Reiterative design in VR ?

[ArsDigita]

Just curious how people who have been doing this a while design their games/experiences, workflow etc?

I love that blueprint oriented UE encourages change-test-fix-test, cycle rinse & repeat.
However while doing stuff for the Vive, it becomes annoying to slap the HMD on for every little tweak.

How do any of you tailor your workflow to accommodate VR better?

For a VR specific title I worry the hassle of setting up a secondary control scheme would not be worth the hassle, or is it?

Would appreciate ANY insight into workflow from others since I am very new to Vive/Occulus.

[Dannington]

The hmd off/on is a bit irritating - I spend time working on stuff without the hmd required for lengths of time between hmd required bouts. The most irritating bit for me is having to restart the crashed vive drivers quite often, which force-closes the editor (at least in 4.11)

[Slayemin]

I only put in the HMD if I really need to see how something looks or feels in VR. Otherwise, I just play the game using the "New Editor Window (PIE)". Most of the time, the modifications I do to my game have less to do with VR and more to do with general game play (such as, "make sure the monster spawns at the correct location with the correct rotation").

The other thing I look at very closely is the GPU Performance Visualizer and frame rates in PIE, in addition to shader complexity. Just because I want to put something into the scene doesn't mean I'm going to be allowed to do it in VR without killing performance...

If I have to rapidly iterate on something in VR, I make sure to keep the HMD on my forehead and try to iterate as quickly as I can (tweak, test, tweak, test, etc). If the iteration between tweaking and testing goes on for longer than a minute, I take off the HMD. Some days, I can be working on my game and testing stuff without ever having to put on the HMD.