Author: sick skills

Limitless’ Reaping Rewards is an interesting piece of VR development, released for free this summer as an “interactive VR short film” that asks players to make “emotional choices” to advance the story.

In a recent chat with Gamasutra, Limitless founder Tom Sanocki explained how his past work at places like Bungie and Pixar influenced his approach to designing Reaping Rewards. Today, in a brief talk delivered at VRDC Fall 2017, he followed up on that by explaining what he’d learned about the art of making immersive, affecting VR experiences — and how fellow VR devs could do the same.

Before Reaping Rewards, Limitless was best known for its work on Gary the Gull, the free (and mostly comedic) interactive VR short film released last year across multiple platforms.

Sanocki explained that Reaping Rewards was meant to follow after Gary by trying to set a more thoughtful tone, asking players to step into the role of a young Grim Reaper-in-training and make decisions about when and how to take lives.

He added that the team took a lot of inspiration from Telltale Games’ games, and in particular the way they are designed seemingly with the understanding that players don’t always want to control the story so much as they want to make emotional, meaningful choices.

For Sanocki, the impact of this type of game design can be much stronger once a player puts on a headset and actually immerses themselves in your story.

“In something as new as VR and AR, we really need to be exploring and pushing the boundaries more,” he said. Notably, he called out Telltale Games’ predilection for allowing players to give no response (“…”) and suggested VR devs should do the same if they want their worlds to feel real.

“The real world doesn’t wait for us to respond”

“The real world doesn’t wait for us to respond,” he said. “It will move on without us.”

Reaping Rewards was born as a script for a more traditional short film, but was translated into VR by making relatively simple (at least in concept) tweaks like moving from a third-person to a first-person perspective, and designing interactions that will have emotional impact on the player.

Unlike with Gary the Gull, which mostly focused on motion and voice, Sanocki says Reaping Rewards was designed to focus on touch because it’s “visceral and emotional.” It’s also very instinctual — so often, the first thing people do in VR is reach out, touch something, and pick it up to look at it. In Reaping Rewards, one of the first things a player can touch is the hand of a dying patient.

“If you reach out and touch the patient’s hand, if you can feel their pulse fading, through haptics, it affects you, as a human,” Sanocki added. “In a way you can’t get with any other medium.”

Comparing Reaping Rewards to a stereotypical “shoot the alien” game, Sanocki encouraged fellow devs to think about the fact that while both were about death, the way they were designed significantly changed their emotional impact on the player.

Sanocki said Limitless save a lot of time during development by designing VR environments in VR — their Limitless Creative Environment toolset let them do explore, scale, and modify a scene’s composition while wearing a VR headset.

This allowed the team to quickly try moving things around and make mistakes before they got too far in development, which Sanocki says was critical because it allowed the team to rapidly design and iterate the scenes of Reaping Rewards. 

Being able to make mistakes quickly is, as usual, incredibly valuable — if you can swing it

“Being able to make mistakes quickly is one of the things that we believe is really important in VR,” said Sanooki.

So for example, with something as simple as placing the Grim Reaper in the hospital room with the player, the team quickly realized that the most intuitive thing to do — put the big Grim Reaper across the patient’s bed from the player, ensuring that the player sees both patient and Reaper when they enter the room — wasn’t ideal.

It seemed too pat; the team was afraid that if they put the Reaper off to the side players would get confused, but that confusion proved to be very temporary — and emotionally affecting.

“By putting him to the side, we found that people now had that feeling of confusion we wanted; people would go ‘oh no, I don’t know what to do. I need help.’” Sanooki said. However, they would almost always find him right away, by looking around the room — and would feel more alone, since the Reaper would basically be standing off to the side and giving the player the cold shoulder.  

“That was affecting,” said Sanooki. “And it was something we were able to find much quicker by just being able to try it out in VR right away.”

As he was wrapping up, Sanocki acknowledged that both Gary the Gull and Reaping Rewards were early, clunky attempts to tell meaningful, emotional stories in VR — that’s part of the reason why they’re pitched as free, promotional products.

But he also seemed convinced that they’re worth studying, and iterating on, and learning from as developers around the industry continue to push the boundaries of what can be done in VR.

“I’m the first to say that it’s not perfect, that it hits in some cases and isses in others, but there was still something to it that we don’t feel when watching it on a flat screen,” said Sanooki. “It’s a good jumping-off point for where VR storytelling goes in the future.”

VR may still be considered a new technology but its practical applications beyond entertainment is evident through innovative, therapeutic VR applications that have been around for years. What is the current climate of VR in phobia treatment, and how does VR treatment work?

During VRDC 2017 in San Francisco today, executive director of Checkpoints Organisation and Doctor Jennifer Hazel answered these questions and more during a discussion that covered what makes a VR experience effective for phobia treatment from a psychological, physiological, and technical point of view.  

Before starting, Hazel looked around the room and gestured to the attendees. “Is anyone in here terrified of clowns, spiders, or dogs?” she asked. Upon being met with silence, she resumed and we were greeted with a slide that featured a looping gif of Pennywise the clown. Nervous laughter fills the room as we all revel in the shared experience of not having clowns ruined for us during childhood.

But people do have very real phobias of clowns. Some may view certain phobias as “irrational” (and it’s true, Hazel mentioned encountering someone with a phobia of knees), but the majority of them are justified. The fear of spiders or snakes is an evolutionary response. Hazel went on to describe that phobias are classified as anxiety disorders, capable of being treated in many different ways- VR being one of them. 

Therapeutic VR treatment has a history starting in the ’90s. “This has been going on for a long time and has gone through various iterations.” Said Hazel. “The first VR work in terms of therapy was specifically for PTSD. This is because it was expensive and could only be explored through funding, which came through the military.”

Even though the technology has been around for awhile and utilized by therapists, Hazel encouraged the developers in the room to take research studies that discuss therapy and VR with a grain of salt. “Not all of us are tech-saavy, so take that in mind when looking at evidence.”

What are the advantages of virtual reality exposure therapy? Hazel was prepared with a list of benefits. Say that a patient had a phobia of spiders. Placing them in a situation where they’re wearing a headset and controlling a virtual arm to pick up a virtual spider could be just as effective as going through ten sessions of working up to being able to see a spider in real life.

VR can provide a controlled environment, where variables can change depending on the needs of the patient and direction of the therapist. Exposure therapy in VR works because VR also elicits the same psychological response as a patient going through it physically. “The evidence is strong. It works.”

More benefits of VRET include flexibility and being able to go through therapy in private environment. Perhaps more importantly though, is that it’s flexible. Going back to spiders, a patient can be exposed to different types of spiders. They can be made bigger, smaller, mobile or stationary. VRET can provide multiple different experiences in one application.”That’s what really cemented it for me.” Hazel said. 

Hazel encouraged developers to take her design considerations into account when going off to create therapeutic VR applications. “There are no right or wrong answers. I can’t tell you how to do this stuff. I can give you a checklist of things to think about before you start engaging in a project.” There are a lot of factors to consider when designing for VRET. If you’re developing a simulation for patients with a fear of flying, what conditions are you going to have? Are you going to have that 1 plane with different conditions, or are you going to have the entire process leading up to boarding? What’s the weather like? Are you going to vary those different environments? It’s a lot to factor.

Before wrapping up, Hazel looked to the future. “We need more research, understanding, and collaboration between someone who knows the psychology and the tech.” She said. “I’m a doctor, you’re the experts in this field, not me.”

Survios’ Raw Data has been one of the standout successes in virtual reality game design. But at VRDC Fall 2017 in San Francisco today, a pair of Survios devs took the stage to talk about how development went wrong along the way — and what they’ve learned from the experience.

“Today we’re going to tell you everything that went wrong with Raw Data,” said Survios design director Mike McTyre, alongside Survios CT Alex Silkin.

The game launched in Early Access last June, and went through what McTyre describes as seven major updates to date. While it’s available on Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive (with a PlayStation VR version coming soon), the game’s playerbase heavily skewed towards the HTC Vive — to the tune of roughly 80 percent.

Here are a few interesting excerpts from their talk: During development, the team was initially going to keep the game’s map count very small — maybe as few as just two, said Silkin, with some color variants.

But when the game got popular, the team thought to increase the scope and add more maps — but that turned out to be kind of a waste, because at this point just 21 percent of players make it past the fifth mission.

First impressions matter — most people play just the early bits of single-player, and not PvP or co-op

“First impressions matter,” said Silkin. “A lot of players just played the first few missions and got the impression ‘oh, this is a game wher eI just stand in a room and shoot.’”

He says this kind of hurt the game, because the team spent a lot of time and effort making more complicated maps later in the game — maps that most players never see.

The number two most requested feature for the Raw Data devs to add, according to McTyre, was player-vs-player combat — but even though the dev team put a bunch of effort, again, into making a PvP mode they could be proud of, McTyre says only 13 percent of players have ever actually played PvP.

“Out of all our players, 80 percent basically, have only ever played single-player,” said McTyre. “That’s an important takeaway for any other VR product, especially since co-op was such a selling point of the game.”

Despite that, only 16.5 percent of players have ever loaded up co-op play. And again, only 12 percent of players have ever played PvP.

“This is an important takeaway for devs: while VR is growing, and there’s a lot of users, creating a PvP-focused product, or trying to build a PvP-focused community, is going to be a challenge for you,” said McIntyre. “Even if you’re going to try it, I would encourage you to have some kind of single-player experience as well.”

All of these numbers come from the analytics data Survios has been pulling on Raw Data, which the pair said have been vital to ensuring they’re understanding how people play the game. For example, they were shocked to see that only 1 percent of players ever used the game’s defensive abilities, or that at one point 50 percent of players were failing the first mission.

“Half of them are VR enthusiasts,” said McTyre. “They were just people who loved VR, and that was the biggest takeaway for us…why we had to change things and nerf missions and that kind of thing.”

Also, “one of the big lessons we learned was about the frequency of our updates,” said McTyre. “Originally we were too ambitious….and we were gonna shoot for every two weeks.”

“That…really didn’t work out,” he admitted. The team switched gears to try for a once-per-month update schedule, but in the end they had to settle on a once-every-3-months update cadence so they could put significant effort into each update.

“We were in this Early Access period and we had all these users, and we wanted them to come back and experience the new content,” said McTyre. “But what we realized early on was if we did small updates — just one map, just one feature — it wasn’t bringing the users back. So we quickly realized that we neeed to have longer update periods and bigger updates to bring people back. And when we did that, we saw bigger spikes in players returning because the updates were meaningful.”

People play the same game different ways on different platforms/headsets

Fun fact: Most Vive Raw Data players (79 percent) prefer the game’s “sticky” control scheme over the “Hold” or “Toggle” schemes, whereas on the Rift, the majority (72 percent) prefer the “Hold” scheme.

“If you’re releasing your game on different platforms, they have different controllers,” said McTyre. “So don’t assume that just because one of your control schemes is the most popular on one platform, that it will be the most popular across all platforms.”

And while the game was initially intended to only have teleportation-based locomotion, the team’s decision to add PvP meant they had to figure out how to get joystick-based locomotion into the game mid-development.

“We just couldn’t wrap our minds around making Raw Data PvP with teleportation,” said Silkin. It wouldn’t be fun if an opponent could just teleport away at will, so the team decided (despite heavy skepticism) to try using joystick-based movement.

“Ideally this is something you should plan for; we added it mid development cycle, so it broke a bunch of things,” said Silkin. Since they hadn’t scoped for joystick locomotion, the enemy AI could be easily broken by players just backpedaling, and had to be fixed.

(And despite the fact that a vocal group of players clamored for joystick locomotion, McTyre says only 20 percent of players actually turn it on.)

Incidentally, to do joystick locomotion on PSVR, which has no joystick, the team tried a “backpedal” button — and it works well enough that the game will ship with it.

“Our biggest challenge to date was porting to PSVR, because we didn’t plan for it,” added McTyre. Silkin agreed and explained that because of that, there was a lot of reworking that had to be done.

“We had a lot of issue with performance, mostly; we’re CPU-bound,” said Silkin. “Sony is very strict about performance; they don’t want you to get their customers sick.”

“Other importants things about PlayStation, besides not having a joystick, is that there’s no grab buton,” said McTyre. “So we actually had to change up our control scheme quite a bit.”

“One nice advantage? There’s a lot of buttons!” McTyre added. “We were very happy to have a lot of buttons to play with.”

To optimize for the PS4 and PSVR, the Raw Data team switched over to a forward renderer and did some aggressive changes to the game’s levle of detail — not only on assets, but on enemy animations (decreasing quality when they’re far away, or behind the player), enemy count, and other aspects of the game.

The game’s biggest cost was enemies moving around the world, “so we just kinda refactored our systems to not have as many things attached” to things in the world. After a lot of time and effort, they had something that could stand by itself on PSVR.

In closing, the pair offered fellow devs some tips for selling your VR game:

• Bundle often – “Do become friends with your various platform partners,” said McTyre.
• Get in on platform sales – “You’d be surprised how many users are waiting to buy your game,” said McTyre “We saw that with Raw Data. We saw it a year ago, we saw it today: a large spike in purchases during platform sales.”
• Get your game on multiple VR platforms – “The hardware is still selling, but right now we’d encuorage everybody to be on as many platforms as you can. It’s definitely more work, but I tihnk you’ll see a lot more success in terms of sales.”