Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is a cooperative party game with one person is in VR who has to defuse a bomb, but has to be instructed by friends outside of VR who reading a paper manual based upon the descriptions provided by the other player. They two or more players have to communicate with each other to describe the bomb in order to know which section of the instructions to read in order to diffuse it.
I think that Keep Talking has the potential to be a breakout, VR party game experience that helps introduce VR to the mainstream. After hearing developer Ben Kane talk about how people have been reacting to it, then I think it has the potential to really take off. It’s certainly built up a lot buzz in the VR community.
It was developed as a part of the 2014 Global Game Jam, and the developers noticed that there would be a crowd of people that formed around someone having a VR experience. This inspired the developers to create a game that would allow the crowd to play a game with whomever was in VR.
Ben talks about the gameplay mechanics of both the VR bomb diffusing experience as well as reading the instructions. The goal was to have interaction be the key component in this game design. They focused on fostering interesting and silly communication because they needed to have a reason for the players to talk to each other. If either side goes silent, then something has gone seriously wrong.
Part of the gameplay is to be able to isolate which portion of the puzzle that they’re working on. The best strategy is to identify the puzzles, and then work through them sequentially. It is possible to do them in parallel with a large enough team reading through separate sections of the manual, but they found that the most efficient and effective approach is to maintain consistent and granular communication with each other.
Space Team is collaborative game where there’s synchronous real-time communication, and sometimes the first rounds of Keep Talking gameplay of new teams resembles Space Team. As people get more experienced, then they start to develop more sophisticated strategies and become efficient at communicating.
They found that the difficulty in communicating the visual concepts was difficult enough to avoid having to resort to misdirection or tricks within the instructions.
He talks about all of the new puzzles, pacing events and other gameplay elements that they’ve been adding since the game jam back in January 2014.
They’ve also designed the levels so that it’s virtually impossible for someone to diffuse the bomb by themselves because of the procedurally-generated and random nature of each bomb as well as each set of rules. It’s even hard for the developers to diffuse the bomb in the most hardest settings.
Ben shares some Insights from watching people play it, as well as the emotions that people get from it. It was also surprising to see the parent and child relationships, and it’s interesting to hear about strangers diffusing a bomb together.
People laugh a lot to cope with the stress. Even if they fail miserably at being able to diffuse the bomb, people still have so much fun that they’ll often line up to play it again.
They originally used the Razer Hydras to diffuse the bombs in the game jam, but they’ve simplified the game controls so that they don’t need to use motion controllers.
Finally, Ben talks about how they’ve been sustaining themselves while they’re working on for more than six months, and that in the end they’re happy to break even and gain a lot of experience in creating a VR game.
It was also recently announced that Keep Talking will be coming out for Gear VR.
Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:12.157] Ben Kane: My name is Ben Kane. I'm part of the team working on Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. It's a cooperative sort of party game for VR. And the idea is that one player in VR has to defuse a randomly generated time bomb, but they have no idea what they're doing. And instead, they have to rely on their friends in the real world who have this paper manual, and that describes how to diffuse all sorts of things, but they can't see the bomb. So it's up to both sides to talk back and forth, try to identify what sort of puzzles are on the bomb, what color wires there are, and get the diffuser those instructions before time runs out.
[00:00:44.547] Kent Bye: I see. And so there's a lot of communication in terms of what to do next, I guess. You know, there's a video that is out there from the Global Game Jam that this was a part of back in January. And so maybe talk about the process of how this game came about.
[00:00:59.312] Ben Kane: Sure, yeah, the Global Game Jam was absolutely where this idea came from, and it was honestly because we had brought, like we bought DK1 dev kits a long time ago, and we had done kind of nothing with them, so we took them to this Global Game Jam just with the intention of making something, no matter what it was. And while we were trying to come up with something, other developers came by and they were like, can we try out the roller coaster while you're not using your dev kits? And we were like, yeah, sure, go ahead. And pretty soon this crowd formed of people watching someone play this virtual reality roller coaster. And we looked at that situation. We saw a crowd of people watching one person do something. And we figured, let's make a game where that crowd can be playing the same game as the person in VR, somehow. And since the theme of the Game Jam was about different perspectives of the same information, it made it pretty easy to come up with scenarios where each group had differing information, and then from there, bomb defusal came up pretty quickly.
[00:01:55.283] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think the prompt was something along the lines of, you don't see the things as they are, you see things as you are, or something along those lines.
[00:02:04.677] Ben Kane: Yeah, we don't see things as they are, we see them as we are. Something like that. No one could remember it and people interpret it fairly loosely, I think.
[00:02:12.601] Kent Bye: And so, talk a bit about the gameplay mechanics in terms of, you know, designing this game because you're doing the virtual reality but you're also having to design the instruction manual for the people in reality for how they're going to actually interact.
[00:02:26.330] Ben Kane: Yeah, the interaction is really the key part of it. It's fairly straightforward to make puzzles that are difficult for either side to solve. We can put a heavy emphasis on the experts having to read through tons of information, but that actually doesn't promote interesting gameplay. So instead we try to focus on fostering interesting and silly communication. So we try to make sure that both the diffuser in VR and the experts with the manual have reasons to talk to each other. So whether it's like something that's multi-staged or maybe they need to describe information as you go, really you want to make it so that there's a reason for each side to keep talking and if either side goes silent, like usually something's gone wrong. Yeah, basically we need to keep puzzles interesting for the group to play rather than just one side.
[00:03:15.318] Kent Bye: And so how do you do that in terms of, are the people who can see the bomb supposed to just start describing what they're seeing and then, you know, at the same time, are the people reading the instructions trying to figure out which portion of the instruction manual to read? Like, how do they know which part to kind of dive into?
[00:03:31.916] Ben Kane: Yeah, functionally they really need to isolate which puzzles they're supposed to be working on. The bomb is divided into sort of individual modules that can be solved independently. But if the diffuser just starts listing everything they see, then the experts are going to be completely overwhelmed and it's actually a really poor strategy whenever we see players do that. So the best tactic is to kind of identify which puzzles are on the bomb and then the experts can start to develop an approach they want to take. If it's a large group of experts sometimes dividing and conquering is actually practical and you can get the diffuser to describe one panel in its entirety and then the rest of the group moves on to something else and then you just try to solve things like in parallel. For the most part though you do need to maintain that constant line of communication so that A defuser doesn't run off and start describing too much, or they're left hanging, describing too little. Really, the best teams are the ones that keep talking in little amounts and go back and forth. Interesting, interesting.
[00:04:33.628] Kent Bye: Yeah, it kind of reminds me of that cooperative mobile game called Space Team when people are kind of like looking at their phones and they have to, you know, say, oh, disable the flanger or set this dial to four or something like that. They kind of have to talk over each other at the same time. But this is, it sounds like more of a interactive, like they're trying to solve one isolated puzzle at once rather than sort of talking over each other. But that same type of cooperative energy where they need to be communicating with each other.
[00:05:02.660] Ben Kane: Yeah, definitely people's first few rounds of the game tend to resemble Space Team a bit more, where they really aren't sure what they should be saying, and there's a lot more yelling over top of each other. What's interesting is that as people get more and more experienced with the game, they actually do start developing strategies, and they can become more skilled at the game without necessarily mastering puzzles on their own. Like, we've specifically tried to design the puzzle so that one side can't simply memorize the relevant portion of the manual and do away with the experts altogether. But you can, as a team, become sort of efficient at knowing what you need to communicate. And at that point, it becomes a matter of, well, how many of these things can you do in parallel? How high can you crank up the difficulty and still get this done in a short amount of time?
[00:05:47.947] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think one thing that was interesting that I read about your commentary in terms of doing the game was that you had designed all these super advanced components within the instruction manual, but you found that when it got down to it, people were very happy with the very basic and simple approaches for it.
[00:06:06.046] Ben Kane: Yeah, our original Game Jam ideas, before we ever had anyone playing any of these concepts, were much more sort of mean-spirited than the final results. Like, we had ideas where the manual would have misdirections, or like scribbles, or redacted segments, or just tricks for the player to trip up on. And it turns out all of those things, well, first of all, feel really unfair, but are also totally unnecessary. Because just the difficulty in communicating these visual concepts to people who can't see what you see is enough of a barrier that you get this sort of interesting communication happening anyway. You really don't need to try to forcefully trip up players.
[00:06:48.065] Kent Bye: And so what has happened since the game jam in January then?
[00:06:51.493] Ben Kane: So over the past five or six months or so, we've started working on this game full time. So there's three of us working on it, basically five days a week. And we've expanded the available puzzles from the original two, I believe, in the game jam to something more like 15. We also have a different variety of like difficulty modes. There are more than just standard puzzles. We have these things called needy modules, which can't actually be solved and they're used to put the onus more on the diffusers, so that they can't focus on one task at a time. We have other pacing events. If players are doing too well, we can shut off the lights on them, or throw an alarm clock in their face, stuff like that. And one of the biggest recent additions was that we started contracting out some artwork, so our game no longer looks terrible. It's been a really big improvement. And then there have been some other things, like we've started working with the Oculus DK2 kit, so we have positional tracking in there now. That's another big addition.
[00:07:50.023] Kent Bye: And so as one of the programmers and developers of this game, can you go in and start to just diffuse the bomb by yourself?
[00:07:58.049] Ben Kane: We get asked that a lot. And thankfully, the answer is no, actually. We often test our game before running any sort of demo. So people might come by and see just two of us developers trying the absolute hardest bomb and just seeing if we can get through it. and most of the time we simply can't. As far as like trying to do it on your own, the manual is just so dense with information that even though we quite literally wrote it, we still don't know everything that's in it, and that's pretty refreshing because we're good at the game in that we're efficient at communicating, but we haven't mastered the game in that we don't need to communicate anymore, and I don't think it's really possible to do that.
[00:08:37.456] Kent Bye: Wow, that's really interesting. So even if somebody memorized the manual, which I guess would be just too much information to really go through, then maybe. But it sounds like you've sort of designed it so that communication is an essential component of it.
[00:08:50.810] Ben Kane: Yeah, we have taken this one step further. Whenever you run a round of the game, it's procedurally generated, sort of the layout of the bomb. But the rules that the bomb obeys are actually also procedurally generated. So if anyone ever did memorize the manual, it is in theory possible that we could just generate a new manual and then they wouldn't know any of it again. So we do have that as a backup, although so far that hasn't proven anywhere near necessary.
[00:09:19.225] Kent Bye: And so talk about what's it like to sort of take this into a party situation and watch people play it, the type of energy that it generates and what kind of experiences people have when they actually play it.
[00:09:28.968] Ben Kane: It's great fun watching new groups of people play this game. The biggest thing that we've seen recently was at conventions like PAX and Gen Con where we would have like new groups of people rotating through and experiencing it for the first time and just seeing round after round the same sort of ideal tense scenarios, the laughter, sometimes just like thinly veiled anger between participants. It's just fun to see all of that stuff and we see things happen again and again like children playing with their parents, which is not a scenario we had envisioned before, but it actually comes up fairly often in these sort of convention scenarios. And kids are incredible at reading the manual very meticulously. They don't skip anything. and their parents are often not great at manipulating video games. And that creates an interesting dynamic where the kids know exactly what to do and the parents can't just execute properly. Those sorts of arguments are a lot of fun. And the other big one is when we pair up people who have just met. Like they will shake hands and then diffuse a bomb together and they'll be laughing all the way. They might explode. It doesn't matter. Everyone has a good time. It's just great to see.
[00:10:40.306] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'd imagine if you're diffusing a bomb that it's going to be creating quite a bit of tension and stress in people and you know what happens in people's bodies and how they are able to sort of move that stress through.
[00:10:52.873] Ben Kane: Yeah, there's some people that just really start laughing as a coping mechanism. It's fantastic to see people just fail miserably at the game, and as exhibitors we'll be watching this and we don't want to interrupt, but we see people, what we think, just not grasping the concept at all. They'll make lots of mistakes, their experts will be arguing. And at the end of it, they'll just be sweating, but they'll be smiling. And they had a good time anyway, and they'll line up again right away. It's just sort of mind-boggling. We had one case where we actually thought our game had made someone, like, incredibly ill. Like, he came out of it just looking terrible. But it turned out he felt fine. He was just so stressed out because they had solved the bomb with, like, five seconds left or something. And it had just gotten to him at a physical level.
[00:11:41.818] Kent Bye: Yeah, I wonder if people who have susceptibility to PTSD or post-traumatic stress disorder, if this is sort of putting them in a situation that is just going to not be healthy for some people.
[00:11:53.630] Ben Kane: Yeah, I can imagine that probably not being a good situation for them. Definitely the immersion of VR can help make this feel a lot more real than it is. So yeah, that's probably not something I'd recommend.
[00:12:06.675] Kent Bye: In the Game Jam, you had the Razer Hydra as a way of input control for the person defusing the bomb to actually manipulate this box and look around it. With this sort of uncertainty as to what the standard input controls are going to be, how have you addressed what the user interaction is for the person that's defusing the bomb?
[00:12:25.643] Ben Kane: The biggest way we've addressed it is really to simplify things as much as possible. We found that when we were demoing the game for people, it was a big obstruction if they needed to lift off the headset to try to figure out which buttons they needed to push, especially if they weren't familiar with a controller to begin with. So we really tried to make the controls intuitive enough that you wouldn't need to remember how do I cut a wire differently from how do I flick a switch or If I need to do something that my expert is asking me to do, I need that to be simple enough that I don't actually think about the physical buttons I need to push. So we stepped away from motion controls for the time being. We're just using a 360 gamepad. And you really just need one thumb stick to control what you're currently selecting. You push A to cut wires or select anything. It's all just one contact-sensitive button. And then you can spin the bomb with the right thumb stick. And really, that's all there is to it.
[00:13:22.045] Kent Bye: And when it comes to, you know, just diving in and working on this full time, how have you been able to sustain a work on this? Is this something that you had fundraising that you were able to raise or you're just sort of going out on your own and hoping for the best when it's launched?
[00:13:36.886] Ben Kane: We're definitely going at it on our own right now. I suppose a passion project at the moment. I'm an indie developer, so I have some catalog titles that are still keeping me going. And the other guys are also software developers. They've got some existing products out there that kind of fund them through this. Having said that, we will probably need to do some sort of fundraising just to get us to the finish line. As we get closer and closer to launch, we're noticing that our expenses go up and up, and now that we've been working on it for about six months, it starts to wear on you. But for the most part, we just are having a lot of fun with the project, and we believe it has at least some potential. At least to break even is our hope. We're really not hoping to get much more out of this than just a good experience, like making the game, taking it places, and showing it to people.
[00:14:27.518] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you see as the ultimate potential for what virtual reality could provide?
[00:14:33.460] Ben Kane: Ooh, ultimate potential. That's a very good question. I really enjoy, I mean it gets said a lot, but the sense of presence that is offered by VR is something that I feel still has a lot of potential for people to not necessarily exploit, but at least explore. I'm really interested in the new gameplay that can come out of it. It doesn't necessarily have to be action oriented. I think it's interesting that our game has very little in the way of actual inputs that you need to make, and yet there's still an interesting game that arises from it. In the same vein, I think there are a lot of exploration games that are going to have huge potential, and that'll probably extend outside of it to things like architectural visualization. Beyond that, I don't really know. I just hope that there is more unique stuff like that that just isn't straight adaptations of existing gameplay.
[00:15:28.164] Kent Bye: Great. Well, thank you so much.
[00:15:30.045] Ben Kane: Thanks a lot. Thanks for this opportunity.
