James Green is the creative director at Carbon Games, and he was inspired to create AirMech: Command from playing a 1989 game called Herzog Zwei, which was one of the first real-time strategy games that also used a gamepad as the primary control scheme. It’s usually recommended to design a game from the ground-up with VR in mind, but the VR port of AirMech’s tabletop aesthetic works really well in VR and gives you the feeling of being able to watch your childhood war toy battles come to life. I had a chance to catch up with James at the Oculus Game Days event at GDC where he talked about his inspirations and VR design process.
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AirMech: Command allows you to either focus on strategy by hanging back to produce units and direct the battle from your base, or you can take a more active approach by fighting on the front-lines or moving units around. There are multiplayer modes available where you can play against other people, or you can do a co-op mode where one player focuses on offensive strategy while the other focuses on defensive battle. There will also be spectator modes available for people to watch and learn from other expert players.
James says that playing against the AI can help you get to a certain level of understanding the basic mechanics and strategy of the game, but that it gets really interesting when you start to play against other humans who are a lot more unpredictable.
Because most RTS games are played on a mouse and keyboard, then there’s a lot of controls that needed to be translated into the gamepad controller. There’s an extensive tutorial at the beginning to teach you all of the controls. While this shouldn’t be too much of a barrier for most experienced gamers, I wouldn’t expect that this would be a good first-time VR experience for non-gamers.
AirMech: Command is launching on March 28th for $39.99, and is rated as comfortable.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:00.068] Kent Bye: My name is Kent Bye, and I host the Voices of VR podcast. And back in July of 2015, I quit my job to do this full time. I just love doing it. But I do need your support to help continue this podcast. I've got lots of great insights from GDC and a lot of other conferences that I want to travel to and kind of be the proxy of the virtual reality community. So if you do enjoy this podcast, then please do consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash voices of VR. The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:41.907] James Green: My name is James Green, I'm the creative director at Carbon Games and we're making AirMech Command.
[00:00:46.931] Kent Bye: Great, so tell me a bit about what is AirMech Command, what happens here?
[00:00:50.313] James Green: AirMech Command is effectively a tabletop RTS experience with a lot of action thrown in. Because of course you're controlling with the gamepad instead of mouse and keyboard, which is normally what people think of with RTS. For us, we've been working on different flavors of AirMech for a long time that use the gamepad as the primary control scheme. So when we wanted to bring the game over to VR, it's like, wow, it's already a perfect fit because we didn't have to compromise anything or reinvent it. We just had to focus on, let's solve the VR problems of UI and size and scale of things. started doing the table and the experiments with the camera and we just got to concentrate on that while we already had a control scheme that worked and felt great from the start. So I feel like we kind of lucked into being at the right place at the right time and that we had just the right game and just the right assets to be a good fit and put us in a position to pull a really solid title together for launch.
[00:01:45.378] Kent Bye: So yeah maybe describe to me if there's a little bit of a hybrid going on here versus like a tower defense where you may have more strategic things but you're also kind of doing a little bit more dynamic gameplay combat as well with kind of a main protagonist that you are controlling who can both have walk around but also fly around.
[00:02:03.242] James Green: Yeah, for sure. And that just harkens back to a game I loved from my childhood called Herzog's Wye, which I credit as the original grandfather of all RTS games, even predating Dune. It was a solved thing how to do a gamepad RTS, you know, 20, maybe it's getting close to 30 years ago now. Where you had this guy fly around as a jet and he could pick up tanks and give them orders and tell them where to go and build new units and then he dropped down as a robot and blow things up and I just thought it was the greatest thing ever. I remember I rented this game and I had to turn it back in so I skipped school. I faked six so I could stay home and play the game more before I had to turn it back in. I was in love with it. It was just such a magical experience to me. And looking back, the game was actually reviewed terribly. Nobody knew what it was, because it was an RTS before RTSs existed. But it left its impression on me, and I've always wanted to bring it back as I've become a game developer and kept questioning. Why are gamepad RTS is not a thing and you know we started our little company and started working on this game on our own and you know it's been a long road to bring it to market and have people realize what we've been doing and I think VR is a perfect flashpoint for this if people turn around and they're shocked like when they play it they're like I just played an RTS with a gamepad. How does that work? How did you just come up with this? It's like, well, it's been banging around in my head for decades now, and then maybe at least a decade, seriously thinking as a developer how to make it. And then the past four years, we've been making versions of AirMech, and then this VR version, which we call AirMech Command. Sort of the culmination of that and it's no accident and it didn't just come out of thin air But if it's the first time you've heard of Aramek, it's great I love that people are able to experience this and see that you can have an actual Gameplay experience that you can play for hours I mean all of our testing revolves around having a comfortable experience for people so that they play the game for an indefinite amount of time like as long as you want to play the game and you can play it and you move on when you've had a fill of that game and you feel satisfied and you want to do something else instead of, oh, my eyes hurt, oh, my head hurts, oh, my stomach hurts. Like that's the worst thing for me. And I think that gaming is going to become a thing in VR. It needs to be that comfortable experience on parity with playing a game on your couch. It's just super important to me. And I know we've got a ton of different experiences that you're going to see here at launch. And I'm just really proud to be able to show up with something I can point at and say,
[00:04:32.065] Kent Bye: You can play this for as long as you want So talk a bit about the different decisions and trade-offs that a player will have to make in the course of playing the game
[00:04:41.232] James Green: So specifically for Air Mech, and this applies both to VR and the normal game, you're both playing an action game. You've got the twin stick shooter, which it feels fun to play with. You're either on the front lines blowing up units, or you're building like a large army and a mixture of like, how many artillery pieces do I put next to these repair units? And then I'm going to build this super tank, which I'm going to hold back and wait until the enemy's distracted. So you're playing this tactical game in your mind on top of the action game. And you can either do both of that, and then you're a really strong 1v1 player, you can just do anything you want. But we find a lot of people like to play co-op and specialize. Be like, I like to blow stuff up, so I'm gonna contain and handle the enemy and harass them and distract them. Well, you fall back, and you're ferrying the units forward, and you're building up these armies. Because to me, it's super satisfying to watch these massive armies clash against one another, which you don't see so much with new players playing, because you're still trying to get the basics. You're building units. You're understanding what the game is all about. And that's fine, and that's fun. And especially in VR, because you can lean in, and I just get lost looking at the tanks and stuff. But when you progress past that, and you realize, oh, there's an actual serious game here, it becomes real war. Like, this supports you being all the way zoomed out and having, you know, 200 units, like, rolling across the battlefield, like, just laying waste to things, and they're just blowing up and missiles firing everywhere. And I just get giddy watching it, because it's a great, fun experience. I mean, I can do that in StarCraft as well. You know, we love our RTS games, and you imagine what this battle is like. But in VR, you can see it, like you can really take it all in because it's out in front of you. And I go back again to things from my childhood, like Warhammer 40k tabletop games, like it's static, but you have this imagination of what it would be like if it all came to life. And here, it's all come to life. And that's why I just love it. It puts a smile on my face. And I love watching other people get to that point and watching it, saying, oh, this is just so fun. We have even a spectator mode built into the game so that before you're at that point where you're doing these 200-unit smash-em-up battles, you can watch the best players in the world play against one another and just in awe at what they're doing and these things unfolding in front of you. It's a ton of fun. I think it's just a great experience.
[00:07:02.249] Kent Bye: And so yeah, it doesn't seem like that you could do one player versus another player. And so talk a bit about how it feels different from playing against the AI that you have for a single player versus doing a multiplayer.
[00:07:14.463] James Green: To me, it just switches gears totally. Like playing as the AI, I feel is more just a thinking game because it plays quite well. But I understand how it plays. And so as soon as you understand any system, and of course, your team is like AlphaGo and everything right now, you understand how something ticks, then it's just, how can I exploit that and work against it? And it's great for training and getting yourself up to speed, understanding the basics of the game. But when you then make the jump to playing as a human, to me, it's like seeing a wild animal in the corner. honestly do not know what that person is going to do. And there's something thrilling and terrifying about that at the same time. I've always found myself gravitated towards these class-based, team-based games because it's the perfect mixture of like, well, there's a combination of elements here of like, what classes does this partner? What could they potentially do to us? What could I use to my advantage about them? I know that they're good at these things and they're also bad at these other things. And then how do they execute them as players? Because again, I treat it like a wild animal. Like that's a wolf and a tiger. And how is that wolf and tiger going to come at me? Because it's different each time. Like I go from a relaxed understanding of the game and be like, okay, I'll build this and that. It's kind of a Zen-like experience to just, you know, play either with survival or skirmish against the AI. to I can feel my ears get red and my pulse quicken because I'm terrified of losing against somebody new. Because it could be a new player who doesn't know what they're doing, but it also could be one of those top players. There's that moment of anticipation when you don't really know how they're going to come at you. And it's exciting and thrilling. And I'm glad we have that. And then we also have players who like to stay away from it. They just watch from the sidelines. And that's fine, too. To me, it's a little bit like watching professional sports, for example. I can muck around and play a little basketball. I mean, I'm terrible. I'm never going to play in the NBA or anything. It doesn't mean I can't enjoy playing basketball. But I can also enjoy watching it. Like, you know, we watch sports that we're never going to play at that level, but it's thrilling to watch good people play against one another. That's why I think the spectation side of it is super useful, both from just learning how to play the game, like, oh, I didn't know I could use that mech with that unit and do that. That's really good. I'm going to use that next time. Just in awe of, man, these guys are great, and I love watching them.
[00:09:35.006] Kent Bye: Yeah, it seems like you have a good range of being able to have different types of views in the game where you're able to kind of zoom out and see the full scale of everything, but everything's really tiny, you can't really see, but you may be able to see a larger view in terms of strategically what's happening, and then you can kind of zoom in to see a little bit more of the tactics. So yeah, as a spectator, what kind of views do they have? Do they have the same types of views and perspectives that a single player might have?
[00:10:00.574] James Green: They currently have the same views, because you can, as you say, zoom out really far and get a really wide view of the battlefield, but it's only useful to a certain degree. So if you move yourself to the center, So yeah, the difference here is that you're able to also offset the camera as a spectator, so you can't zoom out any further or in any more, but you can also change that offset. So you can go to the middle of the map, zoom all the way out, and see both enemy forts, I believe in every map. So you can effectively see the entire map. And if you know what's going on, if you know the game well enough, you could spot, even just based on the movement of units, what they are and get a good understanding. But it's likely you're going to want to zoom in on an area and see exactly what's going on. So that's sort of, I'm going to take a step back and look at it all, and then I'm going to drill down and see what's actually going on here. And it's your choice of what to do. Being able to do that in VR is so, it's so easy to pick up information. I mean, as you were playing in VR the whole time, you didn't get a chance to look back and see what you're seeing on the screen. When I look at somebody playing on the screen, I'm like, how can they see anything? Because it looks small. Like when you look at something on a 2D screen, your size is thrown off. Whereas you're in VR, something can technically be only a few pixels tall, but because it's in line with what your brain expects, it doesn't feel small. You don't describe it as small. You understand you were following it from when it was a different size. But it's a really interesting sensation, and we're just learning about this as developers and how we can use it to our advantage.
[00:11:27.516] Kent Bye: What's one of your most vivid memories or favorite stories of playing Air Mac?
[00:11:33.033] James Green: Ah, playing Air Mech, there's many stages of it. First it was when it was working as a basic game, getting that core mechanic down of like, I can pick this up and I can drop it down. Just that tactile first baby steps of being able to interact with your army, because I have been a huge fan of RTS games since they've been around. But they always feel kind of detached. And you feel powerful. Yes, I can make these units do whatever. But being able to literally fly in there and grab a unit and move it somewhere else, I just thought was so magic. I don't know why more games don't do that. Because it's just it feels like very toy-like and very back to my childhood. I want this GI Joe guy to go over here and do this. And I thought that was a magic moment for me in the development of the game. Getting the feel of the gamepad and the twin stick shooting, because that was an entirely new thing. How do you integrate what I love from Geometry Wars and mash it up with an RTS? People thought I was crazy multiple, multiple stages as we're going through this. And it isn't until we come to VR that we have these magic moments that we aren't even experiencing ourselves. My favorite moments in VR is when I sit other people down and just watch them smile. Like they get it and they look up, they look down, they look around and they just start smiling and they're giddy because it's just cool. They're like little toys come to life. It's novel and new and people are like, oh, what are you going to do with VR? There's all these things you can explore and do. I think starting simpler in some ways is totally fine for VR because everything is new again. So like don't overthink VR too much. It's like just put it in VR and then go from there. Don't start throwing things in their face and like, oh, let's like Dolby 3D, like, you know, fly things into their eyes and stuff. Like, no, no, just you put a cube in front of somebody in VR and let them move their head around it and look at it. It's cool. Like a cube is cool again. So we're We're all the way back to square one, where it's cool just to look at stuff again. Because you can show me anything on a flat screen. I mean, look at Uncharted 4. It's gorgeous. It's amazing looking. But on a 2D screen, the average people are like, eh, yeah, it's better than Uncharted 3, I guess. It's very iterative. VR is just the first new thing we've had forever, to me. So I'm just excited to be doing stuff in it.
[00:13:50.697] Kent Bye: So what do you want to experience in VR, then?
[00:13:54.060] James Green: Experience as a gamer? I'm looking forward to just seeing... I like the toy aesthetic. I guess I'm biased. I like seeing things where I'm able to look down and I can see my character and look around him. And maybe that sounds dumb or too simple, but I love just being able to inspect things more and get a good look at them. I like to appreciate the craft of things and how they're built, and VR is the perfect way to experience that. I'm more looking forward to those slower-paced type things than the overly exciting games that are just throwing everything in your face. It's like, no, no, I want to actually slow down and look at this stuff more because it's, like I said, it's all new again. So we're starting from square one. Or maybe it's because I'm old. I don't know. I just want to take it slow and enjoy the view.
[00:14:40.865] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you see as kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:14:48.067] James Green: I only know enough that the future VR is going to be well beyond what we can imagine. I see this first few generations of stuff as just very simplistic. Like people have these wishes of they want to recreate the holodeck or they want to play Oblivion or play Fallout 4 or play these experiences they already know in VR. oh I've done this and seen this and this other game or sci-fi movie did this so let's do that and that's fine that's okay for a first-generation thing but I think that's very short-sighted like even Ready Player One I mean it's an interesting book it's a nice thought exercise it takes you through things but to me everything in there you know it came from some other sci-fi source or some fantasy source like there was really nothing novel and interesting I see a few generations into this, the kids that are just getting into VR now, they're not going to have these same preconceptions that we do about what they want to do. They're going to be inventing foreign 5D experiences that we won't be able to handle. Our brains won't be wired for it. They'll be able to build generations of experiences to consume data in ways that we can't even Think of like I can't really understand how a wormhole works or you know a gravity well works I know there's things and I could read a book about it and fine and I could make a VR application that shows me like Einstein's theory and how the gravity warps around the Sun and I believe that that could catch me up and get me some new knowledge and But when you've got five-year-olds that you can show that stuff to, and then they're like, now what? What next? You know, what is that generation that we can give them this information so fast and so quick through VR education that, you know, where are they going to do when they're like 10 years old, 15 year old, 20 years old? They'll be able to process and digest information in ways that we didn't have that opportunity growing up. And then that'll provide a foundation for them to make stuff that will make us be the old people of like, I can't work my iPhone. That's going to be us with like, I don't know this VR. It's, I don't know. So I, I look forward to that for the future of VR and the future of humanity. And I'm not looking forward to it because I'm going to be that old guy at some point that doesn't get it.
[00:16:59.150] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say?
[00:17:05.049] James Green: Just that I'm giddy and excited for VR. I actually started playing around with VR back in my college days, like 20 years ago, and everybody felt that VR was coming. Actually, this is a really interesting and important part of what a lot of developers I know that are doing VR stuff right now. We were on the threshold of VR a couple decades ago. You know, the eyeglasses and stuff, there was this sort of push for consumer VR. And, you know, people were hooking up Dark Forces, the game, to like their crude VR stuff. And it's like, yeah, it's coming. It's almost there. But then the market just didn't materialize. The hardware was bad. The software was bad. and it just crashed and burned. And then it didn't even progress the way everything else did. It just went dormant and it shut down. And that's why everybody's shocked that the hardware has caught up so fast. And it's like, oh, the hardware is here. The hardware is good. Now we've got to make software. And then also having that fear of like, if this is not a good launch, like if we create a bad impression, if consumers are scared away from this new generation of VR, it could have a very long-term damaging effect on VR. So a lot of people that I know at Oculus and other software companies making games, like we all know in our hearts how important this is. to launch on a good footing and that's why I personally believe in Oculus' approach of a heavily curated experience. They are brutal about enforcing performance standards and the whole Oculus Ready program and I know that's not a popular thing with the days of like Like, let's get away from curation. Just let every developer do whatever they want. And I understand that. But I also understand from VR that it's so important to have people have a good initial experience for the future of VR and the future of the craft. So we're all on pins and needles, hoping that this is going to be a good reception and a good launch for VR, because it means a lot for the future.
[00:18:59.002] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thank you so much. Sure. Thank you. 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.
