Designing Games in VR: Part One - Old Tropes Die Hard.

I’ve spent the last year and a half building stuff in VR with our incredible team at Fierce Kaiju alongside some great friends who came along for the ride. We have one published title in “Viral” on the Gear VR and a bunch of fun playable prototypes with some big plans up our sleeves. More on those in due course.

I’ve learned a thing or two about designing games in VR and I’d like to share some of my thoughts with you. Chances are if you’re knee deep in VR development most of this material will be familiar to you, but if you’re new to VR or considering trying out VR development then I hope this article is of some use to you.

I should add that developing in VR is moving incredibly quickly, so anything I say simply reflects my thoughts and findings at this point in time. It’s likely that these opinions will change as we move forwards and it’s more likely that someone much smarter than me will rubbish this as soon as I press “Post”. :)

Solve Problems, Try Not to Make Them.

In short a designer’s job is to solve problems, this must be at the forefront of your mind when designing games for VR. I’ll give you an example, first person games in VR bring along some major design headaches which many of us are contending with. One of the biggest is stick yaw control! Yup the simple act of rotating to your left or right like we have done in FPS games for over 20 odd years is an issue. Specifically for many people it gives them what is often referred to as “simulation sickness” this is very similar to motion sickness only in a simulated environment.

One common and obvious train of thought is that our actions in VR should closely mirror our actions in the real world. Now of course we can still cheat and try new ideas and in some cases you will find solutions that totally trample on that statement, but at the very least we need to be more mindful of how the human body moves and works, more so than we would previously need to with traditional console, PC or mobile games.

With the yaw control issue think of it like this; is it normal for your body to turn in that way? The obvious answer is no and our very clever bodies know this, in particular the vestibular system which informs our brain of our spatial orientation, our motions and equilibrium understands that this motion is wrong. Our eyes are telling our brain that an event is happening but the vestibular apparatus deep within our ears isn’t buying what our eyes are selling.

So what am I saying? This great hope of entertainment, industry and science won’t let me play Call of Duty or Battlefield in VR, isn’t that the whole point? Take me to cool places and let me shoot stuff in the face damn you!

This great hope of entertainment, industry and science won’t let me play Call of Duty or Battlefield in VR, isn’t that the whole point?

Well yeeeeah, and no. VR at this point can take you absolutely anywhere the creator wishes you to go and do what they see fit, but we have to design our games to suit the platform. Currently stick yaw control in VR is problematic, doesn’t really work and consequently is best avoided, think of alternative method’s of traversal through environments. Epic Games the masters of Unreal Tournament and other incredible games; pioneers in VR development chose to avoid stick yaw control with their first public facing VR shooter experience “Bullet Train”.

In Bullet Train you have a system similar to what we used with our first VR title “Viral” you choose pre-determined points to warp to with the action taking place around those areas. You don’t have stick yaw control and these experiences really don’t need it. Bullet Train along with Sony’s The Heist are two of the best experiences I’ve had in VR so far. Admittedly in the case of the former this was largely down to the amazing use of Oculus’ Touch controllers but the experience itself had to hold up, and for the most part it does.

It’s important to consider the core component of your game, what it is you want the player to be doing? what’s the key feature? Whether that be shooting monsters, floating in a zen like state through space and time, jumping over platforms, whatever. At first it can be tempting to brute force through with most of the old tropes intact, this wont work. Pay close attention to new issues such as the stick yaw control, screen shake and camera transitions that we’ve taken for granted for quite some time.

Consider how you can pull off the fundamental parts of your game in VR. If your game is first person how do you intend your protagonist to move through the world? Adapt your thinking to understand the limitations of the platform and look for innovative solutions that deliver the best possible experience for the player.

“What we agree with leaves us inactive, but contradiction makes us productive.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Contradictions are a wonderful thing, having said all of the above it’s important that you push boundaries, take the advice and understand the complications that these challenges may cause, but don’t be scared to be disruptive by actively looking at ways to resolve such issues. The VR development community is rapidly starting to narrow down what produces a more comfortable experience, in many cases it’s difficult to definitively state that you can or cant do this or that, as developers we’ve simply got to keep trying new things, even if that means breaking a few rules that appear to make sense.

I’ll give examples, over the last year and a half we’ve experimented and found that a combination of techniques together can significantly remedy the effects of simulation sickness with traditional stick yaw control in a first person game. In many cases removing the sensation of simulation sickness completely for people otherwise susceptible to such issues. This was a big win for us and it’s helped us make decisions for our games as we move forwards.

So what did we do? We found that sim sickness effects with yaw control are significantly reduced when in specific environments, such as zero G, underwater or when flying through the air. Essentially any environment where your feet don’t touch the ground.

We also know that people seem to feel more comfortable when you have a solid frame of reference for your place within the virtual space, that might be the inside of a helmet, the cockpit of a space ship or a car interior. So thinking of ways with which you might include a model built around the player can be beneficial.

We also know that people seem to feel more comfortable when you have a solid frame of reference for your place within the virtual space

On top of this we found that reducing the movement seen in the players peripheral vision can be another good move if it’s available to you, with one of our projects the model around the player reduced how much that you could see in your peripheral vision with good results.

For us this collection of tests and ideas was a massive boost for the project. However moving about on foot in first person as you would traditionally is still proving a tough egg to crack, but we’re often seeing people come up with innovative new ideas.

Hopefully this helps to show a little insight into the level of thinking required on the part of game developers working in VR, but this really is just the tip of the iceberg and VR developers face many more challenges of varying shapes and sizes.

I’ll be looking to share more thoughts soon, in the mean time I’d love to hear any thoughts on the article.