating through multiple prototypes to reduce disorientation and increase player comfort.
A key solution was designing a motorbike control system that mimics the real-world body movement of professional riders.

By encouraging the player to lean into turns and remain physically aligned with the bike's motion, we achieved several goals:

• Enhanced immersion and player embodiment
• Reduced sensory mismatch, which helps mitigate motion sickness
• Increased fun factor, making the experience more intuitive and engaging

This player-to-vehicle physical synergy proved to be one of the most effective strategies in addressing VR comfort challenges.

Scalable Multiplayer Infrastructure

Implementing synchronous multiplayer required building a dedicated server architecture capable of scaling efficiently.
We used Amazon GameLift to deploy dedicated servers across multiple AWS regions, ensuring:

• Low latency and geographic coverage for global users
• Scalability to handle spikes in concurrent players
• Cost-efficiency through auto-scaling and flexible fleet management

This setup allowed us to offer competitive online racing with high reliability and minimal maintenance overhead.

Cross-Platform Evolution and High-End Adaptation

As the project evolved, we began porting VRider SBK to high-end platforms such as PC VR (SteamVR) and PlayStation 5 with PSVR2 support.

This transition required rethinking the visual fidelity of the game to meet the expectations of these platforms.
We collaborated closely with artists to establish a robust content pipeline, allowing for the upscaling of:

• Assets and textures
• Materials and lighting
• Environmental and vehicle shaders

To support this graphical leap, we migrated from URP (Universal Render Pipeline) to HDRP (High Definition Render Pipeline).
Despite the technical upgrade, maintaining scalability across devices remained a core requirement.

To address this, we developed in-game benchmarking tools and real-time performance assessment systems, which:

• Dynamically adapt settings to the user’s hardware capabilities
• Help maintain consistent frame rates and user comfort
• Provide feedback loops for QA and optimization across platforms

This approach ensures that players across all supported devices enjoy a smooth and immersive experience, tailored to the power of their hardware.

Lessons Learned & Key Takeaways

1. Designing for Scalable Multiplayer from the Ground Up

One of the most important lessons was learning how to structure a robust and scalable cloud architecture to support online multiplayer from the earliest design stages.

Multiplayer gameplay requires thinking beyond the game loop:
Every component must be built with network efficiency and replication logic in mind. For instance, the motorbike’s physics system posed critical questions:

• What minimal set of data is needed to accurately sync the bike state across clients?
• Is the physics engine deterministic across platforms?
• How can we minimize bandwidth usage while maintaining fidelity?

These considerations helped us design a netcode-friendly simulation architecture, keeping the multiplayer experience smooth and reliable.

2. Building a Flexible Asset Pipeline for Iteration

Working on a multiplatform title with both VR constraints and high-end target platforms taught us the importance of a well-structured asset workflow.

We built a pipeline that allowed non-developers—like artists and designers—to:

• Easily import and update assets directly into the scene
• Preview changes quickly in-engine
• Automate build generation and deployment across devices

This dramatically improved iteration times and team autonomy, while ensuring consistent results across different hardware profiles.

3. Deep Understanding of Player Behavior and Iterative UX Design

Throughout development, we learned the value of understanding our target audience, not just through intuition but through data and playtesting.

We focused on identifying:

• Which features were most accessible or caused friction
• Where players dropped off or lost engagement
• What caused confusion or broke flow

We implemented multiple rounds of user testing at different stages, collected gameplay data, and iterated on flows accordingly.
This helped us refine the user retention loop and made the experience more welcoming and intuitive—especially for players new to VR.