VR escape room games are one of the emerging genres that are particularly well-suited for the affordances of VR, and Schell games’ I Expect You to Die sets the standard for creating this type of puzzle game. I had a chance to catch up with game design director Shawn Patton at GDC in March where he shared some of the design strategies for I Expect You to Die.
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I Expect You to Die finds the sweet spot of not making it too difficult as to be impossible, but at the same time challenging enough as to not be too easy or boring. So they do expect you to die, but to also learn something new about the puzzle with each iteration. Shawn talks about their primary design considerations which included making it a comfortable VR experience, creating it within a certain budget, making sure that available objects had clear affordances and goals to be achieved, and that solving the puzzle would make the player feel clever. They have also included a number of other achievements and being able to complete a level with style so as to encourage replayability.
There is also a lot of fun narrative elements sprinkled throughout the experience, and the game has one of the more epic introductory sequences that calls back to the early days of cinema where the credits showed before the movie begins. There’s also a really great tutorial at the beginning to teach you the button combinations that you’ll need to know in order to manipulate objects within an experience. They’ve designed the experience such that you can use some of the six degree of freedom affordances of the touch controllers, but most of the gameplay is done through analog stick controllers and buttons that are also available on a gamepad or even a mouse and keyboard.
I Expect You to Die was originally released as a short demo on Oculus Share where it was the top-ranked experience for many months, and it also earned up a number of different VR industry awards. I previously interviewed Jesse Schell after winning 3 Proto Awards in 2015 as well as after winning the Vision Inspire Award at the Unity vision summit. Jesse has a lot of experience in working with virtual reality prior to the consumer renaissance of VR, and has applied a lot of insights for how to cultivate and not break presence within an experience.
I Expect You to Die is also one of the five games that’s currently included within the Oculus Touch bundle selling for $89.99.
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Music: Fatality & Summer Trip
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. My name is Kent Bye, and welcome to The Voices of VR Podcast. So with the launch of Oculus Touch, there's been a number of different buzz around different types of experiences people are checking out. And one of those that have appeared on a number of different lists has been I Expect You to Die by Jessie Schell's Schell Games. So this was an experience that had actually been released on the Oculus Share as a demo and had won a number of different awards within the VR industry. And I've also interviewed the founder of Shell Games, Joshy Shell, back in episodes 223 and 306, talking a bit about some of the design principles. And I expect you to die. But at GDC this year in March, I had a chance to talk to their game designer, Sean Patton, about some of their strategies of how to design a puzzle game for virtual reality. So we'll be talking about some of their design considerations and how to create a cross-compatible game across both the Oculus Touch controllers, a gamepad controller, as well as a mouse and keyboard. So that's what we'll be covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. But first, a quick word from our sponsor. Today's episode is brought to you by the Voices of VR Patreon campaign. The Voices of VR podcast started as a passion project, but now it's my livelihood. And so if you're enjoying the content on the Voices of VR podcast, then consider it a service to you in the wider community and send me a tip. Just a couple of dollars a month makes a huge difference, especially if everybody contributes. So donate today at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. So this interview with Sean happened at GDC this year. That was happening in San Francisco from March 14th to 18th. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:57.620] Shawn Patton: Hello, I'm Sean Patton, and I'm the design director on I Expect You to Die, a VR escape the room game from Shell Games.
[00:02:05.723] Kent Bye: Great. So I know that I Expect You to Die has been one of the top rated games on Oculus Share. So I'm just curious if you could tell me a bit about what is I Expect You to Die?
[00:02:15.031] Shawn Patton: Sure. I Expect You to Die is a game that puts you in the role of a super spy, but a super spy who's in these situations where they need to get out, right? So we started by thinking about what is comfortable for someone in VR. And we wanted to do a seated experience. And we wanted to allow something for you to still be the hero, even if you're just sitting. And if you're in the middle of a death trap, or a room that's about to kill you, or you find yourself in a tough situation, being a super spy, you can use what's around you, and you can figure out how to escape. And so that's where this idea sort of came from.
[00:02:46.154] Kent Bye: Yeah, and so talk a bit about the gameplay mechanic. Like, what is happening?
[00:02:49.877] Shawn Patton: You are in a situation, and you have an objective. In the car level, for instance, you're actually trying to steal this piece of technology and drive the car out of a plane, and somehow survive that. And so you have these telekinetic abilities, so you can move things from far away. You can manipulate things close with the touch controllers. And you basically need to figure out how to get the car started, how to overcome any booby traps you may find, and how to complete your mission.
[00:03:14.205] Kent Bye: Right, and so I know that talking to Jesse Schell, you know, Oculus had actually advised not to use a mouse and keyboard. And so they actually went against that to be able to give a little bit more extra immersion. And then now you've gone into doing a touch controller. So what was it like to go from the mouse and keyboard to now using the touch controllers?
[00:03:32.908] Shawn Patton: Yeah, so originally we had a mouse control system that we felt did provide pretty good hand presence. And we will still support that. But the touch controllers just allow so much more. You can get so much more immersed in the environment It also allows for things like two-handed things, you know, you can pull the top off a thermos or you can dual wield guns and things like that. And so one of the nice things is that you can have that hand presence in the world, but we also had to go back and design some things. We had to move some things closer. And as we designed new puzzles, we had to keep in mind the distance that you can reach and things like that. And we wanted to bring as many things close to you because things close to you in VR is really cool because you can sort of look around them and manipulate them directly with your touch controllers with your hands.
[00:04:12.302] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think being able to psychokinetically bring objects to yourself is a really good mechanic to be able to use a much larger space than you're actually moving around. So for, like, any given puzzle, like, how many different things do you have to kind of put together and figure out for an average puzzle that you're doing here?
[00:04:29.815] Shawn Patton: Well, we try to strike a balance between parallel tasks and serial tasks. So you might have to do A, B, and C to achieve puzzle one, and then you move on to puzzle two. Hopefully that reveals it or breadcrumbs to it. So we usually have three or four tiers, but each one could be comprised of two or three steps.
[00:04:51.506] Kent Bye: How long does it usually take for someone to actually solve the puzzle?
[00:04:54.827] Shawn Patton: So our first puzzle is the car and we usually see people take between 20 or 30 minutes depending on their sort of, you know, how used to VR in general are they going into it. Some of the harder levels we see 35-40 minute play times for naive people. And the nice thing is every time you fail or you die, we do expect you to die after all, The hope is that you had fun doing it, you learned something about the puzzle from that death, and so you get further the next time. And we also have some things like what we call spy mementos, which are basically achievements. So you can replay a puzzle and try to collect all six of those for each puzzle, too.
[00:05:29.762] Kent Bye: And so what has been some of your experiences here at the Oculus Game Days? Because I'm sure that there's been some people who have had a lot of experience in it and some people who have never seen it at all.
[00:05:39.343] Shawn Patton: Yeah, it's definitely a mix. So there's six or so touch experiences here. And so some people come to ours first, it's their first touch experience. And so they're very new to the controllers and they take a little while to get acclimated. Some people, VR is new to them entirely and VR can be very overwhelming. And, you know, we make sure that our puzzles give people time to get adjusted to VR. But then, yeah, you're right. We do see the season's veterans who are like, oh, pick this up, pick that up, toss things. They start juggling, you know, and they sort of really get into the game. And we love seeing that too. And we try to support all skill levels with our puzzles.
[00:06:08.493] Kent Bye: And so it's called, I Expect You to Die. So how many times do you expect someone to die, on average, on a given puzzle?
[00:06:14.526] Shawn Patton: I would say, on average in a given puzzle, three times. That's what I'm going to say. It's a very concrete number. It's a bold statement. But I think in general, and you know, that's part of the fun. It is possible to complete the puzzles without dying. We have given enough clues and breadcrumbs. We've actually seen at least one person has completed without dying at all. And honestly, that's great, right? Because they probably feel like a badass. But for those people who do die, and we do expect you to die, as long as you're having fun, as long as you're enjoying yourself and learning something to progress further, then we've done our jobs right.
[00:06:43.235] Kent Bye: What were some of the big design challenges that you had in doing I Expect You to Die?
[00:06:48.477] Shawn Patton: With any puzzle game, the large design challenge is what is that sweet spot, right? You have people who say, oh, this is too hard, oh, this is too easy. So when you're designing the puzzle, it's important to do a lot of playtesting, bring people in, playtest it early and often, iterate. And especially in VR, you want to see what people try to do. And so if they try to do something, we're like, oh, should that have worked? Can we support that some way? If we can't support it, can we at least acknowledge their cleverness? So for instance, people try to use the knife as a screwdriver in the car, and that's very clever. And we're like, can we support that? But it sort of interrupted some of the other flows we wanted. And also, it would make you miss a really cool moment later on. And so we're like, well, we can't really support that, but we'll acknowledge it. So we have a line of voiceover. I've seen you do many clever things with a knife, but I'm afraid turning screws won't be one of them. So we've acknowledged that you've done something clever, but we're giving you permission to move on and find a different solve. But it is finding that balance between too hard, too soft, and hopefully we've done a good job. And we had the mementos as sort of, if you're a top player, you can try to do the speed run. You can try to get every single achievement.
[00:07:50.563] Kent Bye: Yeah, for you within the office, once you've kind of already figured out all the puzzles, do you have additional things to make it even more interesting for people who have done the basic gist of a puzzle?
[00:08:02.176] Shawn Patton: I think one of the most fun that we have doing is completing the puzzle with style. So for instance, we have a cigar, we have a hat you can wear. I can tell you there's a lot of different ways to light that cigar. And some of them are more stylish than others. And some of them may give you achievements. And really, it's all about how suave, how awesome a super spy can I be. And some of that is just working on it, and getting the style, and getting the right motions down.
[00:08:28.662] Kent Bye: What's one of your favorite stories of watching someone play Expecuted Die?
[00:08:33.477] Shawn Patton: Oh man, there are a lot of favorite stories. One of the things that we see the most in the car is people who use their right foot to accelerate. And of course, we're not tracking your feet. That doesn't work. We've seen people cower from the laser. I've seen a young girl who tried it. She was touching the ceiling. Of course, there's nothing there to touch. She's moving her hand completely in the air, but she wanted to see what the ceiling texture of the car felt like. So my favorite moments are when people are so immersed, they have such presence in the scene that they lose themselves to it.
[00:09:02.195] Kent Bye: Yeah, when I talked to Jesse Schell the first time, he said that one of the reasons why you set it in a car is that we're actually very familiar with the car, and it's easier to create a sense of presence by setting it in something that we're really familiar with.
[00:09:13.720] Shawn Patton: Yeah, the first level being the car is people are familiar with it, the affordances, so if I see a steering wheel, I know I can turn it. If I see a glove box, I know I can open it. So those are the affordances that the objects lend to the player, and they're very useful. They give you intuitive things, and they give you immediate goals. If your long-term goal is to drive the car out of the plane, well, my mid-term goal is to start it. My immediate goal is to find the key. And so with the right balance of those goals, if we do our job right, people will sort of progress through the puzzle naturally. And then in the later puzzles, we put you in a little more new environment. You've got to do some more experimentation. But that's sort of how we build the puzzles.
[00:09:48.741] Kent Bye: Your presentation here at GDC, what were some of the big points that you were trying to give to the developers that were here at the conference?
[00:09:55.425] Shawn Patton: Right, so Jesse and I gave a talk not only about presence and how to maintain it and some of the breakers of presence, but also how we moved from the mouse to the touch and then ultimately how we came up with new puzzles for the game. And part of it was we examined the existing car level and we sort of picked out these five things and we're like, okay, we got it. Let's make some new levels. and we got those levels to a sort of a white box or a prototype stage, and we put people in it, and we were not getting these results. People were not having fun, and they were not seeing the same success that we had, and we're like, okay, we gotta take a step back. We ended up identifying five more qualities of a good level, a good puzzle, and by forming those into this equation, which was sort of the gist of the talk, we were able to then iterate on those and ultimately make some new ones that we feel really strongly about.
[00:10:38.460] Kent Bye: Well, I know that Jesse has the art of game design where he has different lenses where he's looking at, you know, specific things he's trying to do in each specific level. What were some of those five things that you felt make a really good VR puzzle?
[00:10:50.523] Shawn Patton: So the original five were sort of, you know, keep the player comfortable. We also have to be on budget because when you talk about a VR game, you know, able to interact with everything, bring it close to you. The tech quality of staying at 90 frames per second. And then, you know, the affordances that you're given. We want people to feel clever when they get out of it. And then we added to those, in the car, the clear goal of, I want to drive this car, we sort of fell into, right? That was a clear goal that people got. When we made some of the new puzzles, we realized we didn't have a clear goal right from the start that was right in front of you. It was sort of both literally and figuratively obscured a bit. And so we took a step back. One of his lenses is the lens of goals. And so it's like, OK, how can we make this very clear end goal, but sort of put barriers in the way that you have to move through one at a time?
[00:11:33.158] Kent Bye: What were some of the things that you found that break presence?
[00:11:35.922] Shawn Patton: Things that break presence, becoming too aware of your controls. So one of the things is touch is new to people. And so we've actually expanded upon our tutorial or our first office scene to make sure that people can get used to that before they go into the first puzzle. Other presence breakers are if you drop something and it doesn't make a sound. So you've got to really invest in your audio budget. And not only does it need to make a sound, but if you drop it on a carpet versus a wood surface, it should make different sounds. Because we're very attuned to things in real life. And if we're going to believe that you're there, you need to sort of preserve that very fragile presence bubble or immersion bubble.
[00:12:09.529] Kent Bye: So what type of things do you want to experience in VR then?
[00:12:12.625] Shawn Patton: I'm excited to experience everything in VR. I mean, I think some things translate certainly better than other things. But, wow, I just want to explore these new worlds that people are making. And being at the Game Days event, I've had a chance to go around and try, you know, hands-on, literally, with a lot of the other projects here. And it's great to talk to the other developers because they're wrestling with some of the hard problems that we're wrestling with and all the clever solutions that we're all coming up with. It's very exciting to see.
[00:12:37.445] 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?
[00:12:43.787] Shawn Patton: I think virtual reality is here to stay. I think it will enable experiences where you are in the game, right? You are the hero, and I think the social elements will be huge. I think that the broadening of the audience, this is a new experience for gamers, but it's also a very intuitive experience for new people coming into the games. I've put my friends, I've put my family, you know, we've had grandmas in there. And it's a world they've never been in. And yet at the same time, if you do the affordances right, if you do things correctly, it's an intuitive world. You can reach in. You can touch things. And I think it's going to be great for everyone.
[00:13:20.215] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say?
[00:13:24.239] Shawn Patton: I'm just really excited about the future and all the clever things that people are coming up with. I think we're on the crux of something really huge. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. You're welcome. Thanks for coming and playing the game.
[00:13:34.817] Kent Bye: So that was Sean Patton, he's a game designer from Shell Games, and he worked on I Expect You to Die. So I Expect You to Die is an escape room game, and the previous times that I had to play it were in kind of a time-bounded context, you know, I had a half hour to be able to play the game and do an interview, and often I found that I wasn't able to really dedicate the time that I needed to actually get through one of the entire puzzles. But hearing Sean say that it takes on average people, you know, anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes to get through one of the puzzles, that gave me actually a lot more expectations as to having the perseverance to be able to keep on going through all the different puzzles that you have to figure out in order to get through one of these rooms. And I think that is one of the biggest challenges for a game like this is that they don't want to make it too easy because you just go in and you do all of the experience and there's no actual challenge. And so it's actually like challenging you to actually figure out the puzzles and to think about things and to not have an experience where you're just kind of randomly doing things because that can be a little annoying of just being able to scan the room and see if you can interact with anything. So you kind of have to mix this, both being able to scan the room, but also actually thinking about the experience. And I think they did an excellent job of pulling that off. Some of the big design considerations that Sean said that they were trying to do within this experience was that they were trying to make it comfortable, do it within a certain budget, have clear affordances. So to be able to have things that are within the experience that you know that you can actually interact with, just because of your experience with those types of objects in the real world. and they wanted to make the player feel clever once they actually figured it out and having gotten through some of the puzzles I think that it's actually true you have to actually struggle and experiment and you end up dying quite a bit and that you know sometimes the goal isn't completely clear and you know you kind of have to still figure things out and experiment a little bit so I think they've achieved a pretty good balance between trying to find things that are engaging and stimulating for your brain, but also aren't so easy as that you can just whip through it. So if you're into those types of escape room type of experiences, I think this is probably one of the best ones that I've seen in VR so far. Now, their control mechanism is really interesting just because it's a little bit of the least common denominator across all the different input controls. So, what that means is that they're using an input control mechanism that can be used either on the touch controllers or a gamepad controller or a mouse and keyboard. And so what that means is that they're not really necessarily trying to invoke any type of embodied presence while you're in the experience. you know being able to actually you know have a gun in your hand to be able to shoot at different things it does actually feel very satisfying with the touch controller so i think you actually can get a deeper sense of embodied presence with some of the different interactions however most of the interactions that you're doing are using the analog control stick and the button And so you're getting around the issue of not being able to locomote around an area and be able to expand your ability to operate in larger spaces by giving you this magical telekinesis ability to use your thumb, point at objects, pull it towards you, and you're able to either push the X to float it in the air or to drop it if you let go of the trigger button. And so that mechanism, I think, is something that gamers will be able to pick up and get right away. I think non-gamers, it's actually a little bit of a button abstraction that I expect that it may be a little bit trickier for them to pick that up at first. Within I Expect You to Die, it's actually got this really great introduction sequence and tutorial. And it takes a little bit getting used to. I think that for people playing some of these games who are not used to doing some of those abstracted movements, then it's not as intuitive as to just put somebody into the experience and expect them to be able to actually kind of intuitively figure it out. You really should go through the tutorial. And once you do and you kind of figure out that mechanic, then you're able to really engage within some of the experiences. So this kind of illustrates some of the things that I was talking about in episode 480 in my op-ed where I was talking about the differences between active and embodied presence. I think that because the Vive controllers don't have easily accessible buttons, then they've kind of avoided using games that really use those buttons or combinations of buttons. And the trade-off is that you may actually get games that are encouraging natural and intuitive movements and cultivating a deeper sense of embodied presence where you're not focusing on any sort of levels of abstractions to be able to interact with your world. So there just seems to be a little bit of a trade-off here between two different types of presence. One is the embodied presence and one is the active presence. Most of the interactions are relying upon you pointing at things and then pushing a sequence of buttons to be able to exert your will within the experience with that active presence. And that's just a lot harder to do on a Vive controller. And it's just a lot more intuitive to be able to do that on a Oculus Touch controller and be able to have those types of active presence type of experiences. But the trade-off is, I think, that there's less of the embodied presence where you're actually more naturally and intuitively interacting with the experience. Now, that's just a matter of preference of being able to really focus on these types of different levels of presence. This is a puzzle game, so it's really activating your mind and having a mental presence in a certain way. But it's also, you're exerting your will and be able to actually manipulate objects within the environment using these button combinations. And because of that, it is a very satisfying and interesting experience that I think is definitely worth checking out. But just kind of noticing and pointing out that there's trade-offs between having access to buttons like that, what type of gameplay it enables, versus the type of room-scale experiences that allow you to actually move your body around in a way that actually makes you feel like you're embodied within the experience. So that's all that I have for today. I wanted to just thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do tell a friend and spread the word and become a donor to my Patreon at patreon.com slash Voices of VR.
