Category: News

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.” 

Giant Squid Studios’ 2016 underwater exploration game Abzu was, if nothing else, visually resplendent.

At GDC 2017, Giant Squid’s Matt Nava gave a behind-the-scenes look at the processes he and the Abzu team developed to create it.

According to Nava, the game’s vibrant underwater setting presented many technical and artistic challenges uncommon in most games, such as animating vast amounts of fish, simulating huge dynamic kelp forests, and modeling undersea lighting and atmospherics.

Additionally, the team needed to devise a method of creating artistically authored terrains that were visually integrated with the variety of objects in a given scene, yet pliable enough for near constant large scale revision.

His talk was interesting because he explained the solutions/tricks he and the team devised to tackle these problems, sharing examples of from various stages of development.

Now, you can watch Nava’s full talk for free over on the official GDC YouTube channel!

In addition to this presentation, the GDC Vault and its new YouTube channel offers numerous other free videos, audio recordings, and slides from many of the recent Game Developers Conference events, and the service offers even more members-only content for GDC Vault subscribers.

Those who purchased All Access passes to recent events like GDC, GDC Europe, and GDC Next already have full access to GDC Vault, and interested parties can apply for the individual subscription via a GDC Vault subscription page. Group subscriptions are also available: game-related schools and development studios who sign up for GDC Vault Studio Subscriptions can receive access for their entire office or company by contacting staff via the GDC Vault group subscription page. Finally, current subscribers with access issues can contact GDC Vault technical support.

Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Americas

VR has many practical uses outside the sphere games and entertainment. The multiple applications where the technology can be utilized leaves a lot of room for innovation. With that, it comes as no surprise that VR has been used by researchers interested in using the tech to gain insight into human cognition.

During VRDC 2017 in San Francisco today, head of virtual reality and game design at IBM Research Aldis Sipolins lead a discussion about what VR means for human research, and how game design overlaps with experimental design.

When Sipolins experienced VR for the first time, it was with an Oculus DK1 and two motion controllers velcro’d onto the side of his head. With a little work he was able access Minecraft. Being able to peer around a cube in 3D space was a game changer and from then on, he knew VR was going to be invaluable for his work going forward. “I can’t overstate how important this is.” He said. 

For Sipolins, testing behavior and studying human cognition in VR is a no brainer. “We bring people into the lab and test them using pen and paper. But it makes sense to test things in 3D because we live in 3D.” Scientifically speaking, VR accurately mimics how we see. 

“Binocular disparity is the difference between what your eyes see.” He said, hand outstretched in front of his face. He described what his left eye could see, and what features his right eye could distinguish. We can’t get this same experience from a 2D screen, and a lot of that has to do with presence. 

“VR is good for science because of presence.” explains Sipolins. “Your brain’s an idiot and VR fools it.” Presence in VR is a game-changer for human research, and is used in tandem with machine learning by researchers to get a window into human cognition. He goes on to define the concept of ecological validity, which is how much of the artificial reality you create in the lab translates to the real world.

A great example of this in VR are those who tend to hurt themselves in immersive experiences because the line between what’s real and what’s not has become blurred. VR has the power to illicit this behavior. Sipolins gives an example of how behavioral studies that seek to study the brain often use rudimentary or clunky techniques. He mentions the struggle of asking a patient to press buttons inside of an MRI machine, and how VR solves the largely solves this issue of presence.  

VR gives you presence, which gives you ecological validity and this is good for research. “You can break presence in a million ways, but the most tragic is when you go to do something and it won’t let you. This is the difference between pressing B to jump and just jumping.” He said when mentioning input and output in games.

“If you want to change what someone sees, you can add and remove visual input in VR which means you can create entirely new behaviors. VR enables behavior that would be impossible in real life.” 

It’s easy to see why Sipolins has a positive outlook on the future of VR, especially when it comes to using the technology for research. “VR gives us a better way to understand the human condition, it can be whatever you want. It doesn’t matter if it’s game design or level design. Good design is good business. Whatever you’re doing, just do good.”

Nels Anderson, formerly of Campo Santo, announced that he has opened up his own game development studio to develop a yet unannounced “sweet video game.” 

The studio itself is called Caledonia and, beyond that, details are scarce. But Anderson notes that he has already assembled a squad of developers to join him on the project, though he hasn’t disclosed who will be joining him on his new team quite yet. 

Anderson himself was one of the first members of Firewatch dev Campo Santo, and served as a designer for that project. Prior to his days at Campo Santo, Anderson spent time at Klei Entertainment, first as a programmer in 2008 and later as the lead designer on Mark of the Ninja in 2010. 

“Ok, things are real enough to say I’ve started a cool team of people to make a sweet video game. We’re Caledonia,” Anderson announced over Twitter. “Will be talking about the team and game soon-ish, but mostly this is just because I know there are all kinds of things I don’t know, so I’ll be picking the brains of you very smart people about things, and now you’ll have some idea of what I’m nattering on about!”

Update: An earlier version of this story branded Anderson a cofounder of Campo Santo. Anderson later contacted Gamasutra to say that Sean Vanaman and Jake Rodkin are technically the only cofounders. “Founder? More like flounder!” Anderson told Gamasutra, referring to the well-known species of flatfish.

The Gamasutra Job Board is the most diverse, active and established board of its kind for the video game industry!

Here is just one of the many, many positions being advertised right now.

Location: Los Angeles, California

The Big Picture

Mindshow is PC-based virtual reality software that lets you make animated movies in VR with your body and voice. Become 3D cartoon characters, act out a show, and share it with your friends. Come take a look at what we’re building: http://store.steampowered.com/app/382000

We’re looking for top software engineers to help us lead the charge. The ideal candidate has real-world experience developing AAA game titles, solid knowledge in the fundamentals of engineering and computer science, and a passion for virtual reality. You love learning new technologies and quickly applying them to practice. If this sounds like you, then you’ll love it here… we’ve got some cool stuff for you to work on. Send us your resume.

The Everyday View

• Implement the Mindshow virtual reality application for the Vive and Oculus on the PC, and for emerging mobile VR platforms
• Develop high-quality, modular code that is well engineered and architected to support long-term development and product evolution
• Collaborate with designers and artists to develop new features, characters, environments, and props, and contribute original ideas towards all aspects of production and development
• Work with QA (in addition to testing your own code and performing peer reviews of other people’s code) to ensure the application is rock solid
• Analyze code performance and architect optimizations
• Keep up to date with technological developments and advancements in virtual reality

The Kind of Person We’re Looking For

• Hands-on experience developing AAA-quality game titles for the PC or game consoles using leading 3D game creation engines
• Formal training and experience in software engineering and computer science
• Excellent software design and programming skills using C# or C++
• Highly skilled in developing software for 3D computer graphics, math, motion capture, animation, gameplay, 3D user interfaces, physics, and networking
• 3+ years’ work experience (outside of college) within agile Scrum engineering teams

Plusses The Get You Noticed

• Portfolio of prior AAA game titles
• Real-world experience with software architectures and design principals used for large-scale engineering projects, such as inversion of control, separation of concerns, and MVC, and knowledge on how to apply them within a game object / component engine
• Experience with virtual reality (Vive, Oculus, PSVR) and VR SDKs (SteamVR plugin for Unity, Unity VR API, OpenVR)
• Experience developing shaders in HLSL
• Experience developing multi-user systems, real-time networking, digital content distribution, and social network integration

Interested? Apply now. 

Whether you’re just starting out, looking for something new, or just seeing what’s out there, the Gamasutra Job Board is the place where game developers move ahead in their careers.

Gamasutra’s Job Board is the most diverse, most active, and most established board of its kind in the video game industry, serving companies of all sizes, from indie to triple-A.

Looking for a new job? Get started here. Are you a recruiter looking for talent? Post jobs here.

Nintendo has now joined the ranks of game companies that allow players to add an additional layer of security to their online accounts. 

The company has added two-step verification as an optional feature for Nintendo Accounts through the Google Authenticator app.

Going forward, players that choose to enable the feature will need to enter an additional six-digit code generated by the Google app when logging into their Nintendo Account.

In essence, two-step verification prevents would-be troublemakers from accessing an account with just a stolen password since they’d also need access to the account owner’s smartphone to log in.

PlayStation notably introduced two-step verification to PlayStation Network accounts just over a year ago, though Sony’s security offering sends codes via text message rather than through its own or a third-party app. Games like World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XI and XIV have also made use of the security feature in the past, providing verification codes via physical authenticators prior to the rise of smartphones.

The 2018 Game Developers Conference has opened a call for submissions to ALT.CTRL.GDC, that popular on-site special exhibit which highlights unique control methods for playing games.

The perennially popular ALT.CTRL.GDC showcase will take place from March 21 to March 23, 2018 at the Game Developers Conference 2018. The deadline for submissions to the showcase is December 1st, and organizers welcome all indie-centric one-of-a-kind game peripherals, contraptions, and novelties which enhance game experiences and challenge traditional forms of input.

To get your cranial and actual circuits buzzing, consider that last year ALT.CTRL.GDC visitors played a game of give-and-take with a re-purposed printer motor in Doggy-Tug-of-War, touched colorfully-tinted tummies to make mix and match colors in U.F.O. Bellies, crawled for their lives by pulling on a carpeted treadmill in Zombie Crawler, and revisited their childhood imaginations while titling and shooting in a cardboard box in Space Box.

The ALT.CTRL.GDC 2017 Award winner, Fear Sphere, was a spine-tingling inflatable escape-room that players stepped inside and illuminated with a flashlight that doubled as a portable video projector, while another player stood outside to help guide the sphere-engulfed player to safety.

Teams for each chosen submission will be asked to showcase their games to GDC attendees at the ALT.CTRL.GDC exhibit area. They’ll also receive a pair of All-Access Passes and a pair of Expo Passes, for a total of four free passes to GDC 2018.

For the second year in a row, one of the games selected to be part of the GDC 2018 ALT.CTRL.GDC showcase will win the ALT.CTRL.GDC Award ($3,000) at the IGF ceremony during GDC, with judging taking place on-site.

In exchange for the passes and free exhibit space, teams will be responsible for their own travel and the delivery of their exhibit submission to GDC in San Francisco. Those interested in participating in ALT.CTRL.GDC should fill out this online form in its entirety. Any questions about the form or the exhibit should be directed to ALT.CTRL.GDC’s organizer, John Polson.

This will be the fifth year that ALT.CTRL.GDC appears at GDC, and organizers are looking forward to the remarkable outpouring of creativity and ingenuity that has become a hallmark of the interactive exhibit. Organizers are also preparing a host of other exciting interactive exhibits for the upcoming GDC which will be announced in the coming months.

GDC 2018 will itself take place Monday, March 19 to Friday, March 23, 2018 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, California. More information about Game Developers Conference 2018 is available via its official website.

GDC and Gamasutra are sibling organizations under parent company UBM Americas