Pollen is a first-person exploration game set in space by Helsinki-based Mindfield Games. I had a chance to catch up with Project Lead Olli Sinerma at PAX Prime to talk about the story behind the game as well as some of the lessons learned from working on Pollen for the past two years.
The graphics in Pollen look amazing, and there is a very detailed blog post on Unity’s site talking about how they’ve been able to achieve high-end visuals within Unity 5. Road to VR also did a pretty comprehensive hands-up write up on the experience that you can find here.
Olli talks about some of the considerations that Mindfield Games took into account for VR locomotion, and how they’ve been approaching locomotion within a room-scale Vive environment. They considered using the type of Blink locomotion system that Cloudhead Games is using, but for now are opting to use a combination of using the thumbstick controller as well as walking around in a room scale environment. Time will tell to see if this is a viable approach in the long-run as I suspect that this will not be 100% nausea-free as the Blink approach promises to be. VR locomotion is still largely an open problem within the VR exploration genre, and so I expect that this will be an area in VR that will continue to have different approaches and potential solutions.
Olli also talks about designing the first-person control mechanisms for both the gamepad, mouse and keyboard, as well as the Vive and the Half Moon Oculus Touch controllers. They’re considering experimenting with some of gesture capabilities within that are made available with the Touch, but likely not going to be a vital part of the gameplay considering that it wouldn’t be possible if people were playing with a gamepad or Vive controllers. Olli describes how they’re trying to make the interactions as natural as possible whether using a gamepad, mouse or 6DOF hand controllers.
They’re also designing a 2D version of the game, and he mentioned that there will be things that you can do in VR that you can’t do in the 2D version like look underneath a bed. There are definitely design restrictions and considerations like this when trying to develop a game for multiple platforms, and so it’ll be interesting to see whether or not it’s worth for VR game developers to make 2D versions available and how much that 2D version would limit the VR experience.
Olli is excited to see more medical applications of VR, and he’s really grateful for the amount of community and information that’s available on /r/oculus. You can get more information on Pollen on their website here.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:12.036] Olli Sinerma: My name is Olli Sinerma. I'm the project lead of Mind Field Games. We are working on a game called Pollen. It's a first-person exploration game optimized for the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, OSVR, and in the future Morpheus for PlayStation 4. The game is a first-person exploration game, so it's pretty much similar to Gone Home, Stanley Parable, and all of those, like, where you stare at the environment and figure out what has happened. The thing in Poland is that, because we want to do a virtual reality-optimized game, everything in the environment is totally interactive. There is a fully functioning kitchen, you can cook stuff in it, there's a gym where you can throw basketballs, throw darts, play punching bag. run on the treadmill, which apparently causes motion sickness. So when we go for the launch, you won't see that thing there. Fax is great because we get also user feedback like, oh, he got motion sickness from that one, so we are removing that stuff. But yeah, the whole environment is fully interactive. There is about like four hours of gameplay in it, depending on how you play. If you want to use the in-game games that are there or the in-game virtual reality in virtual reality, of course, the time goes up.
[00:01:15.506] Kent Bye: And so yeah, maybe tell me a bit about, like, what is the story or the plot? What's the setting and what is the goals or intention of the character and their motivation?
[00:01:23.429] Olli Sinerma: Yeah, so the idea of Poland's World is that the 70s sci-fi that they had in 2001 space, so to say, Solaris, and even the moon from the year 2000, we went with the idea that, well, that future happened. So the game happens in the year 1995. It begins in a job interview where you are at. There has been a work-related accident on the Saturnian moon Titan and a person has been gotten lost. For you it's a great thing because you get a job opportunity. You take a lander, land on Titan, explore the outsides and then things start happening. There is a reason why they build a huge million dollar base on Titan.
[00:01:59.080] Kent Bye: I see. And so, you know, this seems like, you know, exploration game, you're creating different puzzles. And if you can interact with everything, then how can you isolate what the puzzles and what you're actually supposed to do rather than just kind of playing around but have nothing happen if you interact with objects?
[00:02:14.133] Olli Sinerma: So one thing we decided to do from the early start is that we wanted to have everything interactive. So we need to restrict the player so you're inside the base. There are different rooms like the demo we are showing here is the crew quarters with the gym. the kitchens and the study room. And how we advance the player or tell him where to go, in fact, we don't. The player pretty much figures it out by exploring the environment, figuring out what happened to the person before him there. There are some hints, notes in the environment. Not everything is like a cassette recorder playing some audio tape or a text reader that you read. You really must figure things out. And especially VR is used in that one.
[00:02:53.606] Kent Bye: And so what type of feedback have you gotten so far here at PAX?
[00:02:56.402] Olli Sinerma: It's been pretty amazing if you noticed we are one of the most popular stands here so there's all the time like huge line going on it. I don't know there are not that many first-person exploration games because everybody knows that first-person is really difficult to do in VR. Even we spent like first year just fixing the movement because locomotion is everybody knows it's a huge hurdle and issue. Everybody just does seated experiences, third-person experiences, and that's why we wanted to do that. And it seems like that's what people want. People want to be in VR through their own eyes, being the main character of the story. And exploration works really well because it's not fast-paced. You can do it in your own time, and of course our movement system, our interaction system even, we are using natural motion, so you can use gamepad or mouse or even the Vive or Half Moon controllers to play the game when it launches.
[00:03:48.076] Kent Bye: And so VR locomotion is an issue that, for some people, they get very sensitive when they're walking around in a VR environment. And so you said that you guys have been working on this for a while. What are some of the special considerations that you did in order to minimize motion sickness when you're walking around and interacting with your experience?
[00:04:05.744] Olli Sinerma: OK, there's the easy stuff that pretty much everybody knows, like acceleration. You cannot go from 0 to 100 in a second. You cannot run in 60 miles per hour in the game. You need to go with normal speed. of course the stuff that you cannot take the camera control out of the person and all these mundane things, but then there are the difficult things that you need to figure out. You do the mistake and then you learn from it. Like for example, we had circular stairs in the game. That wasn't a problem. We in fact unlocked how you do stair walking in VR. That doesn't cause motion sickness, but with circular stairs, the issue was that people were playing it wrong, in a sense, that they were running there, like, back towards downstairs, and looking around, and going up, going down, going up, going down, and then they were like, I'm feeling sick. I'm like, you would feel sick if you did that in real life. So, the issue in that case is that we remove it, and then we design it again, how people can play it without getting motion sickness. But it's like, almost in everything that we do, we have figured something out. Those are a couple of examples, but there's a huge amount of those. Like, every week, and even on PAX, we have figured out a couple of things more.
[00:05:13.436] Kent Bye: I see. And so, you know, in terms of the gameplay mechanics that you have, what are some of the things that you can do in terms of these interactions? Because you have the gamepad controller, but you also are designing for the Half Moon controller's HTC Vive, which you could potentially do things that you may not be able to do on a controller. So how do you balance that, designing for both an Xbox controller and a baseline, but also these higher-level two-handed interactions?
[00:05:38.864] Olli Sinerma: Well, it wasn't easy. The thing that we decided from the day one was that we want to do natural motion kind of movement. So every interaction you imitate the things that you do by hand, even if you are playing with mouse. So you use mouse button one to grab an object and then you do the action. You use with the gamepad, you use the trigger controls to grab an object and then you imitate the action with the thumb stick. But in the hand controls, it's exactly the same. You grab the object and then you do the action with your hand. It's always the same for us, and it works perfectly.
[00:06:11.293] Kent Bye: And so is there an inventory system where someone could pick up an object in one room and then stow it away and then recover it later to use it into a completely different room and context? Or are you trying to make all the puzzles such that all the objects are located in the same room and context?
[00:06:27.787] Olli Sinerma: We have an inventory system. The inventory system works so that if the item is puzzle-related, it goes into your inventory as a hint. that you know that there is something important in that coin that you collected or the welcome mat into the room has something interesting on it. And then you need to figure out how does it work. So because there is like hundreds of items in the gameplay, there's a huge amount of objects that you can look around and search. So if we would make it so that anything could work with anything, you'd be spending like 50 hours of gameplay just figuring things out. So we are making it a bit easier for the player.
[00:07:03.320] Kent Bye: Nice. And so, you know, what's next for you when you're looking at these launch windows that are coming up in the spring of 2016? And so, where are you guys at in production and how much more do you have to do in order to complete and wrap up this game?
[00:07:17.574] Olli Sinerma: Polen has been in production for two years now, so we began working when DK1 was like a really rare device, so we began working with that one. And now we are going to launch at the same time as Sokolos comes out. Vive just announced that they will be a bit late, so it doesn't matter for us because we will be available when Vive comes out too. So we will be a launch game.
[00:07:38.928] Kent Bye: And is there a mobile version of Gear VR, or how are you guys also creating experiences from the assets to potentially do mobile versions as well?
[00:07:48.606] Olli Sinerma: With GeoVR, of course, the device doesn't have enough power to run Pollen. To play with Pollen, you need the Oculus recommended device of GTX 970. And with S6 mobile phone, that's not playable. So, we are really interested in mobile VR, but we will definitely do a different project on that one and design it from the beginning to be a mobile device game. Like, Pollen is designed from day one to be a PC-console game.
[00:08:13.368] Kent Bye: And what were some of the biggest lessons learned that you've had so far in developing and designing for virtual reality? If you're speaking to someone who is just getting into VR development, what kind of advice would you give them?
[00:08:25.612] Olli Sinerma: My advice would be that don't do virtual reality device like design or work because you never want to do anything else after that because like mobile games, who cares about mobile games anymore or normal PC games because VR is the best thing ever for a designer or gameplay or creating games because it's so amazing the feeling and all the time we are going so much forward that every week I'm like okay what we are having next week like okay now you have a hand controller so now you have lighthouse And it's getting better so fast that it's the most interesting thing you can ever do. And you can never be too early to start on this stuff.
[00:08:59.160] Kent Bye: And in terms of the Half Moon controllers and the Oculus Touch, how are you comparing being able to use the Vive controllers and the Half Moon controllers in terms of the different functionality and abilities that each of those controllers have?
[00:09:11.545] Olli Sinerma: Well, the difference is not that big. Of course, the Half-Moon controllers have the finger pointing and all of that stuff. We might do something special for it. But at the moment, we have been thinking of the game so that everything that is possible with the normal monitor should be possible with Oculus, and everything that is possible with Oculus should be possible with normal monitor. Except a couple of small things that we have added as Easter eggs. For example, with normal monitor, you cannot look under a bed. But with an Oculus, you can. With the Half-Moon controllers, we haven't yet thought about the finger things. But we might do something that you could play with, maybe put a guitar into the game or a slingshot or something like that. We'll see about it. But the fun thing in Poland is because the world is so open and everything is interactive, we can just add stuff along. It's a sandbox in VR world.
[00:09:55.330] Kent Bye: And maybe you could describe to me if you've ever had a sense of presence in VR and what that was like for you.
[00:10:00.712] Olli Sinerma: Yeah, well in Poland, I feel it a lot, especially when I tried with HTC Vive and I'm moving with my own feet in the world. That's like, that's the virtual reality when you actually move in the VR world. I don't know what is presence after that. Of course, I love the Elite Dangerous stuff. I love what the CCP guys are doing in Iceland there. VR lab stuff is amazing. We have a lot of demos at our office, those give a great things. Then there are the weird stuff. Then, these are of course the games, but you can do, well, instead of presence, I'd go a bit beyond, something that you can only do in VR. It's a bit artistic stuff, there is no market whatsoever on it, but I just want to do it because it's so interesting. VR comics, Carmack does VR comics, there is, and I know why, because that's so really cool.
[00:10:46.350] Kent Bye: And when you use the HTC Vive and you're moving around, do you also implement the D-pad thumb controllers to be able to walk around? Because there's a lot of spaces within Pollen that have pretty large spaces, but are a lot smaller than the 15 square foot that you may have available. And so how are you able to use that physical space? And are you teleporting? Or how are you actually approaching that problem?
[00:11:08.582] Olli Sinerma: It's funny how in Star Trek they never had this problem on the holodeck. It was like, huh, somehow it just worked. In Poland we are going to use the thumbticks for movement and the lighthouse for like... micro movement so if you want to go a bit closer in the kitchen of the microwave and open it up then you can use your own legs on movement and that's Restrictions set by your VR space that you have in your house We were thinking about the blink, but I don't think that we will implement that in pollen We already have like several different movement styles. So we have like the normal FPS movement. We have comfort mode we have the 30 degree change of view and all of that stuff and we were thinking about blink, but Perhaps we will skip it for now. It's a good idea. It works for some games. Also ideas like you put spots into the world and you just stare at the spot and click a button and teleport there. That is a good one. Probably we're going to skip it. But I think eventually somebody will figure it out. I don't know if it will be us because for Poland it's not that important because we figured out the movement so far already.
[00:12:08.062] Kent Bye: And so what type of experiences do you want to have in VR? I don't know, it's really hard to say.
[00:12:13.224] Olli Sinerma: I want to have like... Well, my personal interest is medical, because I'm really interested about what we could do for patients who are, for example, paraleptic, who cannot move at all. So I'd be really interested to help those people out, that they cannot move from hospital beds or anything, but with VR I could give them a totally new view of life. Also, I love what people are doing with Altspace and all of these virtual reality presence things where you can add people along with you in the solitude of VR, but instead it becomes the most social experience you've ever had. That's really interesting stuff. I'd really want to touch my hands in that one. There's so many things. Of course, fitness and VR. We have some companies in Finland who are doing that stuff. I'd be interested to see what can be done with that. There's so many areas. It's like it's a new frontier. There are so many options.
[00:13:02.311] Kent Bye: And so finally, what do you see as kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:13:10.182] Olli Sinerma: The cliche would be saying Matrix. Well, of course, Matrix is no more virtual reality. That's a brain-neural computer interface. But virtual reality, one thing I think it may generate, because it puts you into the shoes of somebody else. You start to see the world from the eyes of somebody else, say a person on war zone in Syria, for example. You can see what they are experiencing and start to figure out how their life is. You could experience life as a cow eating hay field and then you start thinking is eating cows really a good thing in life and it puts you in the shoes of the other people. It may make us empathic on the long run. That's what I find really interesting.
[00:13:49.224] Kent Bye: And is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say?
[00:13:52.545] Olli Sinerma: One thing I really love in VR, I love the community. I love the R-Oculus on Reddit. That's the people, they are really friendly, they are really helpful and they are sharing a lot. Everybody is sharing a lot of their experience. We are also shooting our stuff out and we are not hiding much what we are doing. So that is really good for everybody because that's how we get the people on virtual reality.
[00:14:14.485] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, great. Well, thank you so much. Thank you so much. And thank you for listening. If you'd like to support the Voices of VR podcast, then please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash Voices of VR.
