January 24, 2017 / Jay / Comments Off on Planet 2 Planning and Initial Tests
Planned Tasks:
Follow up on some emails for Hyperfocal Design + some back end “coding” 30 mins
Writing up some notes on a friends game currently in development 60 mins
Planet 2 Planning. What will the geometry look like and handle like for gameplay, what will the colors/lighting be like, etc. 2 hours
Initial Planet 2 test geometry/lighting/color. 4 hours.
Hyperfocal + Emails
Took a little longer than expected, 2 hrs total.
Planet 2
If I had the budget, team, time etc I’d probably get a bunch of concept art drawn up per-planet, but I don’t, so I’ll focus on assembling a bunch of art and photos that somewhat capture the look I’m going for.
Here’s what I’m after, considering Planet 1 is mostly ‘nice looking’, bright, warm:
General theme is still somewhat ‘nice’, welcoming, but cooler and more alien than planet 1.
No sun, night time, visible night sky with intense, nearby nebulae, which lights the terrain below in a combination of red/blue/green.
Harsher shadows, lit by EXO ONE’s light
I’d like an almost snap-frozen ocean look, but am thinking this may be quite a lofty goal. Perhaps a moon-like surface as a backup plan… Since I’m kinda lacking time and resources, I’ll be doing this a bit. Can I get good, fast results? If not, abandon and move on, maybe return later :)
As an object/flora theme I might try placing a lot of icicle/ice mushroom covered objects, which would have the added benefit of being easily repeatable.
Gameplay wise:
Similar to first planet, with variations on geometry, mostly pushing more of the voronoi patterns than flowing hills. If I can get them looking anything like waves I’ll go with that. Otherwise it’s moon surface!
Lower clouds, possibly touching the ground (will test!) therefore less height but more speed
Fast moving clouds moving in opposite direction to goal(?) Play with having to move from cloud to cloud, or avoid them. Former makes more sense considering planet 1 gameplay. One planet may require the player to stay low/behind hills… could be this one.
Initial new scene creation – cloned Sagan4 and renamed some things. I feel like this is a terrible way to do it but don’t really know any other way! I think if I ever accidentally apply prefab changes to something I shouldn’t, I can potentially stuff things up across multiple planets… Doing prefabs for every planet seems crap too, because if I want to change something for all planets, the changes aren’t made everywhere… Thoughts??
Putting some placeholder terrain in, then setting trueSky to night time.
The tough thing here might be generally making a great looking nebulae skybox… I’m going to look at how trueSky’s is done.
I’ll be replacing trueSky’s lighting with my own to simulate the light of nearby nebulae hitting the planet.
Pasted in a nebulae from my reference quickly to check out the quality level etc. It’s pretty low for a 4096… probably not worth trying to do any detail apart from large scale color variations.
Could explore other options such as high res nebulae billboards in the sky, but for now I think I’ll go for the in-built, mostly easier method.
Just from this test it’s now super obvious I should keep the red tones lower, otherwise I quickly return to a ‘sunset looking’ color scheme similar to the first planet.
I’m trying to use trueSky’s moon to give the clouds a bit of lighting from the nebulae, but unfortunately the higher I set the moon lighting, the duller the skybox gets (due to camera exposure)
Reducing the atmospheric brightness fixes this issue
Differentiating visually what is nebulae and what is cloud seems harder than I’d thought! But haven’t spent long yet on this. It’s just going to be tricky if I want to use a ‘low res/color wash’ style nebulae. This is made harder too when I’m wanting to use a foggy, low cloud layer. They both look quite similar. Not even worth showing!
This part of development just always seems to take me ages moving sliders. Can’t get away from it I suppose… It’s fun and I enjoy it but it takes ages figuring out good settings.
I’m now trying a more ‘iconic’ looking nebulae, rather than ‘a bunch o nebulae clouds’. So it’s obviously not terrestrial cloud… Thing is… All nebula is cloudy up close :P
Here’s the sorta detail level we get from a sharp 4096, 16bit skybox:
Not great! I’m just currently slapping in high res NASA nebula to see what looks good or not! Starting to wonder if I’m going to have to bail on the skybox idea.
Breaking for dinner. That took me about 2 hrs of playing around.
More Nebulae
Again the Nebula for some reason just seems to look like red clouds in the sky. Unsure why. Perhaps because so often when we see nebula they are very finely detailed? Or it’s the Milky Way, which is super faint to the naked eye. I could also just be pushing the color too hard…
I’ll sleep on it!
Tomorrow, Per Planet Ambient
There is no light color coming down from the red nebula, so tomorrow I might either play with some reflection probes or per-planet ambient settings, so I can add in some red/pink light (using the above screen for example). Will help give it that colorful red/blue effect I’m after.
I got this idea from Tom Francis of GunPoint and Crate & Crowbar fame, and thought I’d do a recap of every game I’ve worked on. Partially this is an attempt to share my game dev history, partially to make myself feel better about the lack of progress I’ve made in the last couple of years(!).
I’ll start with the oldest games and end with my most recent.
Powerslide
I worked on this game straight out of high school, it was a post apocalyptic racing game that focused a lot on, yes – powersliding physics. I made (if I can recall that far back) 1-3 tracks, I definitely did the majority of the desert track and maybe a lot of the dam and mountain (?) tracks. As my first job, first game and first crew of non-school related co-workers and friends, it was a pretty huge deal and I’ve got a lot of great memories. A Powerslide ‘plaque’ still sits behind me here in my office, which consists of a team photo and signed gold master disc.
Role: 3D artist / Texturing
Made in: Custom Engine
Platform: PC
Year: 1998
Dirt Track Racing
When you’ve got a game with nice powersliding physics, dirt oval racing is a pretty logical move. DTR let you race in a career mode that mimicked real life competition, complete with sponsorship, multiple classes and progression. I think I was credited as game designer, but when you’re modeling a real life competition from real racing, the game is practically already designed for you.
Role: Game Designer / (artist? so long ago!)
Made in: Custom Engine
Platform: PC
Year: 2000
“Next Game”
Looking back, this was probably an overly ambitious title for its time, and the game designs I wrote for it probably didn’t help! The concept would have looked a lot like GTA but in a Mad Max world, complete with FPS and car combat sections, and an in depth story to boot. I recall the original game design by Richard Harrison (part owner of Ratbag) was far more realistic but I had some huge thing for people leaning out of windows and shooting each other rather than ‘copying’ Interstate 76. Anyway, I think this design morphed over time but never saw the light of day.
Somehow, after getting my dream designer role at Ratbag, I just didn’t seem happy at all, in fact it was the opposite, the last year I was there I wasn’t enjoying it at all. I guess I went from making DTR where I had a lot to do, to being someone who sat in front of the game design document all day long. I left Ratbag in the early stages of development, having picked up a copy of Kiyosaki’s “Rich Dad Poor Dad” – I had a need to go start my own business.
So here’s where I left and formed Hyperfocal Design (sells HDRI sky maps). After the sort of crazy schedules games demanded, I’d somewhat sworn off returning to developing them.
Here’s a video, which ended up being fairly different gameplay wise from what I’d proposed:
I cringe looking back at how much harder the prototyping process was (I don’t think there was one at all), especially with today’s tools like Unity. Back then I’m sure I’d have realised early on that dudes leaning out of car windows shooting at each other in a big open desert would have been a little boring!
“Concrete”
I managed to secure some early funding from our state government for this one, but at the time, with this concept, it was unrealistic to produce without a large team. Even today I’d say unless it was top down/2d sprite based or something it was another over ambitious title and I didn’t want to form the next Ratbag to do it. I got as far as actually meeting with a couple of venture capital people but didn’t get any interest. The gameplay again was GTA-like but ‘cops and robbers’ where the robbers could mark territory with spray paint and blend into the general population (there were no names hovering above heads). I suppose in hindsight the design is a little like APB (minus the MMO part), which was a spectacular failure.
“Zombie Outbreak Simulator”
I teamed up with Saxon Druce from Ratbag to make this one about 5 years ago. It was step one on the way to releasing the next game, Class 3 Outbreak. ZOS was a sandbox simulation, not really a game at all, where you could adjust various attributes of zombies such as their speed, infection time and so on. We had some success in terms of press coverage because the game ran on Google Maps and it had a big novelty hook.
Role: Game Designer/Artist
Made in: Custom Engine
Platform: Web, then iOS, then Android
Year: 2009
“Class 3 Outbreak”
With ZOS ‘complete’, we then released the ‘real game’, which I still felt was quite devoid of features. At least it had a fairly nice core mechanic where you had to use police units to stop the zombies multiplying out of control. Unfortunately, due to Saxon being only part time on the coding side, and due to changes with Google’s APIs, and then some huge screw ups with funding from the government, this never went much further. Eventually Saxon and I went different ways – I was always pushing for more gameplay but he wanted to focus on things like the map editor. We butted heads a bit and eventually I handed over my share of Binary Space to him.
Role: Game Designer/Artist
Made in: Custom Engine
Platform: Web
Year: 2010
“Unknown Orbit”
I’m fairly proud of this little title, which I developed in a year and released on the Apple app store. It’s essentially a 3D Tiny Wings/Endless Runner where you orbit around a small planet as a comet. It did pretty average, made maybe $2-3k or so and now sells a copy a day. I think the biggest let downs from this game were that I probably made it too hard and didn’t make enough content, ie other planets to fly around.
Role: All things! No wait, Rhys Lindsay did the music and Saxon helped with some high score code!
Made with: Unity, Playmaker
Platform: iOS
Year: 2013
Enter the ‘prototype years’
Whereby I make lots of prototypes and never finish anything:
“Zombie Games”
I messed around with a number of different designs for zombie games and never quite settled on any.
Status: This one is still simmering in the background, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I tackled a strategic zombie game at some stage in the future.
“Generation Ship”
I then entered a phase where I thought I’d like to make a game with no combat in it. I still feel this is a very noble goal and that potentially there’s a lot of uncovered non-combat stuff out there, but I didn’t do a great job of finding it. I wanted to make a game about a Generation Ship that was trying to survive out in space, you had a galaxy map and a crew, and had to decide where to go, what to do to survive. In the end it was just no fun, there wasn’t much to do, and I’ve since seen other games come out with similar mechanics that I didn’t like much either!
Status: Now ‘reborn’ (below)
“Fighter Tactics”
Obviously here I’ve totally given up on that theory and decided to do a turn based space combat game. This was probably my most promising prototype, which I abandoned when I saw the Oculus Rift.
Status: Also reborn (below)
“The Station”
This was an Oculus Rift prototype that also got quite far along. I wrote an entire script for it, characters, made a prototype… The only gameplay consisted of this kind of ‘dimensional tuning’, controlled by head movement, that never really seemed to resonate with people. Also I realised if I was going to make this game, I’d become a full time 3D artist again, which didn’t appeal to me.
At this stage I’m realising how lucky I am to have Hyperfocal Design paying my bills.
Status: I may come back to this one day, I’m not sure – I liked the story and concept but just didn’t want to make it I suppose. Its also a pretty big commercial gamble having no idea how Rift games would sell.
“Generation Fleet”
This idea didn’t seem to leave me, and I thought, why the hell didn’t I try combining the two ideas of the Generation Ship and Fighter Tactics? I was thinking a lot about Battlestar Galactica as well, and Star Trek Voyager’s Year of Hell episode. In terms of games, FTL is an obvious inspiration, as is XCom, and I really liked SteamBirds and Hero Generations. So that’s where I stand right now – the Generation Fleet/Fighter Tactics game is in prototype phase, I like the game play and I’m just trying some variants to make sure the turn based space combat is as fun and strategically deep as possible. The Generation Fleet story/world surrounding it will form a kind of XCom style meta game.
I’ve read or part-read a number of books on game design including Raph Koster’s Theory of Fun, and The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell (and a few more that I barely got a chapter into). I read Theory of Fun most the way through and re-read Art of Game Design a few times, especially when in the concept/ideas phase of a game, or when a prototype didn’t seem to be working out.
Lately though I’ve preferred watching videos, listening to podcasts and reading blog posts by a number of game designer’s whose games I enjoy, or in genres I’d like to get into. That genre I suppose I’d call narrative led/exploration/”not games”, but that doesn’t apply that well to all the designers and games below.
So anyways, here’s a list of people, companies, blogs and podcasts I like that you might find useful:
Jon Blow
A quick search on youtube will yield a deluge of talks from Jon, and he likes to get deep into game design in a creative, artistic and meaningful way. This isn’t the sort of designer who’s thinking up new combat mechanics or ways to virtually kill people with the most ‘fun’ combo. Developer of Braid and now The Witness, Jon Blow is like(!), my favorite person to listen to right now.
I’m not a particularly huge fan of Braid (I just don’t like platformers that much) and the preview of The Witness doesn’t excite me much either, but then I think that’s a game you have to play to ‘get it’. The main reason I like Jon is he likes to get into the meaty emotional parts of game design! Here’s his latest that I could find:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo7cTlaVJdQ
I have trouble translating some of his advice into actionable steps, especially the above video where he talks about how you should be suuuper emotionally invested to the point of welling up over your game. I totally agree that being this invested in your game will help you through years of development, but… maybe I just don’t have an idea yet I love this much?
Thomas Grip
Designer at Frictional Games who are making SOMA and made Amnesia, Thomas has some great GDC talks, blog posts and tweets.
Why am I following Grip? I didn’t mind Amnesia, I played through maybe a quarter (though I don’t finish many games), but Amnesia tried new things, and that always gets my attention. I was intruiged by their concept of encouraging players to play along with the game, and the ‘faked’ parts of the game mechanics which made the game so scary. Find his stuff below:
Designer on Journey, Flower and Flow, I was completely taken with Journey and have completed it 3-4 times on a friends PS3 (I’m not a console gamer). It’s rare to get such positive and uplifting feelings from a game these days, especially if your favorite game right now is Dota2, which I play on an almost daily basis. I also liked how minimalist it is, and despite the fact I play a lot of combat games, for the most part I am thinking a lot about non-combative game play designs. In his making-of Journey talks, Jenova references the Hero’s Journey story telling methods a lot, and so I feel the need to (re)read a book I have on that subject.
Jenova doesn’t have much in the way of a blog but he’s done a lot of talks at events like GDC.
G4C14: Jenova Chen / Blank Canvas Designing A New Era of Emotional Storytelling Through Games
Jenova’s company, that game company, has just received $7m in funding for their next title – I can’t wait to see what they do next.
Daniel Pinchbeck
Designer of Dear Esther at The Chinese Room, a game I found almost infuriating to begin with. I had to really force myself through the start of the game without a run or jump button, but once I got to the caves that feeling disappeared and never returned. I think Dear Esther and Journey have somewhat of a cross over in terms of story telling, with Journey telling more with the cut scenes and “paintings”, and Dear Esther telling more via the voice overs. I like both for indie games as neither requires crazy expensive character animation and everything that goes with that.
Daniel’s next game, Everyone’s Gone to Rapture, has gone Playstation only (booo) but its obviously a great move by Sony as I’ll now buy their console just for this game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKyoVQKnD4U
Steve Gaynor
Designer and writer on Gone Home, another non-shooter I quite liked. For what I cave-mannishly describe as a bit of a girly story line, I was pretty hooked on finding out what happens (I won’t spoiler it) and I ended up with a really clear picture of the main characters from just a couple photos and a bunch of voice overs and hand written notes. I did kinda speed play through this to just get the story, but as with many of the games above (apart from Journey), I wasn’t a wild fan – I’m more a fan of the designers creating non-traditional games.
February 13, 2014 / Jay / Comments Off on How Will the Oculus Rift Change Game Design?
This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot, as I’m an indie developer that recently got a hold of the first dev kit. What exactly will change in terms of game design and mechanics, or what can we do differently now that the Oculus has arrived? How exactly will immersion and presence affect game design?
I’ll start with outlining what the Oculus gives us that we did not have before.
Increased immersion or “presence” – the feeling that you are inside the environment.
Head tracking in terms of rotation (by actually moving your head) and position (craning your head forward, back, left and right).
Depth perception.
Real world head/limb movement speeds
Orientation issues
Then I’ll end with a few thoughts on some Oculus games and demos.
Immersion
This has been the number one touted advantage of the Rift – you are now IN the game. Big things look big, high things seem high, large drops or valleys look deep, things that are close to you seem closer, and so on. You can’t compare it to a 3D screen, the depth and sense that you are inside an environment is real. In the Oculus, my first thought (inside the Settings Viewer) was “wow, the far corner of this large room is actually quite far away, and this guy is right in my face. That door to my right isn’t *really* there”. That’s quite a thing considering the graphics:
I believe the main benefit of immersion is it increases the chances for the developer to deliver the expected feeling or emotional response from events happening in-game. For example, fear, awe, danger and scale are all greatly enhanced. So how does this change things? Is the Oculus merely an enhancing effect? Scary games will be scarier, racing games will seem faster, shooters more …shooty? Also what do I mean “merely” increase immersion? I realise immersion can be pretty big for some games, but for the most part I wonder how much better or meaningful will a game be, if its got double the immersion factor, or 10x? So now you’ll feel like you’re really, really, really there! So what? This is something very hard to quantify.
If you play Call of Duty as-is but wearing an Oculus, has anything much changed just because you feel more like you are there? Will you see a fellow soldier die, and instead of chalking him up as another meaningless death, will you feel genuinely bad? I kind of doubt it. You might feel like those mortars are really exploding right next to you, though. Taking this to a (silly) extreme, if you recreated the room you are sitting in now, and had 100% perfect VR and immersion, that would be impressive from a tech standpoint, but as an experience or a game, it is meaningless.
Will the increased immersion effects wear off or is it just novelty value that we will eventually adjust to? Going back to regular games, I remember System Shock 2 scaring the crap out of me when I played it as a kid, and the best horror games these days still manage to do the same, so it didn’t wear off for 2D gaming at least. Considering Dreadhalls (made for Oculus) and forgetting how nauseous this game made me feel, the sense of terror was definitely magnitudes higher than other horror games I’ve played. If I didn’t get used to being scared in old games or movies, then hopefully the immersion effect and enhanced emotional responses on the Oculus won’t wear off either.
Finally while I don’t want to talk at length about it – the potential for significant emotional reactions could swing in a number of ways. I could imagine anything from heart attacks from horror games to people not wanting to play shooters because it feels like they’re actually killing people, to the opposite, where we get even more desensitized to violence. I’ve had dreams that feel so real that I’ll wake up feeling bad that I’ve just cheated on my partner, despite it having never happened. Will the same thing happen when VR gets really real?
Head Tracking
Head tracking feeds into both immersion and game mechanics, being able to move your head around helps immersion, but it also gives us some new tools to play with that were previously not available. In the past we’ve used controllers or the mouse and keyboard to control both where the player walks and where they look, however this leaves us with little option for finer control of the avatar’s head. The best option is something like Arma/DayZ where you hold Alt to control your head, but this still lacks control for moving your head forwards, backwards, left and right while rotating, and you can’t aim and look at the same time. For most games this fine head control will be unnecessary, but to use DayZ as an example again, even this could benefit if you try and move your head away from a teeth gnashing zombie, or actually shift your head over/under/around objects to search for nearby zombies.
With the ability to both move and rotate your head in all directions and dimensions, new game mechanics can open up which could involve actions such as:
Close and thorough inspection of objects at different distances and angles
Complex and fine head movement control – ie looking around inside a cockpit, over an edge, peering around corners, peeking over ledges, ducking, etc. You are no longer restricted to looking straight up or down, either.
Head position as a gameplay mechanic – we now have an extra control in addition to gamepad or mouse/keyboard. This could allow more complex games or capitalise on a single mechanic as in Dumpy the Elephant, where you control the Elephants head and attached trunk with your own head movements. In this instance immersion is increased as the trunk feels like an extension of your own head.
Social actions, ie – nodding to multiplayer friends in a conversation, nodding in the affirmative instead of hitting the A button to agree with an NPC. These mechanics also increase immersion.
To carry on talking about Dumpy, this is a good example of a game that could have been designed without the Rift, and would have still worked, however with the Rift it reaches a new level because your head movement is linked to the elephants – you are moving your head as if you are an elephant. It gives you an extra hook into the game world that wouldn’t be possible by just swinging your hand/wrist around with a mouse.
Depth Perception
As an elephant, being able to see down your trunk in full 3D adds another level again – with it almost coming out between your eyes. Depth perception is linked to immersion in terms of boosting the effect of being somewhere inside an environment, but could also help players nail the apex of a corner, make contact with a melee swing, and get scared shitless by a monster that’s right in their face.
Emotionally, I could see depth being a huge factor as well. Imagine looking at an NPC you’ve grown attached to slipping out of your fingers to their doom, Cliff Hanger style, or being right next to someone who’s hit by a car. Perhaps imagine a Bond moment where a buzzsaw or syringe is approaching your face… Again, for horror games turning around and seeing a monster face-to-face is terrifying as was evidenced when my partner slammed my new Rift into the table after ripping it off her face.
Reactions to other players or NPCs could be amplified if they move right in close to you. An aggressor could scream right into your face, or a love interest could slowly move in. Someone could lean in and whisper into your ear, a zombie could bite your face off, etc.
On a slightly more shallow note – all those fancy special effects and particles are sure gonna look pretty as you move through them!
Real World Movement
Real world head movement may even slightly restrict game design choices (although restriction of choices in art is rarely a bad thing). With the Oculus, you can only turn your head or move the view at a certain speed based on the player’s own neck muscles, or in terms of rollercoaster style games, you can only push different movement speeds in so many directions before making the player sick.
If you’re playing in 1st person, you’ll have to be a creature with a single head, neck and two eyes (sure, it’s not common to be a 10 headed, neckless cyclops or something), so while being an elephant or a Grey alien is doable, being a giraffe might not work quite so well. Also consider something like a bird, which travels horizontally with their body out behind them while the player themselves sits upright in chair. Gravity is working against game design choices like this. However, having played a few space games so far, the effect of being upside down with incorrect gravity isn’t so bad.
We also have to consider restriction of movement. You can’t have an NPC put the player’s avatar in a headlock for example, or restrain their head movement in any way, because the player can simply move their head. If you have the player moving through a very tight space, he can crane his head forward and just move through the geometry. I hear that in some demos, developers have blurred and/or darkened the screen when this happens. Perhaps this is a solution for restricting movement too?
Unexpected movement is another thing to think hard about. This can range from a camera move in a 3rd person game (perhaps the camera moves to avoid a wall or moves for a cut scene) to unexpected movements based on physics . If you play Wingsuit or Warthunder, despite their realistic physics models these games can cause somewhat unexpected up and down movements that causes your stomach to really churn. The more simple and direct the movement, the better, at least with the first dev kit.
Peripheral Movement
In addition to real world movement for the Oculus, peripherals like Razer Hydras can suffer from similar problems where the player attempts to move in a way that isn’t matched 1:1 to the game environment. For example, imagine in-game swinging a huge heavy axe with your nice light Hydras – there will be a mis-match between the speed you can swing in reality vs the game world.
Orientation
When playing normal games on a detached 2D screen, it doesn’t much matter which way you’re facing, which way gravity goes, or how much you spin or flip. However when you are immersed into an environment, these things become an issue for your stomach, and sometimes for immersion. Consider my awesome art below:
Comparing your sitting position to the type of avatar/orientation. From left to right – elephant, bird, upside down space ship, scuba diver
Whether or not some of these conflicting body/avatar positions are a problem will probably come down to feel. I personally didn’t have a problem with the elephant or space ships, but I did feel odd as a bird. Games like Lunar Flight or other cockpit games on the other hand really feel like they click.
Existing Game Demos
I’m going to end this post with a breakdown of a small selection of games and how they utilize the Rift, as well as some potential problems with some concepts.
Lunar Flight
I think this is the best example so far of a game that uses all of the Oculus’s features to best effect. When DK2 comes out with head position tracking, it will be even more so. Seated in a Lunar Lander, I’m seated as I am in real life, looking out the cockpit of the Lander. I feel like I’m really in the Lander, the scale is perfect, I can judge depth well enough to land on target locations and the interface is designed well. I also like the fact that I have to look around to use the interface, rather than straight ahead, making more use of screen real estate and the Rift. When positional tracking comes out, I’ll be able to lean forward and judge my landings with even more precision, or look around a strut/monitor that’s in the way of my view of the Earth. Can’t wait!
The number one thing that separates this game from others is that you move your head to control the elephant’s head and trunk. That, coupled with the immersion gives you a pretty solid feeling of being an elephant despite the cartoony graphics. I’m a huge fan of the art style, and its great to see people using non-realistic graphics so soon. Amazingly, considering the amount of head movement involved, I never get nauseous.
I like the concept for this game, and it looks amazing, and a flying game for the Rift is just a no-brainer. However I feel a big disconnect being seated upright myself, vs horizontal as the bird avatar. Funnily enough though, I didn’t get this with Dumpy. I feel that this game might also benefit a huge amount from something like the Stem controller, where you’d need to spread your arms out to fly and maneuver, maybe even flap them like wings. The main benefit to this game is the immersion of the Rift, where you feel like you are in the air. This game may also cross the line a little between an experience and game, where (at least currently) there are no challenges or goals of any kind. Once you’ve played this once, you’ll possibly never replay again, but with so many experiences to be had on the Rift, I think this might be quite common. I suppose you may return to it just to chill out and fly around.
With the first dev kit, I universally dislike all FPS’s because it induces the worst nausea for me. However I’ve seen a few let’s plays and my friends had a go and they were all fine. Hopefully DK2 solves this for everyone and most game types. Having said that, Dreadhall’s use of the Oculus makes great use of real world movement, as you can’t look left and right any faster than your head will allow, and positional tracking will be amazing for peeking around corners. Monsters can feel like they are right behind you, and you can’t pull a superhuman turn/run backwards to see. This game and perhaps the horror genre feels like the easiest to link immersion to a better game, as being immersed in a scary environment elevates the terror by such a degree. A very real problem with the sheer terror factor for this game is that I don’t actually want to play it. This is something I’ve seen and heard in other reviews/youtube playthroughs as well – there might be a limit to how much you can handle while playing a good, immersive Oculus game! Just imagine we reach an Exorcism of Emily Rose level of terror in VR, yikes! At the same time, who can pass up trying something that someone tells you is too scary?
The future of game design with the Rift is quite an unknown – we still have such a small number of demos available, most of them just bite sized experiences, so its hard to judge yet what a fully developed Oculus game will be like with the consumer version. Here’s to hoping that what we get isn’t mostly “what we have now, plus a Rift on your face”. Games like Lunar Flight, Dumpy the Elephant and Dread Halls are some great steps forward, and I think the technology will really make developers dream big and try things that haven’t been done before.
For Rift experiences, I’m also looking forward to everything from 360 degree videos to sunny beach simulators, to dioramas like Blocked In.
Thanks for reading, very keen to hear people’s opinions on how the Oculus will change game design, how immersion will affect how games are made, how I said a stupid thing, or any other comments you have!
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