Paul Bettner is the founder and CEO of Playful Corp, and he’s best known for creating the iPhone game Words with Friends. Dan Hurd is studio design lead at Playful and led an epic 3-4 month jam that produced 38 VR game prototypes exploring various VR game mechanics.
I had a chance to play Lucky’s tale for the first time at GDC, and I have to say that I was blown away. I had a half hour for the interview, and I had the best intentions to get a brief feel for the game and then do the interview. Once I got into the Lucky’s Tale world, I was so compelled that I couldn’t stop playing. Playful has discovered something really key about what they call the “sweet spot” of VR, which is optimizing all of the gameplay to be about arms length away by increasing the IPD and using a set of finely tuned 3rd person camera controls.
Bettner has been an early adopter of new technologies, and he talks about discovering VR through a friendship with John Carmack and then the process that Playful went through in order to discover what works and what doesn’t work in the VR medium. They couldn’t fall back on their old tricks, and they had to find the rules where there are no rules yet.
Paul talks about how developers have decades of expectations and fantasies of what VR should be, and that we have to be willing to let go of some of the things that don’t work as well within VR. At GDC, Paul was starting to see some experiences that go beyond what our fantasies of VR might be. Dan suggests that developers have to be candid with themselves when experiencing something that they expect to be amazing in VR, but isn’t — such as flying because of the lack of depth cues of objects at far distances.
Dan & Paul talk about their iterative process of trying to discover the fun mechanics within VR. Like Job Simulator, they also found that doing mundane tasks with your hands is fun, especially if they’re physics-based.
Paul talks about discovering the “sweet spot” of VR, which ends up being about arms length away. They found research that backs up that we have more neurons in our brains to process information at higher fidelity when all of the game mechanics are happening within the length of our arms. Lucky’s tale was created in order to optimize the gameplay to happen within this VR sweet spot. They ended up increasing the IPD in order to give a giant’s perspective with a third person perspective. They also found that the diorama mode of an entire level looks really amazing in VR.
They broke some of the best practices guidelines from Oculus in order to discover this table mode of placing all of the action with the sweet spot of VR. Paul says that the parameters that control the third person camera operate in a very narrow band of comfort that are not very forgiving.
Finally, Dan talks about how light can bring a sense of reality to these virtual worlds and being in a magical place that causes surprise and delight in a way that’s the most comfortable and impactful. Paul says that virtual reality is the ultimate expression of being able to create your dreams, and that we’ve actually been able to create a technology that can directly interface with your brain in a way that’s indistinguishable from reality.
Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:12.015] Dan Hurd: Hi, I'm Dan Hurd, and I'm the studio design lead for PlayfulCorp.
[00:00:15.556] Paul Bettner: And I'm Paul Bettner, and I'm the CEO and founder at PlayfulCorp.
[00:00:19.335] Kent Bye: Awesome. So you guys gave a talk at Oculus Connect where you sort of go through the process of diving into mobile gaming and doing the words for friends. And then a few years later, sort of diving into virtual reality. So maybe you could just sort of quickly recap that journey that you went through from one iteration of revolutionary change to the next.
[00:00:40.569] Paul Bettner: I think it kind of defines us a little bit as a studio. This studio is called Playful. The previous studio was called New Toy because I kind of have a tendency to go after the shiny new thing. But that's an oversimplification. Really, what happened is we're friends with John Carmack in Dallas. And he put us in touch with Palmer very early on because I heard about something that was happening. And we flew out there, and we saw the very first duct tape kind of prototype of the Oculus. Our experience is the same one that everyone's having now. It was just, this is a mind-blowing piece of technology. And when we saw that, we felt like, I have to make games for this. And that was the same thing as when I first held an iPhone. I had the same feeling, like, this is the coolest thing. I have to make games for it. So that's really the thing that ties those two things together, even though a word game has nothing to do with a VR platformer, but except for the fact that they're just this incredible new technology platform that we want to make content for.
[00:01:36.242] Dan Hurd: Yeah, I think technology is really a strong way to put that. Because if you look at the iPhone, it was how is the best way that we can figure out how to interact with the content under the screen, right? Do I swipe? Do I touch? All of that. Plus, with VR, again, the floor is removed. We couldn't rely, fall back on our old tricks to develop content for that. So again, it was like the rules are fuzzy again. Let's redevelop those. And in some ways, that's the promise of these new technologies. And that's actually what's very exciting for us to develop for as well.
[00:02:05.921] Paul Bettner: Yeah, it's the fact that it's a frontier and that the rules are not defined yet. To us as developers, personally, that's a compelling thing for us.
[00:02:15.123] Kent Bye: Yeah, and at Oculus Connect, in your talk, you go through the process of talking about these rapid iterations that you would do up to 40 games in six or seven weeks. Maybe you could talk about that process of just trying to figure out what the language of this new medium is.
[00:02:29.277] Paul Bettner: Yeah, so when we started that work with Oculus, we knew that we didn't know what we were doing, and that we didn't know what we wanted to create. And we were very open with Oculus about that. We said, we're not going to sit here and pitch you guys saying, oh, we have the ultimate idea for VR. Because frankly, we haven't even spent any time developing for this. Nobody has. And well, I mean, they did 20 years ago when VR was a thing. But anyway, for this new version of it, so let's figure it out. Let's spend some time just kind of exploring the space without, just put any baggage aside of what worked on consoles or what works on mobile or whatever, and let's take a blank slate approach to this. And we thought that the best way to do that was to just rapidly churn out games. So over the course of several months, like three or four months, Dan and his team built over 30 different games. Yeah, and he could probably tell you a little bit more about that experience. It was crazy because, and exhausting in some ways, but exhilarating because the things that we were discovering every day, and this has been the case now since then, working in VR, that nearly on a daily basis we are surprised and delighted by new things and new discoveries that we're making by working on this frontier. Just things that, it's kind of on both ends of the spectrum. They're both things that sound like they would work really well, And then we try them, and we're like, oh gosh, no, that's horrible. Either that makes you sick, or it just doesn't give you the sensation that we were hoping that we had in our head about this. And really, I think all of us developers are going through this just because we have decades of science fiction expectations of VR built up in our heads, whether it's from reading books, watching films, whatever. So we all have a lot of these fantasies of what this should be. And I think really leveraging this platform is a matter of finding those things that do work, and then also being willing to let go of the things that don't work so well. First person being one of the most obvious of those, and we talked about that at Oculus Connect, just how that's kind of this elephant in the room, because that's the most obvious thing that everybody thinks about with VR. off the bat is, I'm gonna put it on and I'm gonna be somewhere and then I wanna just travel around, you know? It's the Half-Life 2 VR thing. It's, I'm gonna get off the train, then I'm gonna walk through City 17 and you have in your head that experience, but then you try it and there are all these really difficult problems that don't have obvious solutions about navigating an environment in first person in VR that just don't work well. And the great thing now is starting to see, especially here at this GDC, that developers are getting past that. So these experiences that Sony is showing off, and that Valve are showing off, and that Oculus is showing off, are not about that fantasy of VR. They are about new things, whether it's painting a 3D scene like Valve is showing, or the crazy Sony thing where you have little robots that jump out and they dance around with the controller. I mean, but these are not things that you would have imagined would be awesome in VR, but they are what turns out to be awesome in VR.
[00:05:26.757] Dan Hurd: It was kind of interesting. I think the video game museum set up that great Atari display here at the expo. And when I was looking at it, there's an old Pong set. And I heard somebody say, wow, we've really come a long way since then. And it's interesting, because I kind of disagree with that statement. The core of trying to figure out what's fun in a new medium feels very similar to developing for arcade games when they were a thing, or right when Atari was starting. You don't know where your constraints are, and Pong was very much like that, right? And it does so many things right, like two people get on, they immediately figure out the rules and know how to play, and they're having fun in seconds. And that process that we went through to try and get a fun thing in VR, like where we spent four hours developing something, and if it wasn't fun by that point, no excuses, set it aside, start again. And we did that over and over again. And actually that felt very, I felt a kinship with that process to develop things like Pong and Yara's Revenge and all of that. That was a very similar thing where we're trying to figure out what our constraints are.
[00:06:25.360] Paul Bettner: It's probably also the fact that... I imagine part of the reason that Dan feels that way is a number of the prototypes we built were inspired by Atari games.
[00:06:32.467] Dan Hurd: Arcades. And we're saying, what was the thing that you popped in a quarter and you needed to be entertained immediately, right? And that was great for me. I mean, I've always wanted to develop for arcades. But I mean, I think in this case, it was so true. I think it still holds true for the vast majority of people who are developing for the Rift right now. There's many untapped types of games. The 3D drawing is a great example of a cool new one that we've yet to explore because we're still trying to shed what baggage we do have. And maybe, yeah, the first-person platformer thing being a really scary example of, well, I can make you sick real quickly that way, right? And we had to set that aside, which kind of helped inform how Lucky's Tale was born.
[00:07:08.178] Kent Bye: Yeah, so 38 games in the course of a month and a half or two months. And what were some of the big lessons that came out of that? Sort of game mechanics that you discovered were really fun.
[00:07:18.548] Dan Hurd: Well, to begin with, you had to be very candid. And that was kind of our word of the entire process. You had to be candid with yourself, even if you really had in your mind, this is amazing. This will work. Just believe me. It's the best thing ever. You know, you had to be ready to set that aside. And to do that required this moment of truth, right? And you couldn't look away from it because if at four hours you just didn't feel that spark of fun, you couldn't buy that extra four. So you just had to through the process do that. But we discovered a lot of things during that. Some great examples are. people thought of playing catch, but throwing things away from you is not great, right? Like the most VR thing is something thrown at you, where again you get in this short visual distance that you're most able to see the high fidelity differences in in-positioning. And we had some fishing prototypes, and we had flying prototype. I think everyone had the desire to fly and to do those things.
[00:08:12.242] Paul Bettner: That's a great example, actually, because that's another one that's a fantasy. It's like, I want to fly. I want the sensation of flying. In the current set of VR hardware, it's hard to pull off that particular emotion that you're expecting to feel because there's some technical limitations. The resolution of the device, we talked about this a little bit at Oculus Connect. When you have basically 1,000 by 1,000 per eye, What happens is things beyond a certain distance, which is about 60 to 80 feet, I think, in the current hardware, actually converges onto the same pixel in both eyes, which means you lose any depth information beyond that distance, beyond 60 feet. It becomes basically a matte painting that is hanging out there at about 60 feet from you. That means that your brain does not have the sensation of being 1,000 feet in the air, because you can't actually tell that the ground is 1,000 feet below. And so that feeling we'd want to have didn't work, even though we were like, oh, That'll be the best thing. I want to be like hang gliding and stuff. And it was like, well, no, that doesn't work. And then a counterexample to that, as Dan was discussing, and actually there's a valve demo here that I forget. They call it the job simulator. We built a prototype like that that was strangely compelling. We're doing simple tasks like cooking stuff was really neat, you know? And I think it's because it was very intimate, it's right up close and in front of you, and you really feel like, oh, I'm in the kitchen, and I see all these little pieces, and I just, you know.
[00:09:33.738] Dan Hurd: And they're physics-based in those demos, too. Like, physics are really fun in VR because you believe them on some instinctual level. In Lucky's Tale, we have a lot of crates that you smash apart, and the little bricks that come out, you can tail swipe those away, and you can rustle every petal, those are really important to help believe that sense of place, right? I am here, even though it looks cartoony, I believe I'm looking at a little secret world, right?
[00:09:57.790] Paul Bettner: So that process of building those prototypes, what we extracted from that, really, as a studio, and what we continue to, it's a big part of our process to prototype ideas ongoing as we're developing in VR, We're basically pulling out these things on a weekly basis that work, that we then can build game mechanics around. So for instance, one of those things that came out of that early prototyping was this realization that there was a sweet spot in VR of a sensation of just very compelling presence and VR-ness, so to speak. was most satisfying in this range of about a foot away from you to maybe, yeah, it's basically arm's length. So we discovered that just as we were building stuff, we're like, man, everything feels good when it's right here. But as soon as it gets like 10, 15 feet away, it starts not feeling as good anymore. So we did a little research and found out that actually there's science behind it. And we talked a little about this Arceus Connect. The bundle of neurons that processes your visual information that's coming into your brain has more neurons devoted to the area that is in arm's reach than the area that's outside of that. And it makes sense evolutionarily, we have to manipulate tools in that space as a species to survive, right? And so our brains are more wired to process information at higher fidelity in that range. But the way that translates into VR is it's just more satisfying to play games where the gameplay happens there. So that was one lesson that we extracted from that. The way we converted that into gameplay mechanics in Lucky's Tale is Originally, the game was built at a normal scale that you would build for a game, and so Lucky was kind of a meter and a half tall, and he was about 10 feet away from you, and the whole environment, the level you were in was miles, right? It's like a Mario level, if you think about it, if you just say, well, a tree is this big, and a box is probably this big, it ends up being miles big. And when we first got into that environment, it was like,
[00:11:51.057] Dan Hurd: No, this is, I mean, Lucky's like way over there and, and just zooming along at this really high rate of speed, which just didn't sit well with our stomachs or anything. And it just didn't feel right because you are racing to catch up with Lucky and he's taking forever just to get across a platform, right? And it was harder to see over cliffs and down drops. It was just very, very difficult.
[00:12:12.773] Paul Bettner: So using one of the lessons that we had extracted from those prototypes we built, we said, well, is there some way we can bring the gameplay and bring Lucky into that sweet spot of VR? And the technique that we ended up utilizing that you can see in the game now is we shrank everything by increasing the IPD and the distance between your eyes, which has the effect of making you a giant and making Lucky this tiny little thing. And the whole level then comes into the sweet spot. So the area that Lucky is moving in and the area that is generally the gameplay area that you're playing in, where the creatures, the bad guys, the collectibles, all that stuff, is all in that space of like 1 to 10 feet away from you, and it just feels much better. And the way people describe it now is they say, oh, it just feels like a Disney ride or like a, you know, like a little toy that I'm playing with. And that ended up being a delightful part of the game, but it was informed by those early prototypes that way.
[00:13:05.008] Kent Bye: Yeah, that's really interesting, because I've noticed that in the Crescent Bay demos, they have a little paper town diorama. And even in the overview of just the menu, you have sort of like an overview of the entire level. And I could just look at that for just minutes. And it just really kind of puts me in awe. It makes sense that that sort of sweet spot, it's not an intuitive conclusion to come to.
[00:13:28.652] Paul Bettner: I mean that that mode that you're talking about which is kind of the main menu of the game right now as we call it the diorama mode because it's kind of like this and it was the same idea so we when we did the first thing and we said well what if we shrink the level down so that the space you're playing in is the 1 to 10 foot sweet spot we went one step beyond that we said well what if we shrink the entire level so that it's like that it fits within this little thing in front of you like it was on a table and the moment we saw that we had the same reaction like oh oh my gosh, that's so cool. Everything's like little tiny and you just want to lean in and look at all the little things that are moving. And I mean, now that I've seen that, obviously there's whole games that will be built around that. You know, it's perfect for an RTS or a God game or even like a League of Legends or anything. I mean, you can just see playing all of these kind of strategic map-based tabletop kind of experiences in VR. You know, initially you wouldn't think that would have been the compelling thing, because in VR it's like, oh, I want to be surrounded by stuff, but actually stuff that's right in front of you that's in that comfort zone and thinking of it like we call it the virtual table in front of you is very compelling in VR.
[00:14:28.365] Dan Hurd: Kind of to the point of none of us as developers really knowing what we're doing until we find something that actually works is some of the guidelines that Oculus put out pretty early on said there is this value, it is IPD, don't mess with it because it'll make you sick. And we actually had to kind of hack what was happening there. We had to expose that so we can mess with it. And this is how we stumbled on this diorama mode and Lucky's whole sense of his world. And it is a very compelling thing. And it doesn't make you sick. But there's so many variables acting on this camera movement. And actually, that was a lot of our development work, was working on the camera. How does it follow Lucky? And so I think those things, we're still finding out every single rule we can. And those rules are often broken. They're just hypotheses until maybe there is this wonderful first-person mode that we'll discover. Somewhere down the line, it just hadn't happened yet.
[00:15:18.793] Kent Bye: So yeah, it seems like the camera movement was really interesting because, you know, you've got a whole sort of like logic around not stopping suddenly to keep the camera moving to acceleration is really tricky when you come with virtual reality because of acceleration, you kind of want to go to the consistent velocity. And so, you know, talk about that process of this third person camera and what you had to do to really tune and find this sort of sweet spot of that action.
[00:15:45.007] Paul Bettner: So the thing that we've discovered, at least thus far, the parameters that control the motion of the camera in Lucky's Tail are very sensitive. They operate within a very narrow band of comfort that is not forgiving of us getting it wrong, so to speak. So when we were initially building the game and we were trying to dial in what worked with this third-person camera, what we discovered is that it was very easy to make people sick with the wrong values. So if the camera did accelerate too fast or decelerate too fast or make sudden movements, it would quickly become uncomfortable. And finding those right values was key to making it work, which was a little surprising to me, because I felt like we were going to be able to experiment with all these different modes of camera motion, and sometimes we can make it go fast, and sometimes we can do these sudden things, and what have you. And what we found is, no, we actually need to operate in a pretty narrow band of comfort, and that for this particular game, for Lucky's Tale, we must solve a lot of those problems using level design rather than sort of taking control of the camera and doing something like, oh, well, we just really want the camera to zoom up to this spot because it would make for a good vantage point. And it's like, no, no, we just can't do that. And so we need to sort of build the level around those constraints instead.
[00:16:56.292] Dan Hurd: That's been part of our entire process. There are many instances where what we did want to achieve didn't quite work out through trying to manipulate the camera. We're artificially holding it back or pushing it forward. like Paul was mentioning. And in this case, level design has become such a huge component of this. You'll notice there's not a lot of desire to even backtrack in the game. And where there were, we're adding teleporters and things to kind of bring you back to points of decision. Again, kind of incorporating these pieces so that The level design is helping out that really fragile camera. Even in IPD, if we set it too high or too low, again, that camera motion is affected and it's dragging you way too fast throughout the scene. And again, you come out of that and you're like, wow, I'm sick after five minutes, 10 minutes. But right now, I feel like we've hit a good sweet spot where it's comfortable to play throughout the entire experience. But we are always seeking to try and make that even better.
[00:17:47.200] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you see as the ultimate potential for virtual reality and what it can enable?
[00:17:53.787] Dan Hurd: I think a very strong component of this, and you'll hear this mimicked a lot throughout the developers, is that sense of presence is just so, so important. And part of that is suspension of disbelief. So what we do in Lucky's Tale right now with high poly, but very low texture environments, is we let the light kind of take this front and center role, which fools your brain into thinking, hey, I am not staring at a little video game, I'm in this magical world. Even if that world is completely implausible, walking fox, crazy things everywhere, the light brings a weight and a gravity to this stuff, so you end up feeling, I am there, I am at this place, even if it is in a cartoon or in a spaceship or wherever. That, to me, is one of the strongest components of this, where we're not yet fooling us into thinking this is new reality, but the reality can be redefined as, I am in this magical place. And to me, this is what brings out the smiles and the joy in all of our players. And this is the part that motivates me, personally, to keep pushing forward. It's like, look, we can fulfill that promise of, I'm finally in the Mario level, I'm finally in that Banjo-Kazooie level in the way that feels most comfortable and most impactful. And I fully believe I'm within that world versus looking at a video game and I feel somewhat removed from it.
[00:19:10.771] Paul Bettner: For me, as a developer, I think that the reason that I started making games was because I had this fantasy of ultimately really almost being able to build dreams. You know, like just, you know, playing games as a kid and suspending disbelief and feeling so immersed in the experience, but feeling like understanding that technology would progress and that those experiences would get more compelling. I never expected to get to the point that we're at now this quickly, but it is the ultimate expression of that. You know, every time that the technology for making interactive entertainment has advanced in some way, whether it's the addition of color initially, the addition of 3D graphics, whatever it is. Those are almost like new colors that we can paint with in our palette. And to me, this technology is the final expression of that. It is the ability to directly interface with your brain and truly put you in an experience that is indistinguishable from reality. That's where we've gotten to, surprisingly, already, which is wonderful.
[00:20:11.047] Kent Bye: Great. Well, thank you so much.
[00:20:12.648] Dan Hurd: Thank you, guys. Really appreciate it.
