Lovesick is a narrative game featuring a character-driven story of a bank on the brink of collapse that faces a series of supernatural events that they must escape from. It features a lot of escape room and puzzle mechanics that are mixed with embodied gameplay, but at the heart it’s about the relationship between these four different band members in what I found to be a real gem of a story with a payoff ending that made it worth the journey. I had a chance to sit down with director and co-writer Corey Warning from Rose-City Games to get a bit more context for how Lovesick came about catalyzed by some funding from Meta, their iterative design process along the way that was centered and driven by the story they wanted to tell, as well as their hope to bring some narrative-driven content and indie spirit to the VR ecosystem.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling in the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So in today's episode, we're going to be doing a deep dive into a brand new indie game, narrative-driven, character-driven story that has a lot of escape room mechanics that it's called lovesick and it's about this post-punk band that is back from a tour that they just went on they're going broke and then they have this supernatural event called the feedback that twists them into this alternative reality that you have to help them to escape so a lot of the story is driven by the characters so both the world design and the interactions there's a lot of dialogue that is driving you through and it's really this independent narrative driven game which we're kind of at this maybe end of an era for a lot of these different types of independent projects, because Meta was funding a lot of this type of projects for a long time. And then starting back in Venice Immersive 2023, a lot of the independent story type of projects that they were funding was being shifted over into more Horizon Worlds. And then as time has gone on, I'm just hearing about even the independent games that they were supporting and funding, but funding is also moving over into Horizon Worlds. And so We're in this kind of weird time where there's been a lot of projects that were previously funded by Meta. Those are starting to come out. And so we may be at this transition period where we may not be seeing much more of this type of projects here in the future, unless it's completely independent driven that doesn't have any outside funding. So it's very much an indie gem of a project where I really enjoyed this as an experience. The story was so compelling and I was so interested to see where it was going that I still went through some of those technical glitches for the VR and embodied interactions. There was some bugs within their program where I had to have extra patience to do the tasks, but they're currently cleaning up a lot of those and it sounds like they're going to also be releasing a patch later in March. But I was able to make my way through it. And I highly recommend if you do enjoy the type of narrative driven character driven projects and then like the escape room genre, if you're into that as well, the room VR was a really good example that they were inspired by this kind of waypoint system where you have these different waypoints and you're able to explore around and rather this high fidelity environmental design that you see in some of those experiences, um, This is much more of a character-driven story where both the environments are reflecting the characters, but also you're having these stories of these different band members. And it's much more around the relationships of this band and that story as it's unfolding that is really the heart of this piece. So anyway, we'll be covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Corey happened on Friday, February 28th, 2025. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:53.653] Corey Warning: My name is Corey Warning. I'm the co-founder of Rose City Games and the director of Lovesick, which is our first VR game as a studio.
[00:03:03.242] Kent Bye: Great. Maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space.
[00:03:07.478] Corey Warning: Yeah, sure. So we've been making independent games for close to 10 years now. And we always have a bunch of different concepts flying around for different genres and different platforms and all that kind of stuff. And we had a friend who started working at Meta back when it was still Oculus. And he had just hit us up and said, hey, I'm sort of running this fund project. thing. If you guys have any concepts you want to pitch, now's a good time. So I had this idea that had been sitting around for a while and I kind of cleaned it up and threw it over the fence. And then we didn't hear back for about eight months after that. So I kind of assumed that that was dead in the water. Then out of nowhere, they hit us up and said, Hey, your project's been greenlit. They had like a different name and there's like zombies at that point in the concept and stuff. And so the whole thing changed quite a bit from the initial concept, but yeah, that's kind of how we got involved in this. A bunch of folks on our team had been doing some VR stuff on the side. But as far as like a big, like full game production VR project, this is the first for just about everybody on the team. We kind of had dabbled around with some experimental stuff with Intel back in the day when they were first starting to like play around with like different like tracking controllers. And they had this like VR backpack thing that we had for a long time that was just like wearing a heavy PC on your back, which is kind of insane to think about now. But yeah, so we kind of have dabbled here and there, but this is first full-on project for VR.
[00:04:35.233] Kent Bye: Awesome. Maybe you could just detail a little bit of your entry point into virtual reality specifically. What were the intersection between what you were seeing with what was happening and what you were doing with indie games and narrative games? And then what drew you into wanting to dive into VR beyond the opportunity for the funding?
[00:04:53.487] Corey Warning: Sure. We had played a little bit of VR here and there, but the big thing that we noticed, at least at the time we were starting, is there wasn't a lot of games that were very heavily narrative-driven in the VR space. We got really excited about the room VR when that first came out. We were kicking around this idea for an escape room style thing. And we always knew that there was going to be this band of characters that was like the main cast and everything throughout there. And we kind of use the room VR is almost like our first like kickoff, like project to kind of try and model after we wanted to do something similar, as far as like puzzle feel and all those games have like a really cool just like atmosphere of like, They just feel creepy and kind of like dreadful, even though there's nothing like scary particularly that really happens in those games. But we kind of use that as a kicking off point to think about like how this band could live in this space where the players going around and solving puzzles and how that all tied into the story that we wanted to tell about this band that is sort of on the verge of breaking up. So it all kind of started there. And we just played as many games as we possibly could. And we thought a lot about what would work well in VR specifically. Like, I think we could have made this game just like a 3D exploration, flat screen experience. But we got a lot of good advice from folks that were working with us from the get-go about... making sure that we were designing puzzles and an experience that felt unique and special to VR, just based on like how you're using your hands and everything. And the big thing that jumped out to us there was the idea of like abilities and like having like special powers that you can do. Because it's fun to be like in an escape room environment and virtual reality and have like things that you couldn't pull off in real life happen. But we really wanted to lean in heavy on giving the player like a sense of power and being able to like manipulate things in different ways that they wouldn't be able to in real life which i know is like now that's sort of like most vr games right like this is pretty 101 i think at this point but way back when we started and especially for this being our first vr project that was all very new and exciting to us like four and a half years ago when we started working on this yeah
[00:07:00.765] Kent Bye: Yeah, and so we're going back in time to the late 90s here in the Pacific Northwest as where the context of the story is taking place. And you're based here in Portland, Oregon, where I am also located. And so maybe you just set the broader context for why that time period, as well as if you are personally coming from experiences of that era, being in the band, and if some of the story that you're telling comes from the folks that are a part of Rose City Games, if that's part of your own experiences that you're trying to elaborate. on?
[00:07:31.426] Corey Warning: Yeah. So my background before I got into making games was in music. I was in rock bands and did a lot of touring and worked at a record label for a while and stuff. So I was in the music industry for quite a long time before I got involved in games. So that feeling of just being in like a pretty unsuccessful band, that's just on the road nonstop. And you're with this group of people who maybe they're your friends, maybe they're not always your friends, but you're just sort of like trapped with this group of people for a 24 hours a day seven days a week is kind of a story i wanted to tell and the band itself is like coming into their situation like a bad spot they just got off of like a really unsuccessful tour they don't really know what the future is gonna bring for them and then to have everything kind of culminate with this big supernatural event that they get kicked into it felt like a cool way to tell like not only the story of this band but i think something that everybody can relate to We got a lot of like really good feedback initially from people who were also in bands and really kind of felt like I think my favorite piece of feedback we got was from an early play tester who said when they got into this music venue level that we had, he felt like he could smell it. And that's like exactly what I just wanted for people who have been in bands, who have played gigs and like had this experience to like really have it like pull them back to that time. But even for people who haven't been in bands and stuff, I think anybody who's been in just a relationship that wasn't going well and you didn't know how to get out of it, or even just like a family that doesn't always feel like a family or just any of that kind of stuff, I think anybody can relate to like what we're trying to tell with this game. And for specifically like the era and the kind of location of the band, we actually kept the location of where they're from a little bit ambiguous in the game. So we don't really go into where they're actually located. It feels like they could be anywhere in America. But I think America specifically, we wanted to throw it back to a period where bands that were just like getting into a van and getting out on the road without having a plan together. The 90s kind of felt like the perfect era for that type of thing to like really work. When I started touring, this was like in the early aughts. So it was a little bit past that period of where I felt like was the dream scenario of just getting in a van and touring. making a band and just figuring it out and stuff and you know just like the idea of just like being on the road all the time i think gets harder and harder the closer we get to now just with how expensive it is to just do anything and especially just like with everything from gas prices to traveling to just like trying to like make a living off of being a musician touring all the time doesn't feel as realistic as it used to so the 90s just kind of felt like the perfect era to tell this specific story of this band
[00:10:13.888] Kent Bye: Yeah, that makes sense. And in reference to the room, that seems like another game where you have like a waypoint system where you're not able to locomote around all of the room, but you have constrained locomotion, so you're able to move. But by constraining that movement, you're able to then make the observations to solve each of these different puzzles. And so the other thing that I just wanted to mention is that The narrative as it's being told, it's a lot more character driven than I've typically seen in these types of experiences. Like that's usually more omniscient or absent of actually having embodied characters within the context of a story like this. And so the fact that you have that same type of escape room mechanic with these waypoints, but you have this really strong narrative component that's on top of that, that you're able to then kind of hook onto the stories based upon these characters. in a way that I really haven't seen very many other narrative-driven projects that are as much character-driven as this one. So I'd love to hear some of your elaboration on both the waypoint system and the development of these characters.
[00:11:20.257] Corey Warning: Yeah. So for the waypoint system, we definitely started out using the room VR as a pretty heavy inspiration for that. So I think folks who have played the room VR are going to immediately recognize what we're trying to do with that. We had full locomotion built out at one point. And there were technical reasons that we wanted to use the waypoint system. It made a lot of when character timelines trigger and how progression works a little bit more straightforward because we at least have a little bit more control or a little bit more say over where the player is going to be at a specific time with that. Even if there's like 50 waypoints in one level or something, we at least have a bit more control over where they are rather than zoning everything out. It also really helped us with optimization, making sure that, and I'm going to try not to talk out of my ass here because I'm not a programmer on this project, but we had to like really focus on culling and just like trying to make sure that the game looked as good as it possibly could with these huge open areas and still run on the quest too without a whole bunch of like jagginess and make sure that we're hitting that 72 frames per second. So there's a whole bunch of technical reasons that we did that. But for the puzzles, it also felt really important for us that we didn't want players to get worried about pixel hunting or searching for every little nook and cranny because we wanted these big environments that felt like there was a lot to look at and that the levels themselves almost kind of feel like a character in the story here too, especially the dreamscapes and the house that the band all lives in and everything. But we just didn't want the player to get too bogged down with like searching everywhere for all these little puzzle pieces and all that kind of stuff. Like if you think about like being in an actual escape room, I think some of the escape rooms that I've experienced where I've had the least amount of fun is when there's like too much to look at and you just can't really pinpoint what you're supposed to do. And we got some really good feedback early on where folks were really excited to learn about the story, but they felt like some of the puzzles were kind of getting in the way of experiencing the story or they would get hung up on one thing for too long. And they just wanted to figure out what happens with the band and what's the next plot line. So we did a lot of back and forth on that. And the waypoint system just really, it helped us so much for the technical challenges of the game. And also just like the design for puzzles, it just feels way more streamlined and a lot less of like searching around. I expect for a lot of VR enthusiasts, I think we'll probably have some folks who are disappointed by that, but I hope they can meet us in the middle there and realize that it was an important design decision for us for the experience.
[00:13:48.166] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think there's this spectrum between people who want to have the most difficult escape room experience possible and then people who want to really be driven by the story. And I think there's also a hint system that works pretty well in the way that you've implemented it. You can go back to the characters and ask for any ideas, basically a tip for the puzzle that you're working on. And if you're really a hardcore escape room puzzle person, then you could just always avoid that option. But if you are more narrative driven and you want to get unblocked from whatever is blocking you, then there's at least that other system that allows you to get some tips to be able to continue to progress.
[00:14:30.560] Corey Warning: Yeah, and I was really excited when we landed on the idea that the characters were gonna be sort of the hint delivery system for the game as well. The biggest challenge we had with that is you have some small moments in the game where you don't have your bandmates with you. So for the bulk of the game, you're always able to go up to one of your bandmates and ask for a hint. And we wanted to make sure that the player never needed to take off the headset and get on Google and search out for how to do, or like you had to email me about something today. It's like, ideally, most people are not getting stuck in that kind of way. But there are certain moments where you don't have a bandmate. And so we tried to make sure that the puzzles were as intuitive as possible so you could feel like you wouldn't need a hint for those spots. One of the very first puzzles you get to is this ritual area in this closet. And the hint for what you need to do is right in front of you. So if you're just looking around, you should be able to piece it together. But it felt really important to us to not have the player get out of the space unless they were just ready to take a break if they get stuck for anything. We also really wanted to try and reduce the amount of UI in the game as a whole, just so that you're not getting a lot of pop-ups everywhere and menus and all this kind of stuff. And you have dialogue choices that pop up from time to time. But the idea of having the characters be this hint delivery system felt... like a really nice intuitive and sort of like immersive way to kind of experience this. And it also allowed us to have like some really fun like banter between the bandmates and everything. So this also came off of some feedback we got early on too. We used to have a thing where if you failed a puzzle, your bandmates would kind of give you shit. Because the whole story is about a band that is like not getting along, right? They all kind of hate each other at the start of the game. And we thought it'd be really interesting to have, you know, one of your bandmates behind you just kind of like picking on you about like failing puzzles. And people hated it so much that we ended up pulling a lot of barks out of the game because of that. So we wanted to find this balance between leaving the player alone to figure it out for themselves, but making sure that they always knew that they could go get a hint if they wanted it and not have to just click through menus and kind of dig around to like find something that felt disconnected from the actual story of the game.
[00:16:35.302] Kent Bye: Yeah, at the beginning, I would go through a dialogue and sometimes if you have a question, you could go back and ask the other questions. And the beginning, I would just stand there and go through each of the dialogue choices. And at some point, once I got into the flow of the game, I would kick off one of those dialogue sequences and then maybe look around and do another task and then come back to that interaction. So there's a lot of dialogue tree moments that you can choose all the options, but there's also some options where you can only choose one. And so I guess one of the questions I had was, When you only have that one choice, is that more around like you expressing the agency of who you want to embody as a character? Or is that actually having any impact on the story cumulatively over time that these different choices that you're making over the course of the story is going to flip me into some other branch of this interactive narrative? So just curious if you could elaborate on that.
[00:17:31.277] Corey Warning: Yeah, so the conversations you can have with bandmates. So if you can go up to their like hint locations, you've got a couple of things you can talk about. A lot of that is just fleshing out like the backstory of the characters and the band and everything. But when you're on these sort of golden path moments and you can decide sort of how you want the player character Sam to react to these things, those are all just sort of like how you want Sam to respond to those things. This was all kind of like trying to balance between we didn't want the player to be this like kind of nameless faceless character that you could just sort of like role play interject whatever you wanted. Like Sam, the character that you're playing in the game, like has a backstory. They're a defined character in this universe. So we wanted to make sure that they had a range of different things. So like let the player sort of like role play in that character, but they're not like a blank slate, right? And because of that, the decisions that you make will trigger different like flavor of responses from the other characters and all that kind of stuff. But we still have like a main story that we're trying to tell here with a specific ending. So when you get to the end of the game, not to spoil anything and stuff, but there is one ending to the game here.
[00:18:36.820] Kent Bye: Okay. Yeah. Okay. I figured after I went back to the beginning and played, I was just trying to experiment to see, okay, is this keeping me on to anything that I can see that's different? And there wasn't any, maybe it was a reaction in the moment, but nothing that I could discern that was flipping. Yeah.
[00:18:52.248] Corey Warning: We also realized, too, that for a long time, we had very heavy exposition sequences. And there's a really great article, I believe this was about Half-Life, Alex, and Valve was sort of talking about how they realized during playtesting that players absolutely hate just standing around and listening to exposition, like especially in VR, which, I mean, even outside of us getting playtesters and stuff, like we feel that just playing the game, right? Yeah. And so for one, we wanted to be really careful of just cutting down as much dialogue as we could. We're still trying to tell a good story here, but we just tried to be as economical with our word count as possible. But we also realized that one of the best things we could do when we just needed to get exposition out and we need the characters talking to each other is to just throw up a dialogue choice just so the player has a little bit more agency and they feel like they're interacting with the game and not just standing there waiting for the talking to end. so a lot of times when we would throw up a dialogue choice even if this isn't going to impact the end of the game it still is making you feel like you're contributing to the conversation and it's also kind of a sneaky way for us to like get some lore about the game out there this is like maybe one of my favorite things that we kind of figured out but some of the dialogue choices that you can pick for sam to reply to some of them kind of hint towards like what's actually happening in the game like with the feedback and the band's history and all this kind of stuff so Some of the responses that you get prompted with are a little bit loaded with like the truth from our perspective.
[00:20:20.821] Kent Bye: Oh, interesting. Yeah. Like the very first scene you're at a gas station and you're hearing people in the van speaking. And so there's another thing that I just want to mention briefly, which is that there's a save system, but it doesn't automatically save unless you get to a checkpoint. And so I had gotten to a point and when I redid it, I had to redo a bunch of the scenes and, which was okay at the very beginning, I had to do it. There was a little bit extra pressure to like get to a checkpoint before I stopped something, because then I would have to do a bunch of stuff that I may not want to do. But so I ended up having to replay some scenes at the very beginning. And the first time I did it, I listened to the entire dialogue just standing there. And then I went to go fill up the gas and the gas filled up very quickly. And then the second time, I just started doing the gas and moving around and interacting a little bit more. And the gas was a lot more expensive. It was like $41 with the gas, whereas before it was just a few dollars.
[00:21:11.576] Corey Warning: Yeah, the gas timer there is sort of, it'll work out where it'll let the player, if you start pumping gas really quickly, it'll just wait until the characters are done talking there. So I hadn't thought about that. That's a good catch. The longer you leave your bandmates talk, the more empty your gas tank is.
[00:21:26.656] Kent Bye: Yeah. So it to me showed how much you were paying attention to the pacing of it, because both the pacing of each of those scenarios worked really well in terms of like, you know, my task that I was doing just happened to fit within that narrative context. To get back to the characters, though, there's these four characters. And maybe you could just give a bit more context for who these four characters are.
[00:21:48.083] Corey Warning: Yeah. So you play as Sam, who's the bassist of the band New Agenda, which is a fictional punk band in the 90s. If you've ever been to like a small concert and there's like, you know, four bands playing, New Agenda is like one of four, right? Like they're the opening band on this like big bill of bands you've probably never heard of except for the headliner and stuff. And again, not to like spoil too much about the band and their history and stuff, but they're a group of friends from different backgrounds. You've got Tommy, the drummer, who is very much like the ringleader of the band. She's kind of like the adult in the room of this group. She makes sure that their bills are paid and that they're budgeting for going on tour and that they're getting the shows booked, right? She kind of does all the like business side of the band. Dom, the singer, who's the big ego, obviously, because you got to have a singer that's got ego because that's just true for almost every band in my experience. And Nick, who's the guitarist, and she's also the sort of like creative spark. But for the band, she does almost all the songwriting. Her and Tommy grew up together. So there's a lot of history between them. And there's some relationship stuff that you get kind of some backstory on for how this band kind of operates and what the relationships are on a deeper level between each other. So like I said earlier, you're kind of getting into the story of this band right when they're sort of at like a turning point in their lives. They're just coming off of a really unsuccessful tour that you find out pretty early on that they actually got like kicked off of. And they're really not sure what's next for them. And so when the supernatural event happens, they call the feedback that sort of rips their minds out of their bodies and sets up the stage for all the puzzles and all the exploration they get to do. It's sort of all of them going through all this crazy otherworldly stuff also while navigating this like existential crisis of being in your early 20s too.
[00:23:39.212] Kent Bye: Yeah, when I got to some of those supernatural components, they were really quite fun because it took me back to the genre of like Stranger Things type of feel of both the story and the VR experience, but also I live here in Portland, Oregon. And when I go to Powell's Books, there's a whole section of Wicca and magic and herbalism and the spellcasting communities. And so just the integration of different occult elements. And so when I got to that part, I was like, oh man, this feels so Portland right now that I'm like, have all these occult aspects being embedded into the experience.
[00:24:13.393] Corey Warning: Yeah, it's very much intentional. We wanted to lean harder into that as the story and the lore of the feedback came together. We're exploring the background of what all the supernatural stuff was. I won't talk too much about it because it's a big part of the story as it unfolds and everything. having that feeling be grounded in something that's mysterious. But like, I definitely feel like a lot of that Pacific Northwest occult supernatural stuff has like seeped into my own head in a lot of ways. And I think everybody on the team too, right? Like, cause this isn't stuff that I just came up with by myself. Like this was a group effort from everybody on the team as far as like the backstory and the lore of everything that's happening here.
[00:24:54.360] Kent Bye: Well, also, there's certain parts where it feels like a very true-to-life, mature... I don't know if it would be PG, PG-13, or rated R. How do you get a sense of the rating of this piece of what the target audience is? Because it seemed a lot more adult than for teenagers to be playing.
[00:25:15.026] Corey Warning: Yeah, I mean, the game strikes me as fitting pretty squarely in a young adult field. I think that... There's no overtly sexual heaviness to the game. It's not violent in any way. There's really no violence at all. There's a little bit of, I think what the ESRB let us call it was fantasy drug use. So we're still rated T for T because it's fantasy drugs and not actual drugs. But it's still the kind of game that like I would let my kids play and feel OK about it. There's a lot of swearing in it because you're in a punk band. And I think that all feels very natural and how I remember talking to everybody when I was on tour. But outside of that, I mean, yeah, it feels like the kind of game that would be good for young adults and teens. I would say like people who are OK with stranger things. I think going back to your other reference, I think that's probably a good example. reference point for the game as far as like audience and age range.
[00:26:11.956] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah. It's probably the swearing and the language because a lot of the narratives that I've seen didn't have that much explicit language in it. So it was kind of refreshing to see just from, you know, it felt like it was a true to life in that sense. And so in terms of the writing process, maybe you could go through the process of how you went about, because you're listed as one of the co-writers, but also the director. And so- Did you have a writer's room or what? And there's also like some components of the immersive design and the embodied interactions. And so talk about how you were starting with the story or were you also looking at from a game design perspective and just kind of the iteration between both the interactive components and then also the storytelling and the writing components?
[00:26:57.009] Corey Warning: Sure. Oh gosh, I feel like I could talk about this for five hours. I'll try to boil it down. The initial concept for this game, it was always about a band. And I kind of had the band members in my head as far as like what their personalities were like and everything. But the actual like lore and background for the story was a little bit different. Like, The opening scene and prototype we were going to build out eventually had zombies involved in it and everything too. And it got very, very different after the original concept. But when we got the project greenlit, I started working with my friend Laura Hall on some of the world building and the background for the band and everything. So I kind of came in with this original concept, but I've never been an auteur or anything like that. I really like working with other people and bouncing ideas back and forth. And this project's no different from that. So when Laura and I started sitting down with this, I think she's the one who came up with the whole 90s aesthetic and everything. And we really worked backwards from the time period. And we started putting together what we thought was in each bandmate's room and just all this kind of stuff. And we worked backwards from that. And then we brought on Claire Carre to start working on the script with us. And that's where things really started taking shape. She helped us develop all the beats and we worked together on the narrative design and started building out how you would interact with these characters. And once the hint system got in there, that kind of like built on top of how economical we could be with words and how much story we felt like we could tell without boring the player to tears and standing around too long. But a lot of the actual narrative and the script came together sort of like writing like a film script. And that's something that I hadn't done in any of our previous games before. We usually just kind of have spreadsheets of dialogue and very loose beats and everything. But Claire came in from like a film writing background. And so she helped us bring a much more structured approach to the story and the narrative design and everything. And that made a huge difference for the game because it's pretty cinematic. And I think that it feels... more like a structured like film or a TV series or something because of that, like our beats felt way more developed and thought through from a story perspective and not just like a story that kind of had to get like sandwiched into an existing game design, which I've also been part of projects where that has to happen too. We also kind of knew the end of the game like very, very early, which I won't talk about here. But that was something that was really important to us. And we kind of knew exactly how the game needed to end from the get go, which made a lot of the rest of the game a lot easier. I think this is maybe the only creative project I've ever been on where we knew the ending up front and sort of being able to work backwards from there because we knew we wanted the message to be and how things were going to play out from the get go made everything a lot easier. And from there, we brought in another writer, Madeline Weatherhead, who joined up for the last year of the project and worked with me to help completely finish fleshing out the script and getting all the dialogue just as dialed in as we possibly could. Yeah, so we had multiple writers on the project. It was very, very collaborative. We worked with like the designers and the artists and just everybody kind of contributed like in some way, at least to like the characters and how they look and what their background is. So yeah, this is still like my favorite way to work on these types of projects where like there's a big story we're trying to tell that like everybody's influencing it in some way. Like even if, you know, I'm the last person to kind of sign off on the exact words that the characters are saying or everything like that, like... It's what makes working on a small team really fun and exciting because everybody gets to kind of have a say in how it all comes together.
[00:30:41.516] Kent Bye: Yeah. What's interesting about this story again, is that how character driven it is. And even going back to the world building and the world design, the environmental design and the environmental storytelling, because when I saw the architecture of the places, they're not super fancy in terms of like the room is an example of like a really exquisite environmental design that is just absolutely beautiful just to look at. And I wouldn't say that these rooms are beautiful to look at. They're very sparse and low poly, but you've got these cultural artifacts that are in some ways an expression of each of the characters. And that is what makes it interesting is that as the experience goes on, it has more and more of these components of the world design that, again, is reflecting parts of the characters. So it's always coming back to the characters in this experience. And so by having those characters right next to you and having those dialogue, it gave a different thrust to the story and the escape room that I haven't seen as much before because most of the story that is done with these other escape rooms, because they have the high fidelity of the rooms, you can't have super high fidelity characters. And so they just don't have characters. They're like off screen and you can't even see them. And so by going to Lillipala, you're able to actually have those characters and have those embodiments and have things that you're pushing off of as you're going through that story. So I feel like there's a resonance between the fidelity of the low fidelity of the characters that you're able to do, but also the low fidelity of the environments, but it all works cohesively together in a way that the environmental design is always reflecting different parts of the different characters.
[00:32:15.586] Corey Warning: Yeah, I'm glad to hear you say all of that. With the game being a small team project and a smaller budget project and all that kind of stuff, we had to do a lot of trades for what felt most important versus something else that we really wanted to pull off but couldn't quite do. Thankfully, we came into this art style from the get-go as well. We knew that we were going to be limited on resources and the amount of people. So the low poly aesthetic was, one, something that just fit with our studio. All of our games are kind of stylized. None of our previous games look like true to life or anything like that. So this felt like a good way to tackle a project like this for our studio that hasn't done a big 3D game, let alone a VR game. So it helped us make the whole project feel more attainable with this low poly... simplified stylized art style. But it also allowed us to make sure that the story could be at the forefront. We always kind of design our games with these like central pillars of like design that we can always focus on. So if we're making a decision one way or another, it's not put up against one person saying, well, I'm the director, so we're doing it my way. It's kind of always for what's best for the game. We've all come together and agreed or like the design pillars of the game. And the story was always like the main center pillar. So if we had a puzzle idea that was going to be maybe a little bit more intricate or take up more resources to either complete, whether that's from like the design level or the art level or anything like that, We almost always simplified those interactions when we needed to, to make sure that the story kind of came first for the game. So I do think that there's a lot of really interesting creative puzzles in the game, but there are also a lot that we had to scrap and streamline a little bit more because Like I said earlier, we got feedback where people were just getting stuck or we just couldn't quite get the player information delivered in a way where we felt confident that they were going to be able to figure it out without just like too many hints or anything like that. Or it was just like taking players too long to either solve it or get to the next beat of the story. So that really helped guide us as far as pacing goes for the entire game or just cutting out puzzles because a level felt way too long and it felt like you needed to move on to the next bandmates area. Yeah.
[00:34:35.173] Kent Bye: Yeah. And so with the puzzles, there's some more intellectual puzzles and mental presence where you're finding clues in the environment and solving a puzzle. But there's also, I'd say, embodied interactions that are, you know, embodied gameplay that is sometimes, you know, like playing the guitar, it feels like a little bit more of... not so much the focus of like a guitar hero, like you're trying to get the high score, but it's more of like you are actually in this band and by going through this little interactive embodied sequence, you are becoming more a part of this character. And that's how I felt playing the specific parts of that guitar. But there's other ways that you're still using the VR components of the embodiment to continue to have a progression through how you're doing the puzzles throughout the course of this piece. And so I'd love to hear you comment on, you know, as you're starting to dive into VR, there's all these new affordances with using your body and experience and how you started to explore embodiment in the context of the story.
[00:35:33.803] Corey Warning: Yeah, so we wanted to make sure that for interactions like the bass playing, that everything felt approachable. And so for players who know how to play an instrument, like myself, I have fun playing that mini game every time. I know how to play guitar, I know how to play bass. Even though it's a really simplified sort of Guitar Hero-esque interaction, it still just feels good every time you do it. And we also wanted to make sure that people who don't play instruments aren't hindered by that. I think actually one of my favorite examples of kind of one thing that we riffed off for this was a game, Night in the Woods, which is not a VR game and not necessarily a puzzle game even, but they have these little sections where you can jam with your band. And I think maybe you're the bass player in that band too. But in that game, it sort of is treated almost like a reward for like getting as far in the game. Like you don't have to play it perfectly. You can miss notes. It's fine, which is also just kind of, what happens in a real band anyway too. So these moments where you get to jam with your band, there's no fail states. We are not tracking, well, we're tracking how many notes you hit, but it's not presented to the player or like anything like that. We didn't want these moments to feel like stressful in a way that like oh my god I'm terrible at rhythm or like I've never played a guitar or anything for this to feel like you couldn't handle it we wanted people who have never played an instrument to be able to handle it okay and feel good and if they just have the worst timing ever that's okay too they can still get through the mini game and maybe they played it pretty bad but that's fine it doesn't impact the story in a negative way we wanted to make sure that like when you get to certain points in the game and these things come up that it felt like a reward. And that's sort of like, again, not to give too much away, but I'm really happy with how the end of each level ties back in with bringing things full circle with each bandmate and getting to play with them. And it's one of those things that only could have happened with everybody on the team contributing to how all these things work from like a design and puzzle experience and the story and everything all working together together. But I think as far as conclusions go, I'm maybe more proud of how we've been able to wrap things up with this game than probably any other project for the studio.
[00:37:41.997] Kent Bye: Yeah, it is very satisfying, those embodied interactions, and both from how it feels in my body, but also being a part of that narrative context of being a part of the band. And yeah, that all makes total sense. There were some weird glitches where if I was sitting versus standing, I found that if I was standing, it was a little bit easier to have stability in the guitar. But if I was sitting, it was a little bit more awkward. But I also found that you're not tracking elbows or anything with VR. And so like, it's kind of sensitive and awkward to hold a guitar because it was kind of twisting. And so what it meant was that even when I was strumming, I was doing the same strumming, but the guitar was rotating to the point where it wasn't detecting properly. So it was just one of those VR moments where I'm butting up against what is maybe the constraints of the technology or, you know, I wanted to like feel like I was really jamming out, but I was missing notes when I felt like I should have been hitting them. So yeah. That was probably the most friction there of that part.
[00:38:35.891] Corey Warning: Yeah, there's still, we actually, as I'm talking to you on this call, we got approval from Meta yesterday to launch and everything. But even since then, we've been working on some quality of life changes and all that kind of stuff, because there's always a patch to make things better and stuff. And the base plane is definitely one of those things that we've noticed too, that Yeah, it's funny. One of the first pieces of feedback I got when we started making this game is that the player character should be the drummer because that's probably going to be a lot easier to pull off in VR. And I said, no way. It's got to be the bass player. It's important for the story. So that's another one of those aspects where we traded a specific interaction because it just had to be the way it had to be for the story.
[00:39:15.279] Kent Bye: Oh, interesting. Yeah. I think you made the right choice after seeing how it came out. Well, because it is such a character-driven story, I think having good voice acting is a key part of that as well. And this has really strong acting. And as you were putting together this story and doing the writing, were you doing intermediary, like just temp voices and then having the voice actors come in when you had things locked down? Or talk about if that was more of an iterative process or if you had some ways of... bringing those same voice actors throughout the entire project. Like, how did you work that out?
[00:39:47.704] Corey Warning: We got so lucky with the voice actors that we found for this project. So when we started out, we wanted to hire some temp voice actors to just get some scratch VO in the game so we could just feel it out and play around with it. And we ended up hiring three voice actors. We had one of them, Seth, ended up doing the voices for Dom and Sam, Sam's player character. And we just couldn't find the right voice for Sam for a long time. So we said, whatever, it's just scratch vocals. So we'll just, our buddy Seth can just handle both of them because it's going to get replaced eventually anyway. And we actually weren't totally sure if these voice actors were going to stay on for the whole project or what that was going to look like. And we kept them through the entire thing. They were recording scratch VO and second round scratch VO and then finals and stuff for us for, it had to have been three years altogether for, And they ended up being such a huge part of bringing these characters to life with us because just some of their performances just made me rethink how these characters would talk to each other. I don't think a lot of game projects or film or anything gets sort of the luxury to have so many different takes with voice actors, but... We were just really lucky for how available they were and how willing they were to work with us multiple, multiple times just to keep re-recording new scripts and for us to plug that stuff in. I think that for this project, the pipeline that we had for implementing new VO was so strong that it just let us iterate so much on the project. And I think it really comes through. But we were able to share a ton with the actors, like, During development too, we were in pretty close communication. Anytime there was like, we finished the Bible or we finished this lore doc, or we were sharing clips and videos and everything with them along the way. So it was very, very collaborative. And in the end, we tried to find another voice actor to play Sam. And I don't know if you noticed this, but it's still the same voice actor. We had Seth play Sam and Dom. He just had... the voice so dialed in that when we went to go find another voice actor, we just felt like it was already fully developed. And so we just made sure during that session that he was able to differentiate those characters enough. But yeah, it just worked out awesome. The sessions that we went through with them were some of my favorite parts of development for the game. Yeah, they were just fantastic. Like, this is the first project where I at least for me that I've worked with voice actors to this degree. So for me coming in and directing the project and having written a bunch for the game and everything to being able to rely on voice actors like pulling off such strong performances just made me really feel spoiled.
[00:42:27.827] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah. And like I said, you don't see a lot of that type of depth of voice acting or characters on screen. So in terms of the character design, maybe you could speak about both designing the look and feel of the characters, but also their movement. I mean, I noticed that a lot of times they're frozen in space as you're talking to them and they're not really moving a lot, but there are some scenes where there are moving around and engaging and playing in the band. And so just love to hear some elaboration on the character design as well as the animation of the characters. Yeah.
[00:42:55.700] Corey Warning: Yeah, so we kind of started with very rough ideas of the characters. And I think we had developed out their personalities. And we knew that they all were going to live in this house together, too. And so a big part of the early passes for the experience design and the world building was figuring out what their bedrooms looked like and what was in them and all this kind of stuff. And I think that actually started before we got the original concept art for the characters. it felt really important that they all looked like they would be in a band together, but they all felt like their own distinct character. Like we didn't want them to be, you know, it's a group and they all wear black together and they've all got emo hair and you know, all that kind of stuff. And our art director, Gina ended up just really nailing it. Like we, we, we had these characters concepted out so fast. Gina has been with us on every game project since the world next door back in 2019, 2017 when we started making that game, I think. So she's been with the studio for a really long time. And when we kind of were nailing down the visual style and these characters, it just all came together so, so quickly. We put together a lot of references from like other musicians and bands and stuff that we wanted to kind of reference and everything. But once it all came together, they still felt pretty unique. And as far as the animation goes, when we started out, we actually didn't think that they were going to be very animated at all. We sort of treated a lot of the ways that they emote and move around and talk and everything. It's very visual novel in a way that like sort of how it operates behind the scenes. And the actual, like the glitch effect and all that kind of stuff, part of the original intention there was one, to have a cool look, but also to make sure that we were able to kind of like... make it look as good as we could with a very small team and limited resources and everything. So we just kind of kept playing into knowing what our restrictions were going to be for this project and figuring out how to make it look as cool as we possibly could with the limited scope that we had. So all the characters were also rigged and animated in a way that referenced other bands and musicians and stuff so we kind of had like a background for like dom the singer we wanted him to kind of feel like this band member and this band member and like this and we would pull youtube videos and look at like how they played their instruments and all that kind of stuff and sort of model them after these references for other musicians that we were referencing for each character well the other thing that we should probably also mention is that there's quite a lot of music that's in this experience as well maybe you could talk around the curation of all the sound design and music that's featured in this piece Yeah, so Graham Nesbitt, who has been with us for a really long time now, he did all the music and sound for our previous game, Floppy Nights, and then for Garden Story, which our studio published. And Graham and I have just had a really easy time working together on music. Graham is a really good example of... My background is as a musician. And as I got into games, I realized that I knew a lot of people who were a lot more talented than me. And so my sort of favorite role here has been more of a like collaborator, producer level and to kind of let Graham really stretch on all the composing. So all the music and sound design that you hear is, it's all Graham. He and I talked a lot about different, bands to reference and sort of the soundscape of these different areas and everything. But one of my favorite things that we kind of nailed down on the concept level was that each of the dreamscapes would sort of really play into the different instruments that each band member plays. So like in the mall, which is Tommy's area, it's very percussive with her being the drummer. And in later level with Dom, who's a singer and the guitarist, and he's also very like sort of an aggressive, abrasive personality. The music reflects that in that level too. So we wanted to make sure that the music and sound design, it all comes back to the characters all the way through. And Graham just nailed that, like the whole way through the game. And then for the actual sound of the band, we developed that over the course of the entire project. And the song Lovesick, which is the name of the game and also the name of the song that they're trying to like write and finish throughout the whole game that actually came together. Oh, my God. We recorded that song like three weeks ago. It was like right at the end of the project. So as sort of art imitates life as much as possible here, the main through line of the game is how this band just like can't finish this song. And we had the same thing going on. We just kept putting it off because there are other priorities. So Graham had the music for this thing nailed down for a really long time. And then I came in and wrote the lyrics and performed that. And then Graham's partner Kalani actually sang for Nick's version of the song too, which happens later in the game too. So it all came together right at the end and we were really excited about how it all turned out. But yeah, it was very akin to the actual story of the game here.
[00:47:50.526] Kent Bye: Nice. Great. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality and immersive storytelling might be and what it might be able to enable?
[00:48:00.455] Corey Warning: Oh, gosh. I'm excited and hopeful. that people will keep experimenting in what's possible in VR. Working on a game in VR was very challenging for us. One, that we're just not a VR studio before this game. And so I think I mentioned earlier, there were a lot of like 101 basic things that I think that Another studio would have figured out way before we had it put together. But it still just feels like there's such a unique way to design games and tell stories in VR that is still really unexplored. And I hope that that gets the support that I think it deserves. VR still feels very niche. And I think that the audience for VR seems to be changing. And I think that certain platforms are not... doing the work that I wish they would do to encourage that kind of experimentation and for certain games to kind of rise above a lot of the Roblox style stuff that I'm seeing on the store right now. So not to sound too jaded here and stuff, but I'm concerned that there's going to be a lot of low effort, free to play shovelware finding its way onto the VR platforms for a while here. And I think unless there is a real concentrated effort to make sure that unique projects are cutting through all that noise, I think VR might be in a little bit of trouble. So I hope that doesn't happen because I still think that there is a lot of cool shit that we could be doing with this medium. But it seems harder and harder to find funding and find coverage and even just find an audience for people who want to get through this. And I think that's my, you know, I mean, it's my concern with everything that I've ever been involved with creatively is like, is this even gonna find its way to the people who I think are gonna enjoy it? And it seems like the barrier for VR specifically right now is harder than maybe it's ever been.
[00:50:03.021] Kent Bye: Yes. Lots of very important and prescient points reflecting on the current state. And yeah, hopefully folks out there in the XR industry, listeners of Voices VR, definitely check out Lovesick. I really enjoyed it. It's very unique. And like you said, it's got that indie VR spirit and indie storytelling and yeah, just a really cool story and powerfully told. And yeah, definitely recommend folks go check it out. So Corey, thanks so much for joining me here on the podcast to help break it all down.
[00:50:28.777] Corey Warning: Yeah. Thanks so much.
[00:50:30.495] Kent Bye: So that was Corey Warning of Rose City Games, and he was the director and co-writer of Lovesick. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview. First of all, I really enjoyed playing through this game, and I think it was because the story was so strong and character-driven. I don't typically see that in a lot of these escape room type of games where it's more environmental storytelling or the story is... Not so much like there's a character that's standing there and you have some dialogue choices, which you don't have any impact from a narrative perspective as to like any of the choices that you're making is changing how the story is unfolding. It's just this is the agency of how I want to embody this character and what kind of expressions that I want to express, but also hear back from the other people within the context of the story itself. And there is this structure where you go through each of these different chapters. By the time I had done this interview, I'd only gone through the one of the three or four major chapters that are in this piece. But the gameplay loop is similar, where you're going into these alternative realities and helping to solve all these different puzzles. And as you do that, you're getting to know more about each of these different characters and your relationship to them, but also their relationship to the band. And the worlds end up being these projections of their internal life. And so even the world design of these alternative realities are always kind of pointing back to revealing different aspects of these characters. So to me, it was really interesting just to hear how the environmental design, the world design started to happen even before they had the character design. And so they're able to design the bedrooms of each of these different characters. And then from there, see how they wanted to have a unique look and feel where they didn't feel like they were all uniform, but they also had very distinct and different personalities of how they related to the band and to each other. And so I just really enjoyed playing through this game. There were some like challenging embodied interactions where there was some timing stuff. And then, you know, some puzzles that I ended up using a lot of the hint system throughout, just because I was more interested in the narrative parts but if you are like a hardcore escape room person you can dial it up by not having any hints at all and trying to figure out different stuff and so they have as part of the description that was sent to me they said that once you reach the first main puzzle area of the mall hints will be available from your bandmates at all times if you ever get stuck talk to them and ask them if they have quote any ideas if you're stuck make sure you check all available waypoints for objects or place points you may have overlooked So, yeah, you just kind of have to retrace your steps. And because it doesn't have stick locomotion and free roaming where you can go anywhere, you are constrained as to where you can go. And that allows them to direct your attention to things that may have changed within the environment. So it's a good idea to kind of explore around, see what is there. And then as things change, you go back and you find what's changed and then pick up different objects. Or as you go on, you get more superpowers. So I provided a little bit of feedback of different things where I knew what action to take, what embodied interaction to take. But for whatever reason, there was like some glitchiness in the code so that it was difficult to actually perform that action. And that was one of the more frustrating things because I knew exactly what I needed to do, but I just couldn't do it because there was like some glitches or bugs. Again, that was stuff that they're going to be ironing out and hopefully also putting out a patch later. So depending on your tolerance for those different types of things, then you could either wait or, you know, I honestly would recommend go ahead and getting it anyway and buying it and supporting projects like this, just because, like I said, the top a little bit of an end of an era in terms of the type of content that meta has been supporting a lot of the projects that you're going to start to see. within the broader XR ecosystem, I think are going to be much more focused on what Meta is doing internally with their Meta Horizon worlds. And anybody that produces these independent projects are going to have to do it on their own dime rather than seeking outside funding. Since it doesn't seem like Meta, at this point at least, is funding many new projects. Or if they are funding something, it's going to be very much focused on the free-to-play model. There've been a lot of stuff that they putting out saying, Hey, everything that's working with NVR is free to play. So they're funding free to play type of stuff, especially when it comes to MetaHorizon worlds. They are having a whole $50 million fund and potentially funding other projects. Doing this kind of first party focus. So that kind of alludes to what Corey was saying there at the ending in terms of, you know, a lot of this shovelware that he's saying in the broader ecosystem. And once Meta had stopped doing a lot of the curation and they opened up to the app ecosystem, they also simultaneously started promoting their own horizon world's first party applications. So I don't know, it's, it's a little disheartening just to see there hasn't been traditionally much support for really cultivating a really vibrant ecosystem of XR that they're really focusing on their own first party apps and their own hardware solutions. But we are still seeing some of these independent driven indie spirit projects. And this is one that I think is a great example of really innovative in different ways, really pushing the edge of how can you do this type of storytelling within the context of VR with this puzzle room mechanic. And to me, the story really drives the heart of this project where it was what was keeping me engaged. It was also something that I felt like was very satisfying at the end of it all. and gave me some real visceral reactions that were surprising that I really wasn't quite expecting. So I found it really quite moving and, you know, just important to see how these indie driven creators and projects are still experimenting with what's possible with VR. And there are a quite a lot of innovative embodied techniques that are throughout this experience and some things that make you puzzle through some of these different things. So both physical interactions that you have to do that are more timing based and more physical interactions, and then more of the puzzle based interactions that you have to be very observant and detect different things in the environment and then deduce the different patterns and then solve the puzzles. And once you solve it, then it just has a really nice payoff for resolving that mental friction and allowing you to hear the next narrative bits of additional context for information about each of the different characters. There are these like hint system where you can ask for hints, but you can also just ask questions to the characters and learn more about the story as you're also kind of exploring around these different environments. Again, I really enjoyed playing through this piece and yeah, highly recommend folks, especially if you're interested in narrative driven projects, character driven projects, and then like the escape room genre. If you're into that as well, then there's certainly a lot of cool puzzles that are throughout this piece as well. Oh, and this project, Lovesick, is actually releasing on Thursday, March 6th. So that's all I have for today, and I just want to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoyed the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a Mr. Supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
