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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

Where do we go from here?

It was a common topic of conversation at VRDC Fall 2017 in San Francisco this week, as developers and other industry types try to suss out what the future holds for virtual- and augmented-reality experiences.

XEODesign chief and game designer Nicole Lazzaro tackled the topic in a talk at the show about what the future looks like for mixed-reality, outlining a number of possible futures and walking devs through what they can expect to do to get there.

“I believe that where we are now is not where we’re going to be…we’re going to have whole new genres come out of this thing we call virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality,” she said. “As designers, it’s our job to think about where we’re going.”

Lazzaro is currently working on the VR game Follow the White Rabbit (pictured), so it’s fitting that she compared virtual reality experiences to “taking a trip down the rabbit hole to explore Wonderland.” With that in mind, she encouraged fellow developers to view mixed-reality experience design as the future of this technology: the point after we grow comfortable with virtual reality and augmented reality and blend the two, in terms of both technology and design.

Her talk was full of interesting suggestions, including five techniques game designers can use when creating mixed-reality spaces intended to have strong, meaningful narratives.

“I want narrative spaces to do one thing: give me the feels,” she said. “I want to feel amazed and connected to my friends, for more than 15 minutes.”

For Lazzaro, a “narrative space’ is basically any space that evokes a series of emotions. Referencing her famous “4 Keys 2 Fun” philosophy of game design, she encouraged developers to try and make mixed-reality games that encourage serious fun, hard fun, fun with people — anything beyond easy fun, which refers to the sort of approachable 15-minute games that VR/MR designers are already doing well.

“In the MR space, most games only deliver one: easy fun,” she said. “It’s a great experience, but then you don’t have a reason to go back there again.”

The world is your genre

If you want to get to a point where the players of your VR/MR game are coming back for more, over and over again, you need to design a world with both breadth and depth.

“The world itself is the genre,” said Lazzaro. “And interaction with the world is the game.”

She predicts a future where mixed-reality game design heavily involves players interacting and playing within an environment that tells its own story. As an example, she references how the fictional Star Trek Holodeck tech fills an empty room with highly-detailed scenes, places the characters spend as much time exploring and interacting with as they do traversing.

That may not be technically feasible now, says Lazzaro, but it’s something game designers should be moving towards now if they want to be making more meaningful VR/MR games.  

Gameplay is all about depth — literally

“If you can’t play your game with a depth map alone, just with the depth, then you really don’t have a virtual- or mixed-reality game,” said Lazzaro. “If all of your action is in 2D, that’s great, but it doesn’t need to be in VR an it’s not going to be new or interesting.”

This may seem obvious, but Lazzaro cautioned that most game designers are instinctively used to designing within the bounds of flat screens. From her perspective we still haven’t fully explored what we can do when everyone has easy, convenient access to depth as a game design tool, and designers should be exploring that axis now.

To use depth in a meaningful way, she said, you want to think about making things that nest or interlock; things that open and close, or nestle within each other.

This encourages to players to reach in and play with things in your world — and of course, that means you have to make sure those objects are well-made and stand up to close scrutiny, since players will want to pull them close and look at them. 

Progress through the world can be your game’s story

“If the world is changing as you move through the game, then that world is going to feel mch more alive,” said Lazzaro. “You want to be sure that the player feels like they made a difference, like they changed the world.”

As an example, Lazzaro calls back to the film “The Matrix” and the points in that film where the world changes because the viewer’s perspective shifts.

If you can give your players a similar sense of changing the world (or at least, their understanding of the world) based on their actions, you’re on the path to creating a mixed-reality game that’s fun for more than 15 minutes at a stretch.

Make NPCs that can be explored

“We really want NPCs to be explorable, just like a space is more explorable,” said Lazzaro. “It’s not necessarily realism, either; NPCs will be very different in mixed-reality.”

The suggestion here is that characters in your game gain a new dimension of meaning when a player can walk up and talk to them in VR/MR. That doesn’ tmean you need to make your NPCs realistic human doppelgangers; it’s okay to create characters that are artful, animated, or otherwise simplistic as long as they can be explored by the player.

By that Lazzaro means that your NPCs should be compelling, they should ask questions, and they should offer choices to the player. Most importantly, says Lazzaro, you should think about designing NPCs the same way you should think about designing narrative spaces in VR/MR — you want them to have a sense of depth that the player can explore.

Don’t skimp on player customization — it can be a key narrative tool, even in VR/MR

“When we look down, we see ourselves in the world,” said Lazzaro. “The question to ask for your design team is, then, what can you do increase the storytelling potential of the player character?”

She cautioned devs to always “leave room for the player” in your game design. Rather than shoehorning the player into your vision of what the game should be, try to leave room in your narrative and your game world for the player to express themselves. 

You might fill your narrative spaces with objects players can pick up and put on themselves, for example, or you could implement interactive ways for them to leave a mark on the world.

Also, don’t forget that you can give players room to shift their own narratives — at least temporarily — by trying on different bodies in VR/MR.

“You can be male, you can be female, you can be big, you can be small,” said Lazzaro, noting that VR games like Mindshow let players do this and then set up ways (with mirrors, for example) for the player to see and identify with their new form.

In closing, Lazzaro encouraged developers exploring virtual-, augmented- and mixed-reality game design to think more deeply about what kinds of fun they foster in their work. Years from now, she reasons, the VR/MR games that stand out will be the ones that give players room to have meaningful experiences, letting them explore, dig into, and change the world around them.

Final Fantasy Brave Exivus developer Gumi has reclaimed its website from a band of hackers that gained access to the site and seemingly a smattering of Gumi’s other files this past Thursday.

According to a record of the events collected by one NeoGAF user, a hacker under the moniker ‘HaxAC’ replaced the developer’s website with a taunting image and ransom demand yesterday afternoon. 

The hacker in question claimed that it had access to more than just the website, threatening to release source code for a number of Gumi’s games if the developer did not send between 75-300 bitcoin (roughly $266k-$1.1 million) within the timeframe specified. 

“Your security is a joke. Fortunately, we will not be touching any of your files,” read Gumi’s hijacked website Thursday afternoon. “But it would be quite unfortunate if the source codes of your (9?) games were to say, LEAK. Well, you know what, we don’t actually feel like leaking anything today. But, we do feel greedy.”

The intruder than reportedly distributed roughly $40 worth of in-game currency to players before the game itself went down for ‘emergency maintenance’ shortly after. The developer has since reclaimed its web pages and released a statement via Facebook to say the game would remain offline as it ensured “the integrity of the game system including all game data and players’ personal information”

“We have determined upon investigation that this disruption was caused by someone who gained unauthorized access into our system for the FFBE game, and made a threat to our hosting company,” reads the post. We are currently conducting maintenance to ensure the integrity of the game system including all game data and players’ personal information.”

“We would like to assure all players that this matter is of utmost importance to us. We sincerely ask that you bear with us in the meantime while our teams are hard at work, trying to resolve this matter, and resume the game services as soon as practicable.”