Part of the challenge of creating a first-person perspective game in VR is that there are limited locomotion options for moving around in VR in a way that’s comfortable for most people. Damaged Core is a Oculus Rift launch title that uses a unique and very effective locomotion method where you move between different first-person robots as well as third-person security cameras. This ends up being a very comfortable way to provide a lot more agency in movement than most other survival wave VR shooters, and it also has a lot of elegance in that it’d actually be possible to do in a world of AI-driven robot assassins. You can’t hack into every robot enemy, and so you have to strategically move around a battlefield in the right order.
I caught up with High Voltage Software’s creative director Eric Nofsinger at the Oculus Game Day event during GDC to learn more about their R&D into VR locomotion, FPS game design strategies, and how they were able to make a scoping feature work despite it being against what Oculus recommends as a best practice.
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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. My name is Eric Knopfsinger. I'm Chief Creative Officer at High Voltage Software, and we're working on some titles that we're pretty excited about on the Oculus Rift. Great, so tell me a bit about some of the titles that you have releasing here. Well, we have a title called Dragonfront, which is a collectible card game with a miniatures component. And we have a game called DamageCore, which is an original first-person shooter where you transfer your consciousness from body to body. Great. So yeah, I guess one of the big things that's a challenge in VR is locomotion. So talk about some of the unique approaches that you have to locomotion here in DamageCore. Well, one of the first things we started doing was a ton of R&D into what felt comfortable. Not just for the locomotion, but also even targeting, using reticules, things like that that you sort of take for granted in traditional first-person shooters. So we had to question everything about what we were doing with motion. We looked at by transferring from body to body and then rooting each one in place, quickly we found that you would have the feel of freedom of movement but without that sense of nausea that people get with dual stick movement techniques. Yeah, it was very unique in the sense of being able to have both either other robots that you can kind of hack into and take over their control, but also cameras to be able to go back and either transfer and overlook parts, but also as a safe place to go to. So talk a bit about the strategy that people may need to use as they are kind of jumping back and forth between cameras and armed robots. Well, that's definitely going to be a big part of how people will play, or at least to be able to play well, is deciding which things to go into first, you know, to be able to kind of get a bird's eye view of the play space to be able to get a lay of the land and where they should hop into from the cameras. Jumping often is typically a good thing as opposed to waiting until you're sort of in last gasp to then frantically kind of hop to the next one. You know, we think that what you saw in that first little sliver is definitely representative of how the game will aesthetically look and is representative of how some of the game will play, but certainly we have areas of the game that have much, much bigger levels that allow you to hop along rooftops and to do more stealthy kind of gameplay. We have a lot of different scale robots. You saw some of the more humanoid sized ones. We have big giant 15 meter sentries that overlook everything that were really intimidating when you first encounter them and then they have a shield mechanic on them that you have to knock out to then go into them. which is pretty cool. And then you get a different vantage point. We have enemies that hover and fly over the battlefield. We have jammers that jump over you. It gives you a great sense of different kinds of enemies that you can not only be, but, you know, figuring out which order you kind of want to take them out in order to have the best outcome. Yeah, one of the really interesting mechanics that you have as well as the scope being able to really zoom in and to get a much closer view and get some precise shots as if you were kind of a sniper. Maybe you could talk a bit about the work that you had to do in order to do that. Oh yeah, that was a tremendous challenge. Doing a scope, and even reticule in general, is a lot trickier than you might think. I mean, a traditional shooter, you just kind of put an X in the center of the screen and call it a day. With VR, especially when you're doing stereoscopic, you have to put things positionally in space, so it competes for your focus. Where you're looking in 3D space is problematic. So actually what we do is on the reticule we're ray casting out to the point that you're aiming at and it's stopping there and then we're scaling it in real time so that it always looks like it's the same size to the player but it's actually scaling based off of whatever thing you're hitting and it's drawing at that distance and so you don't get that kind of cross-eyed feel. With the scope itself were shifting between a one-to-one and a three-to-one depending on how you're turning. And that also was a big consideration in comfort and making sure that people always feel comfortable when they're playing the game. Yeah, because when you start to zoom in, I know that it's actually in the Oculus' best practices to not zoom in and do that, and you're kind of doing that. And so did you find that you had to tweak some things to make it comfortable and not make people motion sick? Yeah, absolutely. Just the scope alone was more than three months of R&D. My advice to anyone making VR products is question any of your assumptions about making games and pad in a lot of time for iteration and R&D because you're going to need it. Yeah, I think it was quite an amazing effect. It had a nice feel to it, and I could feel how, you know, when you do that, you're really kind of blocking out the rest of the screen, and so if you take a choice to be precise with your shots, then you're taking a trade-off of perhaps you're going to be blindsided by other robots that are coming after you. For sure. And that's, you know, there's a risk reward there of having not only a precise shot, but we also do a damage modifier when you're in scope to give you a little bit of a carrot to, you know, when you are in there, your shots will do a bit more damage. So that's the encouraging part of it. But as you say, the, the negative and the risk reward is your periphery is limited. And so you can get hit by things around you. What are some of the other big strategic gameplay things and trade-offs that a player would have to make down the road that you really tried to build into the game as well? Well, one of the things we really wanted to incorporate was the sense of, you know, each of these robots having different weapon sets. The ones that you saw in that first level were all Gen 1 robots, so they're robots created by humans originally. As you progress in the game, we start to introduce more and more fantastic robots, and some of these are, you know, they're robots created by other robots. So the designs tend to be a lot more fantastic and bizarre. And the interesting part is figuring out how to best use those to take out other robots. So the idea of what is the best way to use this, what are strategies to sort of stack weapons. Each of these vessels have a primary and secondary fire. And being able to use these in the right order and hop into units in the right order can play a big difference in how well you do. What's some of your favorite stories of either playing the game or watching other people play the game? Oh, you know, I think we've seen a ton of really amazing things where people are, you know, there's this near down to the wire kind of last gasp moments where people are hopping and they just barely make it. We've, over the last several days having people play, it's been really great just hearing people hoot and holler and really get into it. you know, at the office. It's always a balance to get the game where you want it to be difficult but fair. It's definitely intended to be for people that like a challenge. So that's one of the things too that, you know, from a team story perspective, I mean, we love to play this game and, you know, it's something where, you know, we knew we had something when it became You kind of have to nudge people, get back to work, because you're spending more time playing it than you are making it. So that's when you know you kind of have some magic there. So it's a tricky thing where once you hit that balance right where it's just challenging enough, where people are like, F that. I'm going to keep going. I got to try this again. I got to get through this. Yeah, that sounds great. And are there going to be different difficulty levels to kind of vary depending on as you get better, you can challenge yourself more and more? Yeah, there definitely will be three modes of play. There will be easy, medium, and difficult rating. But I would say that even our normal mode is quite challenging. And finally, what do you see as kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable? Well, you know, I really think what we're on is the cusp of a new medium. I mean, I've been making games for a long time. I've worked on 95 ship titles over the last 23 years, and this is the most transformative time in games I've seen in my lifetime. It's more transformative than the advent of 3D graphics. This is going to change everything, not just games, but social interaction as a medium. It's going to change narrative. There's so much that we're learning every day, and it's just exciting to be a part of it. We're scratching the surface. This really is the start of it. I think there's a misconception that a lot of VR is an insular or singular experience and some of the things that we're finding are the most engaging things about VR are social things, things that when you're playing games with other people, to have that sense of that other person across the table or to be able to communicate with them and connect is really powerful. Great. Anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say? Well, we're just excited to get these games out there and have people playing them. We think that we've got a couple of titles that we're extremely proud of. The teams have really been killing themselves for the last year and a half on these. And we're really anxious to get people playing it and telling us what they think. Awesome. Well, thanks so much. Thank you.
[00:10:09.571] Eric Nofsinger: 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 voicesofvr.
