Up to this point, the game has relied on a left-eye-only ghost piece — a subtle way of encouraging the weaker eye to do more of the perceptual work. It was effective, but only for a while. After enough sessions, I noticed something had shifted. The challenge was still there in theory, but in practice it no longer felt like much of a challenge at all. My brain had adapted.
That raised a more interesting problem: how do you reintroduce difficulty without simply making the game harder in a conventional sense?
The answer, it turned out, was to move away from spatial cues and towards something more meaningful. Instead of only affecting the ghost piece, I began experimenting with colour — specifically, making certain block colours visible to one eye only. This changes the nature of the task quite significantly. It’s no longer just about anticipating where a piece will land, but about actually interpreting what you’re seeing. Colour becomes something that the weaker eye has to contribute to directly.
Getting this working was less straightforward than expected. My first instinct was to replicate the existing setup using Unity layers, but nothing seemed to change. Blocks continued to appear in both eyes, no matter how carefully I configured things. Along the way, I ran into a few smaller issues — duplicating materials in the wrong place, not seeing any debug output because the game only starts properly in-headset, and even a build failure caused by an awkwardly named file. None of these were major on their own, but together they slowed things down.
The real breakthrough came from stepping back and looking more closely at how the project was already rendering per-eye differences. Rather than relying on camera layers, it uses a custom shader to control what each eye sees. Once that clicked, the solution became much simpler. I duplicated the existing material, reduced the right eye’s brightness to zero, and applied that material selectively to certain colours in the code.
The result is immediate. When one of these colours appears — currently blue — it’s only visible to the left eye. There’s a slight instability to the image at first, a sense that something isn’t quite lining up. It takes a moment to resolve, and that moment is exactly where the work is happening. The game hasn’t become harder in the usual sense, but it has become more demanding.
And for now, that feels like a step in the right direction.