The world is your genre<\/strong><\/p>\nIf 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe world itself is the genre,\u201d said Lazzaro. \u201cAnd interaction with the world is the game.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u00a0Holodeck tech fills an empty room with highly-detailed scenes, places the characters spend as much time exploring and interacting with as they do traversing.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Gameplay is all about depth — literally<\/strong><\/p>\n\u201cIf you can\u2019t play your game with a depth map alone, just with the depth, then you really don\u2019t have a virtual- or mixed-reality game,\u201d said Lazzaro. \u201cIf all of your action is in 2D, that\u2019s great, but it doesn’t need to be in VR an it’s\u00a0not going to be new or interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n
This may seem obvious, but Lazzaro cautioned that most game designers are instinctively used to designing within the bounds of flat screens.\u00a0From her perspective we still haven\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
To use depth in a meaningful way, she said,\u00a0you want to think about making things that nest or\u00a0interlock; things that open and close, or nestle\u00a0within each other.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Progress through the world can be\u00a0your game’s story<\/strong><\/p>\n\u201cIf the world is changing as you move through the game, then that world is going to feel mch more alive,\u201d said Lazzaro. \u201cYou want to be sure that the player feels like they made a difference, like they changed the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
As an example, Lazzaro calls back to the film \u201cThe Matrix\u201d and the points in that film where\u00a0the world changes because the viewer\u2019s perspective shifts.<\/p>\n
If you can give your players a similar sense of changing the world (or at least, their understanding\u00a0of the world) based on their actions, you\u2019re on the path to creating a mixed-reality game that\u2019s\u00a0fun for more than 15 minutes at a stretch.<\/p>\n
Make NPCs that can be explored<\/strong><\/p>\n\u201cWe really want NPCs to be explorable, just like a space is more explorable,\u201d said Lazzaro. \u201cIt\u2019s not necessarily realism, either; NPCs will be very different in mixed-reality.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u00a0you need to make your NPCs realistic human doppelgangers; it\u2019s okay to create characters that are artful, animated, or otherwise simplistic as long as they can be explored by the player.<\/p>\n
By that Lazzaro means that your NPCs should be compelling, they should\u00a0ask 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.<\/p>\n
Don’t skimp on player customization — it can be a key narrative tool, even in VR\/MR<\/strong><\/p>\n\u201cWhen we look down, we see ourselves in the world,\u201d said Lazzaro. \u201cThe question to ask for your design team is, then, what can you do increase the storytelling potential of the player character?\u201d<\/p>\n
She cautioned devs to always \u201cleave room for the player\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u00a0world.<\/p>\n
Also, don\u2019t forget that you can give players room to shift their own narratives — at least temporarily — by trying on different bodies in VR\/MR.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can be male, you can be female, you can be big, you can be small,\u201d said Lazzaro, noting that VR games like Mindshow<\/em> let players do this and then set up ways (with mirrors, for example) for the player to see and identify with their new form.<\/p>\nIn 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\u00a0players room to have meaningful experiences, letting them\u00a0explore,\u00a0dig into, and\u00a0change the world around them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":252,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=251"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}