How an underdog Street Fighter 6 player beat the odds to win $1 million
Wang Yuan-hao made history by winning Street Fighter 6's Capcom Cup. We spoke to the man known as UMA about the underdog story that landed him $1 million.
Gundam Evolution is a hero shooter for more than Gundam fans
Gundam Evolution may be a Gundam-based team shooter, but it's chasing a wider audience than ever.
The fight to keep the Nickelodeon All-Stars Brawl scene alive
When Nickelodeon All-Stars Brawl seemed dead on arrival at launch, one fan hatched a plan to keep the scene alive.
Lost Recipes: How Schell Games Wrote A Perfect Recipe For Virtual Education
When Lost Recipes launched a few weeks ago, one of the questions that seemed at the forefront of everyone’s mind – my own, my colleagues and even the team at Schell Games – was whether this was actually a game, or something slightly different?
“I would consider it an experience more than a game, even though it definitely has some game elements,” said Lost Recipes Project Director and Schell Games Senior Game Design Manager Melanie Harke. “Of course you’re being scored and there’s lots of different mechanics in it. But in the end, the real goal was for it to be kind of like a vacation.”
Melanie and I had a lengthy conversation in VR last week in UploadVR’s virtual studio. We discussed Lost Recipes’ origins, development and the reasoning behind some of the decisions made by the team at Schell Games during development.
What makes Lost Recipes so unique is that it blends VR gameplay into a much more relaxing, educational experience than we’ve ever seen before in VR. You travel back in time to three ancient cultures and learn recipes in a relaxed, stress-free and educational manner. You can even take what you learn with you back into your actual kitchen — the VR cooking process informs the same process in real life.
This was all part of a plan from Schell Games to appeal to a different kind of crowd – those who don’t necessarily think of themselves as ‘gamers’, especially when using a Quest headset. “I personally think everyone’s a gamer, but you know, they might not title themselves that – instead it’s people who want to use the Quest as maybe like a lifestyle tool,” said Harke.
“We got a bunch of people when they were play testing [Lost Recipes] that said, ‘You know, I haven’t played any games. All I play is Beat Saber, that’s it.’ And they don’t consider that a game either. They’re like, ‘That’s my exercise routine.'”
This idea of the Quest as a lifestyle tool is becoming increasingly popular – just look at the many options for fitness and workout apps on the platform, which Meta itself is using as a marketing angle.
“We wanted to get those people [lifestyle users] in and have them play this. We had a lot of people after the play tests that were like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know they made games that are like this… For me.'”
Even if it doesn’t quite fit into the traditional ‘game’ label as we understand it now, there’s a lot to love about Lost Recipes’ approach. It’s one of the few games on the platform that doesn’t just copy mechanics or gameplay beats from traditional, flatscreen games. This is an experience that only works in VR, and delivers educational content not through lecturing or instruction, but more like a field trip or hands-on activity with game mechanics applied.
It is so brilliantly unique and specific to VR that it is arguably more, not less, of a proper VR ‘game’ than many other titles on the platform.
But before finding its way to Lost Recipes, Schell Games developed lots of varied experiences that would later inform this new venture. There was a mixture of both more straightforward education content, developed for flatscreen platforms, and more ‘traditional’ VR games that the studio has become recently known for — namely the I Expect You To Die series and roguelike action game Until You Fall.
Harke herself joined Schell right back at the company’s beginning, well before VR was part of the picture, working initially in QA and then in design for titles like Disney Pixie Hollow, the Disney fairies MMO, and then later other VR educational experiences as well as mobile educational games based around PBS’ Daniel Tiger show, a spin-off from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
After running the gamut on many types of games on many platforms, Schell Games worked with Oculus Education on ideas for a new experience exploring what made education in VR so powerful.
“It’s really about presence,” said Harke. “Being there in the location.” The studio took what it learned from its other educational experiences – Water Bears VR and HoloLAB Champions – but aimed to make something less formally educational in nature. “We knew we didn’t want to be like a classroom experience. We wanted to be something that just a normal, everyday person who’s curious about things – cause we all like to learn – might want to experience. And so that’s really where I think cooking came from.”
With development beginning during the pandemic, the idea of escaping to another location – a virtual vacation – also became quite appealing.
“I just don’t want to cook just in my normal house, because I’m in my house 24/7. I want to cook and experience these places that maybe – right now, especially – I can’t get to. That really helped push us into exploring what if you were cooking in locations that are not like your house? How did people cook in ancient times? How did they cook in like prehistoric times, even? That was one of the conversations. And that really got us excited.”
But how did the team decide what cultures would be featured, and how they could be represented in a way that was properly authentic and respectful, even if they were from time periods that have long since passed?
“It really came down to what could we get good data for. That was very important to us, because we did want this to be a very authentic, real experience,” explained Harke. “We wanted to make sure it was a place that we could find a human that was willing to work with us for the long-term. We wanted to have people at the very early [stages], to research, but also looking at the art later on and everything.”
The final game features voice actors playing the chefs, one for each culture, voiced by people representing the closest modern analog for each ancient culture. But it wasn’t just the voice acting that had to be authentic. The team wanted everything — the food, recipes, environments, art — in the game to be as authentic as possible.
They achieved this through connections with subject matter consultants at the Kenner room at Carnegie Mellon university, collaborating and talking to them during the development process. “We had oftentimes weekly meetings with them, because we had so much to talk about. It’s not just the food, it’s… what’s the language that you would use? How would the scene be arranged? What’s the decoration on the walls? What sort of material would they have?”
“They didn’t always have the answer – sometimes they would point us to resources, books to look at – but it was just good to have someone who was connected to the culture, working with us the entire way.”
For Harke, the authenticity that the subject matter consultants and voice actors lend the game is what makes it so potent as an experience. “Without them, we wouldn’t have a game,” she said. “And really, I just hope everyone gains some new appreciation of both how different and also how similar all of our cultures are. How familiar cooking is and how it connects us all together as people.”
Harke’s hope certainly isn’t unfounded either — cooking the recipes in the game does give you a new perspective, with transferable skills and methods. While playing the game for review, I was able to recreate the game’s steamed fish dish in real life, using methods and recipes learned from the game.
“We definitely wanted people to try these recipes in their own homes. We didn’t want people to get bogged down in like super details, and in fact, a lot of ancient recipes, they’re not going to have those super details anyway,” said Harke.
This was an approach discovered during play testing. Early versions of the game had more details for each recipe, providing more specific instructions than what ended up in the final build. “People got really bogged down in the detail of making sure that the color of the liquid that they’ve made exactly matched the picture that’s on there, and that they’ve measured it exactly… It started to feel really stressful to people. That’s not what we’re going for at all. We want you to feel accomplished, that you can do these things in cooking.”
This was when the team transitioned to using ratios and other looser measurements, focusing less on outcomes and more on process. It was at this point that adding in some tricks from traditional games also helped improved the feedback loop – the little sparkles that shine once an action is finished, for example, help players know when something has been done correctly and avoids unnecessary worry.
Early versions of the game experimented with implementing support for the Quest’s controller-free hand tracking, but it ended up being a less than ideal option. “Really it just became much harder to do things [when using hand tracking],” explained Harke. “People started to look at the technique of how they’re holding the hand and I think it took some of the enjoyment away.”
Hand tracking also made some of the actions, like stirring a pot, problematic — when using hands without any controllers, it often became harder to manage what Harke described as the ‘fakery’ behind some of the physics interactions.
So while the finished product opts for controllers-only, the overall community and critical reception of the game has been positive.
“We’ve got lots of feedback of people sort of saying that this is not like other cooking experiences.” Other VR cooking titles – like Cook-Out or Cooking Simulator – focus on being frenetic and chaotic, but Schell opted for the opposite direction. “I certainly love those games, but we did purposely try to make something different and unique. People have really picked up on [that]. This is a game where I can sort of relax. I can chill in it. And that’s, that’s definitely the vibe we were going for.”
Speaking hypothetically, Harke says the team still has plenty of avenues to investigate. “We have like full lists of other environments that we are excited about exploring, even with some reference people that we might reach out to. I think that that is certainly something that, as a team while making it, we’re definitely thinking about and very excited about. No promises or anything, but…”
When it comes to potential updates, new content or DLC expansions for Lost Recipes, Harke’s lips are sealed. “Stay tuned. I can’t really speak to that yet. But we really liked the product. We really enjoyed working on it, and we’d certainly love to do more.”
This feature piece is an edited version of our full conversation with Melanie Harke from Schell Games, available in video format on our YouTube channel here.
How the relaunched G4 plans to stand out in the Twitch era
G4's Brian Terwilliger talks on-air talent, its broadcast model, and G4 not taking itself seriously.
Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook Will Be ‘A Metaverse Company’ In 5 Years
Platformer’s Casey Newton interviewed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on his plans to make Facebook “a metaverse company”.
If you’re not familiar with the term, “metaverse” simply means a massively social digital alternate universe. The term was coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, which also popularized “avatar”.
Some consider individual platforms like VRChat metaverses, whereas others think the term should only be used singular to describe an open protocol-based system like the internet.
Facebook’s near term social platform, Horizon, is still in a small scale closed beta despite being marketed alongside Quest 2, which shipped back in October.
You should go read or listen to the full interview. But if you don’t have time, here are some key quotes:
What Even Is The Metaverse?
“You can think about it as the successor to the mobile internet. And it’s certainly not something that any one company is going to build, but I think a big part of our next chapter is going to hopefully be contributing to building that, in partnership with a lot of other companies and creators and developers.
But you can think about the metaverse as an embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content — you are in it. And you feel present with other people as if you were in other places, having different experiences that you couldn’t necessarily do on a 2D app or webpage.“
Multi-Platform Support
“I think a lot of people, when they think about the metaverse, they think about just virtual reality — which I think is going to be an important part of that. And that’s clearly a part that we’re very invested in, because it’s the technology that delivers the clearest form of presence.
But the metaverse isn’t just virtual reality. It’s going to be accessible across all of our different computing platforms; VR and AR, but also PC, and also mobile devices and game consoles.“
Facebook’s Strategy
“I think all of these different initiatives that we have at Facebook today will basically ladder up together to contribute to helping to build this metaverse vision.
And my hope, if we do this well, I think over the next five years or so, in this next chapter of our company, I think we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company.”
Replacing Smartphones & Webcam Grids
“We have these phones. They’re relatively small. A lot of the time that we’re spending, we’re basically mediating our lives and our communication through these small, glowing rectangles. I think that that’s not really how people are made to interact.
A lot of the meetings that we have today, you’re looking at a grid of faces on a screen. That’s not how we process things either. We’re used to being in a room with people and having a sense of space where if you’re sitting to my right, then that means I’m also sitting to your left, so we have some shared sense of space in common. When you speak, it’s coming from my right. It’s not just all coming from the same place in front of me.“
All-Day VR Headsets “By The End Of This Decade”
“There’s clearly an evolution, or multiple, in the technology that are going to need to be possible, that will need to happen before this is the main way that people work. But I think we’re going to be there by the end of this decade.
Today, the VR headsets, they’re still kind of a bit clunky, they may be a bit heavier than you would ideally like them to be. There need to be advances in being able to express yourself and having higher resolution, being able to read text better, a number of things like that. But we’re getting there, and each version is better and better.“
The Challenge of AR Glasses
“So you’re basically cramming all of these materials to build what we would’ve thought of as a supercomputer 10 years ago into the frame of glasses that are about five millimeters thick — you have computer chips, and networking chips, and holographic wave guides, and things for sensing and mapping out the world, and batteries and speakers, all this stuff, and it just needs to fit into these glasses — so that is a real challenge.
And I actually would go so far as to say that I think that might be one of, if not the biggest technological challenge, that our industry will face in the next decade.“
Facebook Already Does VR Meetings
“The other area that I think is going to be pretty exciting is basically doing meetings. And I already do a bunch of meetings in VR.
Even though the avatars aren’t as realistic today as they will be in a few years, in a lot of ways it already feels almost more real, and more like you have a sense of space, than a Zoom call, because you have the shared sense of space.“
Horizon Will Have Concerts, AAA Games, And An Economy
“But you’d get concerts in there. You have this whole set of creators who are building out different experiences, ranging from an individual creator to teams of dozens of people building AAA games, where you can have your avatar and you can go across these experiences.
You can teleport instantaneously. You can bring your outfits and your digital objects with you. So I think that there’s going to be a whole economy around this.“
Bypassing The Limitations Of Geography
“When I grew up, I played Little League baseball in my town, not because I am made to be a baseball player, but because that was one of the few activities that was available. There was, I think, one other kid in the town who was interested in computers — I was lucky that there was one other kid. And that was my world. If I wanted to call someone who I met when I was at camp or something and wanted to stay in touch with a friend, I would have to pay a lot more because long-distance calls cost more than talking to people nearby.
I think one of the things that is most magical about the present, and that I think is going to get even more so, is that flattening out distance creates a lot more opportunities for people. Not just in the sense that a version of me growing up today wouldn’t be stuck playing Little League, that I’d get to find people who are interested in the same things, so I could explore coding and have a much more vibrant community around that, or surfing, or whatever the thing is that you’re interested in. I think that that’s probably quite compelling and positive. I also think it is really important for economic opportunity.“
Interoperability, Portability & Digital Governance
“I think a good vision for the metaverse is not one that a specific company builds, but it has to have the sense of interoperability and portability. You have your avatar and your digital goods, and you want to be able to teleport anywhere. You don’t want to just be stuck within one company’s stuff.
So I think part of this is, I think it’ll be good if companies build stuff that can work together and go across lines rather than just being locked into a specific platform. But I do think that, just like you have the W3C that helps set standards around a bunch of the important internet protocols and how people build the web, I think there will need to be some of that here, too, for defining how developers and creators can build experiences that allow someone to take their avatar and their digital goods and their friends, and be able to teleport seamlessly between all these different experiences.“
“But even within that, there’s a lot of questions about how that works. Is it interoperable because it’s decentralized, in the way that a bunch of the crypto work is being designed now, so there’s kind of no central dependency? It’s not just interoperable, but there’s no centralized control points? Or is it interoperable because there are some bodies that set standards and enable a bunch of these experiences to work together?”
Metaverse Shouldn’t Be Plural
“I don’t think in the future, people are going to call the work that individual companies do a metaverse. Hopefully, if we’re successful collectively in building a system that’s more interoperable, and where you can teleport between things, it should all be the metaverse, each company should not have its own metaverse.
Hopefully in the future, asking if a company is building a metaverse will sound as ridiculous as asking a company how their internet is going.“
Cubism: How An Architectural Mindset Spawned An Intuitive VR Puzzle Game
Thomas Van Bouwel is the one-man developer behind Cubism, one the best puzzle games available on the Oculus Quest. Van Bouwel now works full time on Cubism and is developing a set of DLC levels for the game, but five years ago he was working in a completely different industry with no experience in the world of VR.
“My background is actually not in computer science or game development at all. I actually come from a background in architecture,” says Van Bouwel, speaking to me in VR from UploadVR’s virtual studio. “I was a practicing architect for several years, until I made the switch. It was architecture that actually led me to move into VR. I was really fascinated by what VR could do for the design process and how it could make the design and architecture a lot more human-centered. Instead of looking at a plan for a building from top-down, you look at a building from a human perspective while you design it.”
Van Bouwel was always fascinated with the ways that immersive technologies and game engines could be used within an architectural context, and ended up investigating further during his university studies. In his third year, Van Bouwel gave a presentation of a 3D architecture model displayed in the PC game Crysis, imported using CryEngine. He found that from showing his friends and family the model in-game, he received a lot more feedback compared to showing them plans or scale models. “That was when it first clicked. Like, ‘Oh, these sort of immersive technologies can be very useful for the design process.'”
After working as an architect for several years, Van Bouwel decided to quit his job in 2016 and started learning how to develop for VR. He attended hackathons, went to game jams and landed a job at an enterprise VR startup, InsiteVR (now known as Resolve), within a year and a half. While he had a Vive headset at home, the job gave him access to a variety of different headsets, including an early Quest prototype — the Santa Cruz — in 2017.
It was around then that Van Bouwel came up with a new concept for a VR puzzle game. Working in his free time, he soon created the first build of what would become Cubism — an intuitive, deceptively simple puzzle game where the user must place different shaped blocks together to fit into a larger wireframe shape.
“It sort of really came out of that fascination with minimal design in mobile games and what that could mean in VR games,” says Van Bouwel. Minimalist mobile games like Mini Metro, Hitman Go and Lara Croft Go were big inspirations. “These games can use a very simple look and a very simple input scheme, but then can have a lot of depth to them. And more importantly, [they are] games that are really well scoped for small teams.”
“A big part of choosing to work on Cubism was that it felt like it was small enough in scope that I could work on it in my spare time. At the time I was working at that startup, which I really enjoyed working at. So I knew that if I was going to work on a project on the side, it better be something small and something that was manageable.”
Cubism’s puzzles are a riff on the classic wooden block puzzles that have been around for many years. In real life, the end shape is usually restricted to something quite memorable and solid — a rectangle or a cube. With Cubism, the shapes of the pieces and the wireframes vary wildly in both difficulty and design, no longer held back by gravity pulling at physical blocks.
The real beauty of Cubism is in its simplistic, clean design — the architectural influence is very clear. The entire game can be played with just the controllers and the triggers. If you’re using an Oculus Quest, you don’t even need controllers — you can just use your hands. This game-wide policy of simplicity and accessibility means that almost anyone, even those inexperienced with VR, can pick up the game and play it. “I put a lot of effort into that actually. The game came from being in a stage where it was a lot harder to use and learn.”
Earlier versions of Cubism mapped several actions to different controller buttons. This wasn’t initially a problem, as only experienced gamers and other VR developers were doing the playtesting. “I was missing a lot of UX issues early on, because if people are comfortable with VR or they’re comfortable with playing games in general, they learn these controller mappings pretty quickly. But if people aren’t, it’s really a roadblock for them.”
The UX issues became more apparent when Van Bouwel took his builds on the road to a wider audience. “Putting those people in the game and seeing them sort of struggle with the control scheme, that really sort of flipped the switch for me. Like, I really need to simplify this.”
“From that point on, I did everything I could to make the whole game playable with just the triggers, which required a few redesigns.” Small changes — allowing the triggers to be used for all actions, placing a menu indicator beneath the puzzle — made the game much more accessible to the uninitiated. “From the start of the game to solving the first puzzle, that became a really fast process. People could get started with their first puzzle within like 10 or 15 seconds of starting the game.”
“That was always a goal of mine — to make sure that it was something that was approachable,” he says. “I think that’s part of the appeal of VR too, right? That it should be more intuitive.”
Cubism released last year, and while the game is available on both PC VR and Quest, it shines on the latter. Not only is it among the best puzzle games for the system, but since launch Van Bouwel has also added hand tracking and 120Hz support, which both elevate the game to an impressive new level. It’s also one of the best showcases of the Quest’s cutting-edge VR technology and features.
Now, approaching a year since release, Van Bouwel is designing and playtesting a set of 30 new DLC levels for the game.
“DLC seemed to be like the best way to give people more puzzles to play,” he says. “It’s still a work in progress, but hopefully [the DLC levels] are going to have a bit of a different look from the main campaign to differentiate them. But they will play very similar to the puzzles in the main campaign.”
“And much like the campaign, there’s going to be a song that’s sort of tied to the puzzles, specific to the DLC.”
Sound is another big part of Cubism’s design. In the main campaign, each different puzzle piece has an associated piano note. When you solve a puzzle, each of the notes will play together to form a chord. If you combine all the chords from each level together, it forms a song. “The main campaign is basically this big song that you unlock as you play it. And the DLC will have a song of its own that you unlock as you play the puzzles as well.”
But how does Van Bouwel approach designing a Cubism level, both in terms of its form factor and its difficulty?
“Usually, it starts with a shape,” he says. “Then I start filling it in with pieces.”
“I try to make the puzzles in such a way that you can approach them with some reason, so that you don’t just have to trial and error your way through it. There are like certain tricks that I know I can design for — maybe there’s one or two pieces that can only go in several spots of the puzzle, so it gives a starting point.”
Likewise, on the other end of the scale, certain elements will bring complexity. “If there’s a limited number of symmetries in the puzzle shape or in the piece shape, then it becomes a lot harder to sort of do these mental rotations when you’re placing the pieces into the puzzle.” Despite this, playtesting puzzles is essential, which is why Van Bouwel has been running a series of weekly playtests with Cubism fans over the last six weeks as he works on the new levels.
Beyond the DLC, a local editor might be on the cards eventually, allowing players to create their own levels and share them online via sideloading, similar in process to installing custom Beat Saber levels. In terms of adding multiplayer modes or leaderboards, Van Bouwel isn’t too bullish. “It’s something that I’ve sort of consciously shied away from in this game. Part of the design of the game is to be a relaxing game and a relaxing experience. I wouldn’t want any of the mechanics to pressure you into needing to find a solution.”
When it comes to future projects beyond Cubism, Van Bouwel has nothing official to announce just yet. “It’s a bit early,” he says. “I do have some ideas of next projects that I would want to work on, but [they are] ideas without any execution… I’m looking forward to [when] I have time to prototype these new ideas. Hopefully then I have something that I’ll be happy to share.”
Cubism is available on Oculus Quest and PC VR now, with extra DLC currently in development.
Livestream Interview And Q&A: Cubism Developer Thomas Van Bouwel
Cubism is one of the best puzzle games available on Quest, with excellent native VR design and an excellent showcase of hand tracking capabilities on Oculus Quest. We’re sitting down with Cubism’s developer, Thomas Van Bouwel, to talk about developing the game, plans for DLC and more.
The interview is set to take place later today, Wednesday the 16th of June at 2:00pm PST, on our YouTube channel. It will be broadcast live from our virtual studio in VR, where we also host our podcast, The VR Download.
If you manage to join us for the interview livestream, please leave your questions in the chat and we’ll try to get to as many as possible. If you miss it live, you can still check out the recorded broadcast at the same link below.
Cubism launched just under a year ago, but has consistently rolled out a series of impressive updates and new features for Quest since then. Its implementation of hand tracking is absolutely sublime and one of the best showcases of the technology on the system. You can also pair hand tracking with the recently added 120Hz support as well, which rounds Cubism out as one of the best titles to showcase most of the Quest’s cutting edge features all at once.
Last month, Van Bouwel announced that a series of DLC levels were in the works for Cubism and signs-ups were open for those who wanted to help playtest new levels. I was able to join the playtesting group and gave some of the new puzzles a try over the past six weeks. I’ll be discussing the approach taken in designing these DLC levels and the original campaign with Van Bouwel in our interview today, going over the process from start to finish and how the upcoming levels might differ to the existing campaign.
Let us know if you’re looking forward to Cubism DLC and be sure to leave your questions in the chat during the live broadcast.
Grabbing The Bull By The Horns: The Importance Of VR Hands And Presence
We spoke with several VR game designers and developers about the important (and difficulty) of creating believable and immersive hands in VR.
The Importance of Believable VR Hands
VR hands are a strange thing to ‘get to grips with’ so to speak. Not only do they allow you to interact with the virtual world in front of you but they allow you to become part of it. As you shape yourself to fit into that world, it does the same to fit around you. In real life, you have limited strength and ability but VR gives you that rare opportunity to be better than real life; it lets you become an action hero.
“It was pretty clear right off the bat that it was important,” Kerry Davis, a Valve programmer that worked on Half-Life: Alyx, said in an interview “Even if you didn’t have a full-body avatar yet, to at least have hands so that you could sort of connect with the world and actually participate. We all have an innate desire to control the world we inhabit. As a VR user, you don’t simply want to sit back and let the story happen—you want this organic control over the world. “People really wanted to have hands.”
Half-Life: Alyx’s design encapsulates this. There’s this visceral sense of control you have covering your mouth when you come across Jeff or even that satisfying click you get from loading up ammo. Tristan Reidford, a Valve artist who also worked on Alyx, learned this previously when working on the Aperture Robot Repair Demo that shipped as part of The Lab.
“We didn’t have hands in that… we simulated the controller… that satisfied people’s desires to have representation,” Reidford said.
The most fascinating thing about VR hands is the spectacle itself, the representation of you. When using a controller, you can disconnect and understand that certain buttons equal certain actions. The uncanny valley nature of movement in VR makes it just close enough to true immersion to become distracting when it’s not.
The uncanny valley in this case represents that physical and mental border between what your eyes see in the headset lens and what you feel around you. As VR gets closer to real life, it also gets further away. There’s something distinctly recognizable, yet alien-feeling about this imitation of real life. VR is at its best when it’s immersive and compelling but not trying to lie to you. It offers you a fantasy and, in the case of Half-Life: Alyx, that alien feeling comes from somewhere else: Xen
“Now you don’t need as much of an abstraction so you can almost get an exact representation of reality,” Davis said. “It turns out it’s almost harder to do in VR.”
The complicated nature of emulating some sense of real-life movement means you often have to trivialize or exaggerate that movement. “In VR, your interactions are so close that your brain wants to fall back to actions you’ve known since you were a toddler,” Davis said. “We still have to put this interface layer in there and say we’re defining what the constraints of this virtual world are.”
You are constrained in two senses when in VR. There are the constraints of your movement—such as how far you can move in your actual room and how much you can lunge forward before colliding head-first into your dresser—and the constraints of the tech itself. There is this wonderful creativity that springs from necessity when creating games atop necessary limitations.
Oftentimes, a world has to be made less organic and genuine to feel real, as paradoxical as that sounds. The swinging of a sword feels natural but you don’t have to undergo a year of training before you can use it in VR. It throws a little bit of ‘real life’ out the window to provide a more fun and, ironically, more immersive experience.
Limitless Limitations
Over at Streamline Media, a small group working on their first real VR title. “Due to resolution issues they (the team) often went back to using just larger gestures and bigger levers,” Stefan Baier, COO at Streamline Media, said. “Smaller hand gestures didn’t reliably scale and made it not work well with the dev work we were doing for PS4 where you don’t have that input.”
When working with it, PSVR often has to be at the bottom of the barrel, technologically speaking. This means that whilst hand gestures are held back in some sense, the choice to fit certain actions in are made purely for the player experience. When you can’t show off the tech or provide hyper-realistic details, you only provide what’s necessary. A streamlined control system allows for more natural movement, even if it’s constrained.
“We are always limited by the hardware…Especially with these fairly new technologies…tracking will massively improve”, Christof Lutteroth, a senior lecturer in the department of computer science at Bath University, said. “There’s nothing fundamental that will prevent us from simply tracking our hands. It’s just a computational problem that’s harder to solve.”
Ultimately, we are always held back by the tech but this doesn’t mean we should stop and accept it as it is.
“From what I’ve seen…It’s definitely a big step forward. However, it’s still very rudimentary,” Lutteroth said when talking about the Oculus Quest’s finger tracking. “When you come to hand tracking, there’s quite a lot of error involved with machine learning… That’s very often data-driven.” Due to the varied nature of human fingers (that’s before mentioning those with disabilities) hand tracking technology is dominated by research into what an average hand is. Unfortunately, with the way that research works, it often gets caught up in implicit biases.
One very highly publicized case of these forms of bias is Microsoft’s AI chatbot, Tay. It was designed to pick up on speech and emulate it to make Tay’s speech sound authentic. Within a day, it was virulently bigoted. This is an interesting microcosm of how these biases set in. If the people you test are racist, your chat bot will be. If the people you test have all ten fingers, your hand designs will be.
This is why Davis and Reidford were so outspoken in our interview about the power of playtesting. Reidford spoke of finger tracking and the unique hurdles in making your movement feel both organic, yet slick.
“There’s this sliding scale where, on one side, it’s fully finger tacking and then, on the other side, 100% animation,” Reidford said. ”We had to find the balance there… as soon you put the player under any kind of duress…They just want to slam a new magazine in.”
Surpassing Limitations
There’s creativity to just existing in VR. Davis mentioned that testers told him “‘Yeah, I’m playing this. I don’t feel powerful… I feel like my normal everyday self… that’s not why I go into games,’” Davis said. “‘I go into games to feel powerful and skilled.’” Even though it emulates your actions, VR is so captivating due to its ability to emulate the wonderful and powerful. That uncanny valley is less prevalent when the situation itself is one that you choose to put yourself into. When you’re aware of your world and place yourself in there, you can forget all about the gear you’re wearing.
A fantastic example of this is Half-Life: Alyx’s gravity gloves. “In Half-Life: Alyx it was about having the hands feel so natural you don’t really think about them anymore,” Reidford said.
You hold your hands up, grab an item and pull it towards you, and hope it lands. As long as you’re close to where you should be, it will always land. The same design philosophy is at work with the doors in Alyx. They don’t function like a normal door. You put your hand up to the doorknob and your character just turns it automatically.
“The player can still turn the handle themselves if they want to but they don’t have to, all they have to do is reach out, make a fist, and the door is open,” Reidford said. “Over time, it looks so correct and it’s what they expect to happen that the player actually believes that they’ve done it. They think that they reached out and turned the handle themselves when really they didn’t. The game did it for them”
The genius of Half-Life: Alyx is that this notion of feeling like “the action hero” is deployed so effectively without making you overpowered. You can simultaneously get crushed by creatures, cower away from Jeff, and giggle at the falling physics of a head crab—yet you still get out there, load your weapon, and take down the bad guys. This is a testament to VR as a whole. There’s a spectacle to it that can only be accessed via your hands. From its early days and crude movements to the beginning signs of significant hand tracking, there’s this bustling sense of creativity that keeps pushing the industry forward.
When you stare into the dark lenses of a VR headset and find yourself staring back, you look around your environment, look down at your hands, then squeeze closed your fists and you become something grander than the every day. You become your own version of an action hero.
Rip And Tear: How Archiact Remastered DOOM 3 VR Edition For PSVR
Today DOOM 3 VR Edition launches on PSVR for $20. We sat down for a chat with Ken Thain, Executive Producer from Archiact to talk about what it was like working with id Software to bring this iconic FPS into VR officially.
If you missed our DOOM 3 VR Edition review, that’s live to check out and we’ve got additional coverage as well, such as this graphics comparison with the Quest 2 modded version.
Here are the major excerpts from the interview:
DOOM 3 VR Edition Interview
David Jagneaux, Senior Editor at UploadVR: Okay so, just checking here: the official title is DOOM 3 VR Edition, is that right?
Ken Thain, Executive Producer at Archiact: It’s a VR edition because we were very particular. It’s not a port. It’s not we threw stereoscopic view on a DOOM game…When we were working with it, they [id Software] were actually quite passionate about the idea that it’s not just a port, let’s make this an adaptation, let’s make this a remaster for VR because we both recognized that Doom 3 is a fantastic game for VR just based on the fact that out of the DOOM franchise, it’s a bit more of a slower first-person shooter.
We as well recognize the possibility within VR and so we consider it an adaptation or remastering because we redid so much. We redid the weapons, we redid the audio, and we can talk about it later, but the VFX: the audio, uprezzing the graphics, uprezzing the weapons, a new diegetic UI. We did so much to it to make sure that it felt like it was for VR from the ground up and I have to say it came out really, really well.
When we first got [the weapon 3D models] it was like, yeah, there’s whole chunks missing because they never had to show them on-screen so you can reveal the weapons and re-texture them up and stuff and then all the additions of the laser target, the flashlights, redoing the sound, redoing the VFX. It really is a remastering and I think once everybody’s able to jump in and play it, they’ll really feel it.
UploadVR: I remember when the game first came out there were lots of complaints about how the flashlight worked. How does it work exactly here? Were the weapons totally remade?
Thain: Yeah, it’s just depending on the weapons. We modified the weapons for those that either we had to put a flashlight on it, or we just keep it on your shoulder or it’s on your head where your aim and for VR is particularly good because with Doom 3 being so intense, like you literally playing where a door opens, it’s dark inside, you peek your head in, look around, put your gun in with the flashlight, check out all the dark corners, it feels totally different…The fact that your flashlight is still on a battery, it can run out, you can turn it off and on and you can look in one direction and have a flashlight going in another direction. So I think people will be really happy with that addition.
UploadVR: Can you talk a little bit about getting the lighting and all that, adapting it for VR, just right? How important is that sort of creepy atmosphere in a VR game like DOOM 3? As you said, it’s a slower-paced game, more horror-style than the others—I imagine it really helps amplify things tremendously.
Thain: First off, it was an advantage in the sense that games built back in 2004 were a lot less complicated rendering wise than they are now. So we’re able to bring the engine forward to update it, but like our team had a lot of Doom 3 fans, particularly, and there’s a group of us actually that were motors in an era of this.
Luckily enough, we uprezzed the environments, we uprezzed the weapons, we uprezzed all the UI and stuff. These additions feel really good. They feel really modern. You play the game, it’s super solid frame rates, 60 frames across. It feels really smooth. Everything’s really clear. It has this modern feel to it but yet this nostalgia of the style of graphics and the style of creatures and stuff from the original Doom. From there, it feels really good and then there was a few things we had to work on, like the original Doom 3 had a lot of strobing lights and that’s not good for VR because you are right in there.
We had to go through and do some modification, either tone down the strobing of some lights or leave them on full time. There was some atmosphere that we had to work around with that, but overall, based on all the additions that we did to it, the game itself stands out really well. I mean it’s id Software, they invented the first person shooter.
UploadVR: Have you looked into the Quest version of DOOM 3 at all? Is that something you’re aware of?
Thain: We’re aware of the Dr. Beef Quest 2 version. There’s also a lot of VR mods for DOOM 3 on the PC as well and we’re aware of these and it’s good. Overall, it’s good. We’re all contributing to VR. We’re all creating good content for VR players. There was never a moment we’d looked at it as competitive or anything like that. As far as Archiact is concerned, we support those mods and I’m sure Bethesda does as well as far as making sure that as many people get to play DOOM as possible.
UploadVR: What are your thoughts on DOOM VFR?
Thain: I don’t have any thoughts on Doom VFR.
UploadVR: I didn’t know if that was one you had played or not.
Thain: Well, definitely looked at it. We looked at actually a lot of shooters in the VR space just to see what was working, what doesn’t. Even our experiences ourselves with Evasion, we knew what worked and what doesn’t and the good thing is with id Software, they were very supportive of when we came up with the features and we prototyped them and we had them try it out. We had some collaboration back and forth of exactly the placement of flashlights or even the art. Like, with the double barrel shotgun we have the flashlight taped on because it feels a bit more visceral. Yet the modern machine gun, which is very sci-fi looking, we built the flashlight into it.
Let us know what you think of DOOM 3 VR Edition down in the comments below!