Thrasher is a really compelling VR game with a very satisfying and magical core game mechanic inspired by ribbon dancing. It’s the latest VR game from Brian Gibson, who designed the art and music for the VR rhythm game Thumper, as he teamed up with former Harmonix co-worker Mike Mandel via Puddle Studio. Thrasher was also partially inspired by the classic Snake video game, but in this version you’re controlling a much more abstract and artistic “space eel” entity with your hands in order to deliberately crash through crystals and avoid obstacles. There’s many power-up permutations to extend on this idea, but the main thrust of the game is that it’s just super satisfying to manipulate this space eel entity by moving a single hand around either using tracked controllers or hand tracking alone.
Thrasher is launching today on the latest Meta Quest platforms as well as on the Apple Vision Pro. Inspired by the lack of input controls on the Apple Vision Pro, they also implemented hand-tracking to the point where you can quickly twirl around your index finger as an input control to the point where it started to feel like this entity was a sort of extension of my body. I played all the way through it first on the Apple Vision Pro with just hand tracking, and then on the Quest 3 with hand-tracked controllers, and I actually preferred the way that the game feels with just hand-tracking, even though it’s technically more precise with Quest’s 6-DoF controllers. Even though it’s technically harder to play within the hand tracking mode, it just feels a bit better, especially if you prefer to play in more of a vibe-out mode than trying to climb up the leaderboards.
I was a part of the Raindance Immersive jury that awarded Thrasher with the Best Game award because it has such a novel, unique, and satisfying game feel along with a lot of depth and development as they explore this mechanic to it’s logical extreme with different power-ups, obstacles, and an increasingly difficult game progression curve. There’s even a very subtle and nuanced combination system for advanced players that is elaborated in more detail on their website with this Thrasher Gameplay Guide, or you can watch this THRASHER: “How to Win” video for more details on how it works. I played through it twice without having access to these supplemental materials, and I wasn’t able to fully figure it out. So this system is a bit cryptic and hidden from the perspective of the game design, but you can dig into more details in and experiment more on the first level.
I had a chance to catch up with Gibson and Mandel last month to talk about their journey and design process in creating Thrasher, and some of their preliminary thoughts on whether they’ll release a more relaxed vibe-out or Zen mode. Whether they decide to or not, Thrasher is certainly one of the best games that I’ve played so far on the Apple Vision Pro, and their ribbon-dance inspired mechanic is something that feels super magical and fun to play around with. It’s also a good example to discern some of the phenomenological differences in what the game feels like with controllers (and haptics) a blend of embodied movement with abstracted agency, and with just hand tracking or finger tracking and a bit more visceral embodied experience overall.
Also stay tuned for my next episode where I had a chance to chat with Creature label co-founder Doug North Cook talking about helping to produce and represent Laser Dance, Thrasher, and their flagship mixed reality game of Starship Home.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. It's a podcast that looks to the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So in today's episode, I'm really excited to dive into the brand new game called Thrasher, which is by Brian Gibson, who's the artist and composer behind Thumper, which is a very popular rhythm game within VR. And then also Mike Mandel, who is doing a lot of the programming, and they actually met when they were working on different music games at Harmonix. And now they're a part of the indie studio called Puddle Studio. So Thrasher has this really incredible core mechanic of what this game feels like. It's just a lot of fun. So I originally played this game on the Apple Vision Pro and then went to the Quest platform. There's something just magical of being able to just kind of wiggle your finger around in order to control this space easily. eel like creature it's sort of like a snake like entity but it's really inspired by ribbon dance and taking these sticks that have a ribbon on the end of it and it kind of has that feel where you're moving your hand and there's a little bit of a delay but you have this snake like space eel creature that's moving around the whole object is to crash through the crystals that are there they're either a circle lines or like series of lines and grids and you're trying to avoid these threats that are taking away your time So it's a pretty simple mechanic, easy to pick up, quick to learn, but there's also all sorts of advanced combinations that we dive into a little bit here throughout the conversation. When I played through it, I just played through straight through, wasn't trying to get like the super high score or anything, but there's kind of like a timed amount that you have to complete each of the different stages and levels and waves. And if you don't get it through that, then it kind of defaults to infinity mode. So you're able to continue to progress and go through each of the stages, but still have lots of room to be able to compete and go for the leaderboards. I would highly, highly recommend consider playing this game with hand tracking first. and then try to eventually go through and play with the controllers. If you have an Apple Vision Pro, highly, highly recommend checking out this game because I think they're able to actually create an input mechanic that is able to handle this lower refresh rate that you might have on the Apple Vision Pro that's built into the mechanic of how you're moving your hand around and have this delay. It just has a really magical feel. So definitely check it out with either the Apple Vision Pro if you have one or on hand tracking on Quest. And then I'd recommend checking out with the controller after that because you will be able to have more control. So we'll be diving into all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Mike and Brian happened on Wednesday, June 26th, 2024. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:50.046] Brian Gibson: I'm Brian Gibson, and obviously working with Mike on Thrasher right now. And before that, I did Thumper, which was also a 2D first game, but it's a VR game as well. And before that, I did a little bit of prototyping with Mike on Harmonix Music VR at Harmonix. I mean, we had worked together on various projects there, but that's how we got to know each other.
[00:03:15.094] Mike Mandel: Cool. I'm Mike Mandel, and I'm the other half of the indie studio Puddle. And we're, like Brian said, we're working hard to release our first game, Thrasher, which is coming to MetaQuest and Apple Vision Pro soon. And I primarily handle the programming and share in the game design duties with Brian and have a pretty long history of experimenting with VR and doing rapid prototyping. I guess we can get into that. But yeah, I've been tinkering since 2013 with VR and lots of other related technologies before that.
[00:03:44.383] Kent Bye: Great, and I'm wondering if you could each give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into VR.
[00:03:48.745] Brian Gibson: Yeah, I mean, when we started Harmonix Music VR, that was like, was that the Oculus Go or something? What was that? That was like the first headset out there.
[00:04:00.189] Kent Bye: The Rift, Oculus Rift.
[00:04:01.821] Mike Mandel: Oh, no, it was the Samsung Gear VR, which had no input or anything.
[00:04:09.784] Brian Gibson: I remember when we started working on that, people were just so excited. There's a lot of exuberance about just how mind-blowing it was to just see things in stereo 3D. And there wasn't like a clear sense that this was going to be the next big thing like in a year or it's just like everyone was kind of blown away and excited. But I mean, maybe there's a little bit of unsureness, but I remember Harmonix really wanted to get in front of it. And so they had a team working on that. And that was really fun and exciting. And it was just cool to sort of explore this new device. But it's cumbersome too. So at the same time we were doing that, I was also doing Thumper on the side while I was working at Harmonix. And I left the company. But then as I was working on Thumper, PlayStation started talking to us about psvr and if we wanted to put thumper on psvr for our release and we tried it out and it worked super well totally randomly the game was not designed for vr at all but there's a lot of happy accidents with how we design that game to make it miraculously not that nausea inducing for it being like one of the highest velocity experiences you can probably have in a game I mean, it's unnaturally fast. And they put us on the demo disc. So VR has been a thing that I've gotten more and more familiar with. It's just been this thing that's like, I love making art and music primarily. And then it's this new emerging medium. And it's fun to engage with it. I see it as something that has strengths and weaknesses. But it's pretty exciting to have made some of the first few games to ever be put on VR. I think that's a privilege.
[00:05:50.981] Mike Mandel: Cool. Well, I'll try to keep my winding journey brief. I sort of always been interested in technologies that enable new, more natural interfaces to interactive experiences. I think I can trace it back to college and Carnegie Mellon. I had access, kind of unique access, full access to a motion capture studio when I was there and all sorts of like weird data gloves and motion control things. So I had this interesting playground to explore. Like my first game, which was also a school project, was a motion control sword fighting game where you swung your hand to swing a sword. So I've kind of been playing around with this stuff for a while. Like when the iPhone came out, I was super interested in prototyping things with the gyros and multi-touch. And then spent about a decade plus at Harmonix with Brian. And was primarily doing game programming, rapid prototyping, R&D, cooking up prototypes. I spent a long while with Kinect in the early 2010s on games like Dance Central and Fantasia Music Evolved. And I think, you know, that was like my first taste of like using your body as a controller and trying to make like real things for real people. And I think a lot of relevant lessons came out of that that helped me transition to VR as it was emerging in 2013, which, by the way, was an Oculus Kickstarter backer. And so I was playing with the DK1 in 2013. Like Brian mentioned, we were part of this early spearheading of R&D into music and VR at Harmonix around 2014. And we had a lot of wild, unconstrained prototypes around music, and some of the Oculus co-founders would come through and check them out. Was also participating in game jams, VR game jams, early. including one that was sponsored in Boston by Valve, where they brought some of their prototype VR hardware. So this is before the Vive, some of the sort of hand-built duct tape things. And that was my first taste of positional tracking. It's before the DK2 had come out and I had tried it. There was a wacky game that came out of that called Alien Makeout Simulator. Some people might remember that. I'd also met Chet from Valve there. And so that led to a bunch of folks from Harmonix visiting Valve's room in 2015 and getting briefed on their Lighthouse technology that was still just like a circuit board and some hints about a partnership with HTC, which then, you know, we all know turned into the HTC Vive. So it was really exciting sort of being part of that and meeting a lot of the folks that were doing some interesting work early on, you know, when the Vive launched. Circling back, I guess a bunch of those experiments from Harmonix eventually released in a music visualizer called Harmonix Music VR, which was a PSVR1 launch title. And of course, Brian worked on that with me. And in sort of in parallel, around 2014, I had started a group called Secret Portal, which was doing experiments around XR in public spaces. So, you know, 2015, doing immersive theater projects and art installations, live immersive shows, projection mapping in VR, things like that. And then I guess in late 2020, I left Harmonix to work with Brian on some VR game ideas, and I guess Thrasher started taking form in 2021. Okay.
[00:08:53.425] Kent Bye: And in terms of each of your backgrounds, are you coming more from computer science, art, music? Maybe you can just kind of elaborate a little bit more of your backgrounds and your, I guess, contributions on this project.
[00:09:07.031] Brian Gibson: Yeah, I went to art school, and I'm a very poor engineer. I've tried to do a little bit of game programming, but I end up calling Mike any time I get stuck, which is once per day. But I love doing art and music. And in this game, in Thumper, I do the level design, but the actual design of the game is collaborative. And I like that. I like the collaborative process. But I tend to be more on the, I'm very far, actually, on the art and music side.
[00:09:36.946] Mike Mandel: Yeah, so I handle most of the engineering, expose stuff to a visual scripting system for Brian. He does some programming with visual scripting and Unity. And also, like Brian said, share the game design, have a passion for game design and rapid prototyping and sort of the intersection of creativity and technology.
[00:09:54.011] Kent Bye: Okay, well, so I've played through each of the nine levels of Thrasher, both on the Apple Vision Pro and the Quest 3. And when I was talking to you, Mike, I was getting a little bit more context that it sounds like that this was originally designed for hand-tracked controllers. However, there is a pretty good translation to do hand-tracking, and there's some differences that we can start to dive into. But I'd love to hear where this project began and what were some of the initial seed ideas for Thrasher.
[00:10:23.795] Mike Mandel: Yeah, so some of the early ideas that we had that led to Thrasher were around, you know, we're discussing, you know, reimagining some classic games like Snake. And Snake was an interesting one because it's a game that's just fundamentally about growing a creature. And so we sort of know that in VR, scale is experienced really viscerally. So that seemed like maybe there was something there. Although, you know, all the things about Snake pretty much have been shed from the game, you know, avoiding running into your body, etc. Anyways, we had just from a previous prototype had built this selfie stick thing. So like the very first prototype was let's hang a ribbon off the end of this selfie stick and swing it around and see what that feels like. And that was really interesting because it felt almost like a ribbon dancer, really embodied, satisfying mechanic. And so that seemed like, okay, there may be a game here. And then just separately was sort of interested in games that are made to be played seated that felt native to the medium. Like I love me some Beat Saber and Pistol Whip and all these really high motion games, but also crave games that allow me to like chill on the couch, but also like don't feel like a port of a 2D game that feel like they're made for VR and there just really weren't that many. And so, yeah, it was a long journey of prototyping. Like you said, we started with a controller. And I think in the early, when we were working on this game, hand tracking maybe had just come out or wasn't really in a lot of games yet. We weren't intending to make a game that is only one controller. But in the end, the game really only uses one hand because it's really about your connection to this creature. And we explored quite a few ways that the game, what felt good about the game was flowing quickly and recklessly. And so there's this conceit in the game that it's a race. And so adding the timer was something that came along. along that journey. And it really wasn't until the Apple Vision Pro was on the horizon that we got serious about hand tracking, even though there was a version of it, sort of a really early version of it, but had been in there for a while. And it seemed like, oh, yeah, we could probably refine that into something decent. Because fundamentally, the game's about pointing. And so once we were able to try it on the Vision Pro, like, oh, wait, actually, this game is like there's this magic to it when you're using your hand. I mean, there's a loss in precision in some ways, but there's also a magic of like sort of telekinesis. So it was like really it was the Vision Pro that kind of spearheaded our commitment to doing hand tracking and to releasing it on that platform.
[00:12:55.078] Brian Gibson: I think the ribbon dancing metaphor, I think, or the connection to ribbon dancing was really important because it's a real world proof of concept of something that feels good to do and has a beautiful visual result. And it's just like when you see people, I don't know if you see performers that are doing that. It's just something that looks so pleasurable. And I guess just from a game feel problem with VR to me is what would feel good to do with these motion controllers? so it seems like such a good exercise to come up with real world analogies to like what do people like to do with other handheld things that feel it where it's just got this graceful flowing satisfying result so that was really big to just give us confidence that this was like a good direction to explore in terms of game feel
[00:13:43.342] Mike Mandel: Yeah, I'll add one more thing about that. I mean, this is sort of a philosophy that I learned from Harmonix, but there's this idea of creating the toy before you create the game. And before you like figure out what are the details, what are all the mechanics and the metagame of, you know, it's like, is there something that's just on its face satisfying? Like when you play Mario Brothers, you know, it's just like fun to pilot the character around. And so really like in the earliest weeks of this game, we had this mechanic and then it was like what's the game and that was like most of the journey of the game but it's starting from like trying to make swooping this creature around elegant and beautiful and satisfying and that's what we spent quite a bit of time early on and then it was sort of a mystery what the actual game would be around that and it took several years to figure out if if we figured it out yeah well you guys will tell us yes
[00:14:31.892] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I had a chance to play through it both with a controller and a hand track, and I think there are some distinct differences of the gameplay design that I think the pinching doesn't always have a direct analog to the button press, and there's some precise turning motions that happen that I think are also different. So I played through on the Apple Vision Pro. And the first thing that I want to say is that I feel like the mechanic is incredibly satisfying on the Apple Vision Pro and that the Apple Vision Pro right now only has a refresh rate of the hands around 30 Hertz. And so you have less precision to be able to control things around. And I think there's been a lot of challenges for creating interactions and games that feel as responsive as you want them to be. However, I feel like the way that you have this extended ribbon-like thing, it's like a, you know, almost like a fishing rod with a line that you're swinging around. So this ribbon dance metaphor you're talking about, I also have a reference of like Blarp, which was a VR game by Kibibo where you kind of have a slingshot mechanic. You're kind of like whipping your hand around, but it's not like a direct translation. There's a little bit of like a long extension to this. So you kind of have to figure out how to precisely move your hands around in order to have... the end result move where you want it to do. So there's a little bit of like an abstraction of as you're moving, there's a bit of a delay that happens, but it actually like helps you with the Apple Vision Pro because it feels like the mechanic was intentional to do that. And it still felt responsive enough for me to have enough control to move around. And so I feel like with this mechanic, I feel like you've been able to actually bridge the gap between you know, when I went back to the quest, I was using hand track controllers, which are at presumably a much higher update rate. And I found it actually a lot easier. However, the experience was a lot different than using my hands. I actually almost preferred using my hands more because I felt like more connected to the game. It was almost like the controller was disconnecting me from the visceral experience of moving the snake around. However, I do lose some of that precision in my times when I started to replay some of the levels that I did on the quest with the hand track controllers. You know, from the small number of levels I played, I was never able to beat my time with hand tracking, which I think kind of speaks to the differences. And it was only like, you know, maybe five or six levels that I did on the quest, but I wanted to just get a sense of the feel. And so I'd love to hear you walk through this process of designing this for the Quest 3 with the hand track controllers, and then you move over to the Apple Vision Pro. And then again, you have this sort of happy accident type of thing where, you know, with Thumper being a 2D game and being translatable into VR, you seem to have stumbled upon a mechanic that actually also tends to work really quite well for the Apple Vision Pro. But there are some differences and I'm sure some nuances that you had to work out in order to make it compatible for both the Apple Vision Pro and the Quest 3. So yeah, I'd love to hear some of your process of designing this whole game and then the Apple Vision Pro coming along and then starting to kind of have these dual input mechanisms of both the hand track controllers and the hand tracking.
[00:17:39.252] Brian Gibson: One thing I'll say is the lag is something that even if the precision was like 100% accurate, I think we would still want to have a lag because it gives the creature a sense of weight. And I guess that's like when you play Mario and he's like running really fast and then you stop and he kind of slides a little bit and then you try to run again. It's like that feeling of weight actually is what makes a game fun a lot of the time is like learning the physics of the world and learning to manage it and make predictions based on something that's not exactly it's smooth there's a lot of there's a lot of benefits to having a kind of smoothed out smoothing out the input but also like when you point the controller one thing that annoys me is just seeing like how shaky my hand actually is in real life and just like smoothing that out so it feels like you're being much more graceful than you actually are is another good thing but I don't know maybe Mike can continue about just how that it did seem to Because we already wanted it smooth, the input to be smooth, things worked really well on the Apple Vision Pro right out of the gate. But it is not the same filtering. It feels a little... I think you felt like there was more lag on the Apple Vision Pro, right? Because of the...
[00:18:50.228] Kent Bye: Yeah. Well, I feel like I, well, this is a game where it's difficult to really talk about the differences because I do think that the game progression, you're learning how to play the game. And so as I'm playing through the first time, I'm sort of learning the mechanics. When I played through the second time, I already knew all the mechanics. And so the game is good in the way that I actually feel like I was better in And it was better because I had played through the entirety of the game. However, when I also was in the quest, I feel like it was also like I had a lot more precision. And this is something that anecdotally, I was able to cruise through the entirety of the quest game in a way that almost going straight through without having to go to the infinity screens. And so you have this conceit where you kind of get three tries to pass a level with a time. So you have like a minute and sometimes there's multiple waves that you have to get through. And so there's this pressure that you have to get through this timed trial. The first time I played it, I was a new user and I was using the Apple Vision Pro and the hand tracking. And the precision was such that I felt like there was level one, level two, and level three, there's a new mechanic where you're essentially giving a button press where you have to move your hand, but you also have to be pinching your fingers on Apple Vision Pro. And then in the Quest, you're basically pulling a trigger in order to do that button press. And it's a lot more precise. I didn't have the feeling where it wasn't detecting it, whereas in the hand tracking, it wasn't always detecting it. And so it was just easier. And also I think the precision of the hand track controllers was such that I felt it easier to kind of move around and navigate. And I felt like I had more control over it. And so there is this delay that you're talking about. And so I had this feeling of, as I was playing through it, that I actually preferred the visceral nature of what the hand tracking felt like. Sometimes I would move my whole hand and sometimes I would just move my finger. And so I was able to kind of move my finger, my index finger around just to control everything. And just to have like a game where I'm like moving my finger to kind of precisely move things around is extremely satisfying. But then when I went back into the hand track controller, I felt like there was a level of abstraction that all of the tracking was being mitigated by this object I was holding. And there were haptics that I got from the game, which you don't get with the hand tracking. However, it didn't feel as immersive or embodied in a way. I felt like it changed my experience of the game by holding the controller. Even though I was better and faster, it felt a little less satisfying.
[00:21:14.236] Mike Mandel: Yeah, I guess I would say maybe reflecting on it, one of the ways that this happy accident happened was in the back of our minds, we kind of had this idea of supporting vibe seekers and score chasers. These are sort of the two categories of players. a casual vr player who's new to vr and just wants to like go into our crazy worlds and have this awesome experience but like doesn't want the game to be super hard but then we also want the game to be replayable and long lasting and so like appeal to people who really want to get into the mechanics and so there's this whole like other layer of the game that most people won't experience in their first playthrough through a combo system that revolves around circling You can chain together these massive combos and you can really get into like competing on the leaderboards. And so there's like this dichotomy between these two design goals. And so, like, for me, like, when I play the Apple Vision Pro version, it's the, like, I'm vibing out, it's late at night, I'm sitting on the couch, and it's just, like, I'm wiggling my finger around and having this awesome, like, fast action game, which I'm not used to with hand tracking. But, like, if I'm, like, I'm going to get an awesome score and I'm going to, like, go nuts with these combos, I'm going to switch and play on the Quest version. So even though you can do all of those things, you know, on the Vision Pro, I just find it satisfying to be, like, you know just chillaxed on the couch you know playing it and like my gamer mind is what comes to bear like when i'm playing with the quest and so i sort of like this aspect of the game it reminds me of other games that i like like mario kart or tony hawk pro skater where like they're like really easy to pick up and you just like mash buttons and you have fun but like okay you really don't get into mario kart until you do the power slide and you don't really get into tony hawk until you're doing the manual in terms of like the advanced play and then this whole playground opens in the game that changes your relationship to it. And so I think this game has a similar thing with our combo system, where it's sort of this optional layer that we hint at, but you don't really encounter it deeply until your second playthrough. And then it's this totally new way to play, in fact, Like the first levels of the game are just totally transformed by understanding that circling things creates a combo and extends a combo and gives you more bonus points when you circle things. And it also happens to be a satisfying thing to do loops with the creature. And that was this thing that we knew was fun in the game for like ever and had all these weird power ups that we were trying to circle. We just couldn't figure out what it was. And it wasn't until like later in development that we found oh yeah, circling can form the basis of a combo system. And so I think that was a really cool moment and us focusing on the skill chaser types. But so sorry, that was a bit of a digression. But yeah, like there's a bit of a happy accident there, but I think it was a little bit of the design philosophy that helped there. And let me see if there's anything else. Yeah, I mean, I guess it's hard without delving into like the technical details, but you know, there was a period where the controls didn't feel great on Vision Pro and there was, you know, just some time of like looking at different parts of the hand and understanding when you have to be aware of occlusions when you're dealing with hand tracking. So sometimes you lose sensitivity in a certain part of the hand because, you know, the cameras can't see it. And so that was one of the key things that helped the controls become better was crawling down the hand and looking at, you know, parts of the hand that still have sensitivity and doing that rapidly so that you can just sort of wave your hand, you can go upside down, you can really play however you want. And it seems like it just sort of always works. And that at least that's the goal.
[00:24:43.115] Brian Gibson: I wonder if the higher refresh rate on the Apple Vision Pro will end up making it the same.
[00:24:49.986] Mike Mandel: Yeah, right, because Vision OS 2 is going to have 90 hertz tracking, which we haven't tried yet. But I imagine that will be a big improvement to the game. So we'll see.
[00:24:58.110] Brian Gibson: I think, yeah, in an ideal world, the precision control is the same for the controller and the hand. I mean, I doubt we'll ever get it to be exactly the same. But the controller feels more like how I would want to tune it for the hand. But it's still fun to get a little bit of extra lag.
[00:25:14.382] Mike Mandel: Yeah, it's interesting because when you're holding an object in the hand, there's certain ways that you sort of pivot around in your hand. You can do it real comfortably and quickly. And then when you're controlling the game with your hand, there are certain poses that are just uncomfortable, you know, like pointing down into the side. And so some of these things, you know, affect the level design a little bit, and we're still sort of tweaking some of that. But some of those same poses are not as uncomfortable on the controller because you can sort of like use your fingers to kind of twist the controller around without like twisting your whole wrist around. But, you know, on the flip side, you've got your finger, like you mentioned, your index finger, and you can kind of just like wiggle your finger around and play the entire game, you know, with your hand in your lap and... So like, I don't know, it's like really interesting that the game works in these different ways and is kind of satisfying for different reasons across the two different ways of playing.
[00:26:00.458] Kent Bye: Yeah, and we're still about a month out from when the game is going to be officially released. And so one of the things that when I was playing through on the Apple Vision Pro, we were talking on Discord and you had mentioned that there is these two different modes that you were thinking about in terms of like a vibe out mode. And then also really going for time trials. And there's like the conceit that you have essentially like nine different levels for each of the levels. There's like three different stages. And then each of the stage has like nine or 10 different waves. How many total levels is that? Yeah. Nine levels.
[00:26:31.058] Mike Mandel: Nine levels, three stages per level, so sort of 27 stages of the game.
[00:26:37.004] Kent Bye: 27 stages, and then how many total waves?
[00:26:39.346] Mike Mandel: There's 12, I believe, in each one. It's sort of like you have nine waves of gameplay and then three waves of boss fight.
[00:26:46.934] Kent Bye: Right. Okay. So by my rough calculations, 27 times 12, that's around like 324 or so waves. Does that sound around right? That's about right. Yeah. Okay. So there's the level, then the stage, and then multiple waves sometimes for a time. How do you... Oh yeah.
[00:27:02.965] Brian Gibson: There's like, there can be sub waves.
[00:27:04.947] Kent Bye: Sub waves. Okay. Yeah.
[00:27:06.628] Brian Gibson: And that can be up to, usually we don't go more than four sub waves, but it's often two or three. Okay. Sometimes it's just one. Okay.
[00:27:15.290] Kent Bye: So for each of the waves, sometimes there's sub waves where you say, okay, here's like two or three levels that you have to finish within a minute. And then if you don't do that after three tries, then it goes up to infinity and you can take as long as you want. I feel like if you were to create like a vibe out mode, what I would want is just to put it into infinity mode where there's no times. I just like am vibing out. And then also later in the game, there's things that respawn. I think in terms of difficulty, it actually does make it more difficult because you have to like have more working memory to keep track things of more. There are some times where just like, oh, just was there was a mode where things weren't responding because I just want to have that satisfaction of clearing everything out. So I definitely think that there's some room to change the type of gameplay to achieve these different flow states. This is a game that really encourages those flow states and you're not like worrying about stuff. And I feel like by restarting stuff, sometimes it disrupts that flow state mentality.
[00:28:10.809] Brian Gibson: Do you think people would still be able to progress in that mode or is it just a thing that you can access after you've already beaten the level or how do you picture that?
[00:28:20.732] Kent Bye: I mean, I think in the beginning, if you choose whether or not you... Well, I mean, maybe it's something that you do get after you complete the game. It's like a reward to kind of like just vibe out. But I do think that you could potentially be missing out on folks who are not as interested in... Like there is a certain amount of difficulty that the game has. And once you go through those three times that you don't get it within a lot of time and you kind of get lasered by this big giant being in the background... I feel like that there's a certain amount of just wanting to vibe out where you could have it more of a relaxing mode where you're not as concerned and it's just more of a flow state thing where you're kind of moving around and there's a satisfaction of kind of getting rid of all the different clutter. you know, less around the time and leaderboard and more just like you've created an experience that has a really satisfying mechanic. And I do think that there's like another mode of just that total chill out mode where you can start to, you know, tweak some of these different mechanics so that you can just create like an onboarding way for people that Like, you know, I know if I showed this to my wife, she would get super frustrated with the game like parts. But if it was just a vibe out mode, this is the type of game that I think would be accessible to a different type of audience that wouldn't necessarily be as interested in trying to like improve their skills and get the times.
[00:29:37.924] Brian Gibson: sad because it's on my end it's a lot of art and music that i kind of want people who buy the game to see all of it i mean the variety of worlds and 27 different songs and it's a lot of work and i know from thumper that i think it's fairly typical with games that like usually like 100 of people play level one and then like 75 people play level two and then It drops almost exponentially. At least in Thumper, it was like maybe 10% of people go past level three or something. And it's like, that's just a lot of, you know, they're paying for this thing. And a lot of it is an experiential, you know, it's like music and art and design and all of these cool things that you kind of want people to at least get to see it, you know? but if they get frustrated or it's got some friction people drop off really fast like this i think this compared to thumper is way more accessible but i think you're right that it's still got a lot of barriers to i mean it's still challenging after i think level four it gets like it becomes becomes a game where there's like a threat that you will not survive i mean we do have infinity mode but even getting to infinity mode it takes time and that's friction so
[00:30:51.638] Mike Mandel: Yeah, I guess a couple things. I mean, definitely have heard from folks the idea of a Zen mode and something that is on the list of possible post-release updates, like the idea of just kicking back and endlessly playing through content. You mentioned that waves are divided into these parts. And in many ways, the reason for that is it's actually much more satisfying and chill to have a small challenge in front of you in the game, like a little tiny thing that you can sort of see and then defeat, and then the next little thing comes in. And so if you think about taking a wave that's divided into sub waves and just make an endless mode full of those little sub wave challenges, you could imagine a pretty satisfying mode. There's also just another thing I wanted to touch on about what makes the game satisfying in this way is that there's a predictability to the motion of objects. And we didn't know this was what we wanted to do originally. Should there be AI? Should there be creatures that you're fighting that have their own minds? And in the end, the game, almost all of it The motion is sort of like cosmic, like everything is moving in circles or circles nested within circles. And so even though you can get this really complex sort of mesmerizing visual, it also has this predictability, which allows you to navigate this elegant swooping and sort of have an idea of where things are going to be in the future, especially considering the lag inherent in the control scheme. So yeah, I guess long-winded way of saying, yeah, Zen Mode would be fun. And I think that we probably have the pieces to do it. We just need to think about how that would fit into the game. Yeah, it's a good idea.
[00:32:28.260] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I feel like when I did it on the controllers with the Quest, I feel like the game progression curve was pretty consistent and almost like too easy at the beginning, you know, because you have like a minute and there was never like a time at the beginning where I was getting close. But certainly later in the game, I was running into that a lot more. And I feel like the hand tracking mechanic of like the pinch, I feel like the computer vision detecting the pinch is normally really amazing when your hand is not moving and static. but I feel like part of the challenge of this game is that you're pinching and you're moving at the same time and you're sometimes letting go of that pinch. And so there's kind of like three moments that you have to be tracking. And I feel like the precision of that was not as precise as the controllers and pushing the buttons, but felt like it got it a hundred percent of the time when I was doing it, where if I don't know what the percentage of accuracy would be, but I felt like, There was a lot more times anecdotally where I was getting to infinity mode within the Apple Vision Pro because of, I think it was probably like the lack of precision with the hand tracking combined with the button pressing that was happening. So it felt like there was a certain amount of flow to the game where it was like, okay, it was really encouraging me to get into this flow state. And as soon as the button press mechanic was introduced in the hand tracking, it was like, okay, it's disrupting that flow state. And now it's like a whole other level of difficulty that I feel like is one part computer vision challenges that may be at the platform level and another part of trying to figure out the differences between the track controllers versus the hand tracking. And if there's like too much of a step increase of difficulty in the game progression, given that it's mechanically more difficult to track.
[00:34:03.991] Brian Gibson: I think you most definitely encountered a bug that I think we recently fixed with the pinch detection.
[00:34:10.996] Mike Mandel: Yeah, we pushed a build yesterday that may be improved, but your point is taken that, you know, you're twisting your hand around and you're trying to like move it and very precisely release it because that is totally critical to like the dash mechanic where you want to dash in a straight line in the direction that you sort of aim while you're pinched. Like if it's just a little bit late or a little bit early because your hands, you know, twisted in a way that the cameras can't see. Occasionally, it won't release right away. But there was definitely a bug in some of the earlier versions that made this even worse, where it would just sort of get stuck and never release. So it might be worth giving it a try again. OK. I also know that the game's difficulty generally was tuned with controllers. And so once we had hand tracking, there was this question of, should the game be different? And I think most of the answer, at least what we've been going with, is just trying to be more forgiving With the infinity mode, for example, like if you run out of time three times, you just get unlimited time. And there's other things we're considering, like giving you a slow motion right at the end there to give you a little bit more time. So we're trying to thread this needle without having two separate versions of the game. And I think we're getting close. We're not quite there, and we still have a little bit more time before the game releases.
[00:35:21.154] Brian Gibson: A lot of the fun of the Quest version hinges on people discovering the combo mechanic, because it's pretty easy. But with the combos, even level one is super deep in how much you can get with a combo and how hard it is to get the maximum combo.
[00:35:35.851] Mike Mandel: Yeah, our plan is to release some content around how the system works, and hopefully we'll eliminate it for folks. Before they play the game, they'll see what an expert player looks like.
[00:35:46.966] Kent Bye: I noticed that you have the time of the waves and then the levels. And then at the end, there's like a number that's kind of magically aggregated where you have a certain time that you're starting with. Um, and that is going down. It's like 10 minutes that you're starting with, but then with those combos, sometimes you can like add even more time. So I think I saw Brian on leaderboard. It was like, you start with 10 minutes and all of a sudden Brian's up to like 18 minutes. I'm like, wait a second. I'm missing something here. Yeah.
[00:36:14.329] Mike Mandel: Well, you know, it's nice to have scores that like bigger is better, but you know, the reality is like time is dwindling down and you know, the time that you have remaining is your score for a wave. But you can do these actions, you know, when you combo, you get time back on the clock and you can do combos that give you like 100 seconds back. So you can definitely have more time on the clock than the minute that you have to do each wave. You know, you can have two minutes left at the end, you know, if you play really skillfully. So, yeah, that's what leads to like being able to get 18 minutes left at the end, even though you only ever had like, you know, 12 minutes to do it anyways. So, yeah, that's yeah, that's a thought around that.
[00:36:49.611] Brian Gibson: But yeah, the combo also in later levels, especially like the last level, is not just a way to exceed the time you started with, but it also just keeps you alive on a level that's super hard. If you can eke out an extra 30 seconds.
[00:37:04.598] Mike Mandel: Yeah, you lose time when you take damage. So that's sort of like when the game gets hard, you're losing time a lot because you're taking damage. And so the combo system kind of counters that by letting you get time back.
[00:37:15.506] Kent Bye: Yeah, I saw that there was a little radial dial that is like going into like 100% as it's going around in a circle. And I never figured out the combo system exactly. And so to just describe it, do you go around the object that you're trying to hit as a full circle? Or are you just trying to do a loop and maybe like just kind of describe the idea of, you know, because there was one spinning wheel thing where you kind of have to twirl your fingers around in a way that when you hit it, it kind of spreads the bullets out more to hit objects. And I found that to be incredibly satisfying to play, but are you kind of building upon that twirling your finger in a circle or your hand in a circle in a way that you could somehow circle the object or maybe just describe in words, like how's that combo system actually work?
[00:37:58.501] Brian Gibson: Definitely one, when we were thinking about the ribbon dancing thing, part of the question was like, what do ribbon dancers do that's like cool? And like, they're always looping around. You're always seeing these like circular shapes and so we wanted to try to encourage that with the gameplay like mike said before we originally tried to make like actual like circle cues that appear and you have to like do a loop around them to destroy them but being prescriptive about it just wasn't fun like to have something that you had to circle it just something felt like it seems like circling needs to be some way that you're expressing your own way of approaching the wave not something Eventually, we just experimented with if you do a quick circle, if you cross over your body and you've encompassed a large enough radius, you're going at a certain velocity, it will trigger this circle, this feedback that you just did a circle. It will be this little swirl thing. If you do that, if you envelop or surround any gameplay object, I think every gameplay object you can. It'll destroy it just like as if you smashed into it, but it has better, it'll also basically initiate a combo or extend a combo, and it'll also increment aspects of the combo. Mike is probably better at describing some of those.
[00:39:21.615] Mike Mandel: Let me see if I can explain this. That little circular meter that you see, it counts down, and while that's counting down, as you're destroying gameplay objects, a number will tick up inside. And there's also actions that you can do that'll give you a multiplier. So the idea is to try to like get as much stuff destroyed while that meter is counting down. But you can make it appear by doing a circle. So like if you just do a circle in place, suddenly you've started a combo. But it'll also appear like when you, in other situations, like dashing through reds. But anyways, once it appears, you want to quickly try to smash through things, right? But then you can circle again to fill the meter up again. So that's sort of the equivalent of the manual in Tony Hawk, where if you just keep circling, you can hold onto a combo, and you can bring it through many sub waves. and build it up, right? And when you circle red things, you get multipliers. And when you circle, you know, green things, you just get the number inside the circle goes up. And there's a bunch of other secret ways of like, you know, the multiplier may cap out at four normally, but there's ways to get it to five and even to get it to six. So there's, you know, sort of skillful actions that you do that give you multiplier and give you a base value. And you're just trying to like accumulate that. Now, as you're building up the combo, if you take damage, you lose it all. So there's sort of this risk reward of trying to like carry the biggest combo that you can. And of course, when you try to circle an object, that's even more of a risk because, you know, it's hard to circle around something that's moving. And so you might slam into it. And that's why we give you a bigger reward. But the hope is that people will sort of stumble into bits and pieces of this. Just in playing the game, you'll make circles, and you'll see that appear. And you'll see numbers counting up. And so it's one of those things that it shows itself, but it's not totally clear without sort of having a little bit more detail or playing for a little longer. And again, we're going to release a video that really delves into this. But that's the basics.
[00:41:11.519] Kent Bye: OK. Yeah, well, I played through twice, and I didn't figure it out on my own. I knew there was something there because I was like, OK, there's clearly some way where people are doing something to get a lot more time than whatever I'm doing. So there's some levels where you can really start to rack up some of those combos.
[00:41:27.173] Mike Mandel: Yeah, the leaderboard sort of gives you this hint that, wait a second, there must be some way to get insane times, and what is it? And maybe you have to go to the internet and watch a creator do a crazy run, and you're like, oh, I see. OK, there's all these things that I wasn't aware of. And I kind of like that aspect of the game. I mean, I think it's already intense enough. As you're just playing the game, you're just learning how the game works in this novel control scheme. And so trying to shove tutorials around the combos, we decided to sort of leave it up to players to discover, because there's enough in the game to discover in your first playthrough. But it is a tricky thread to sort of pull to figure out the right way to introduce this to folks.
[00:42:04.998] Kent Bye: Yeah, there's an experience of this type of game where it's easy to learn but difficult to master. So I feel like you've really kind of hit that sweet spot where it's really simple to pick up, but there's a lot of levels to the game that even after playing through it twice on two different platforms, there's still a lot of stuff that I missed and I feel like this is the type of game where you have different waves and sub waves where people could really start to speed run the game in a way that you know the most optimal way to do this or that. I feel like this is difficult to speed run because you are like adding time and time is not like a consistent thing it's not like a linear chronos time there's kind of a game time where you're adding and subtracting in ways that are not always reflective of this time that it takes to actually go through but i feel like this is the type of game that could be like a good speed run because you could be doing it just for speed without being worried about the score but there's also the whole score dimension that you can also tie into as well yeah
[00:43:02.779] Brian Gibson: My dream about this game would be that people really, some people start to dissect individual waves and you see YouTube videos that are like, Thrasher, level 734, under 20 seconds or something. Because I feel like that would be definitely vindication that we tuned the design right or something. It's just people get really excited about maximizing each wave has almost like an optimal path or there's some specific trick that can get you a huge multiplier somewhere that's kind of hidden or hard to find. But we'll see if that catches on.
[00:43:36.061] Mike Mandel: Yeah. Someone figures out how to circle like eight things in one circle, which, you know, gives you this giant multiplier, but no one really, there's like this precise moment when you can do it. There's those sorts of moments that I think people, or I hope that people will dissect, but you're right. There is this sort of like, originally we were framing the game as like a racing game. And I think for the new player, that is like a good analogy that you're just trying to go as fast as possible. But then the advanced play is a little bit more like a Tony Hawk where it's like about like getting the big score, the big combo. And, you know, it might take you a little bit longer to orchestrate it. So there's a little bit of like, I think speed is always on your mind. If you can do it all faster, you're going to get a better time. Right. But then there is this aspect of like doing certain actions to give yourself more time and So we'll have to see where things fall. But I imagine that all things considered, if someone figures out a technique and someone else can execute that exact technique a little faster, they'll just get a better score. So, yeah.
[00:44:28.134] Kent Bye: Yeah. I feel like prediction is a lot about understanding a system to the point where you can make a mental model in your mind to know where things are going to be at. And I feel like as this game goes on, it gets more and more chaotic in a way that it becomes more and more difficult to predict and more erratic movements and more objects that are chasing you down in an erratic way where you have to defend yourself. And so I feel like that there's the spectrum between order and chaos, where if something is so completely ordered, it's not interesting at all because you have already made a mental model and it's completely matching your expectations. And then the chaos is moments where it's so chaotic that you have no ability to make a mental model. I feel like when I first played through it with the Apple Vision Pro, there were some moments where I didn't feel like I had enough granular control on some of the levels where I was like, this is just totally, utterly chaotic and random in a way that I can't precisely get myself out of it. I didn't never run into that when I ran it through on the Quest, where I felt like I had a lot more precision and more order in my ability to control the object. So I feel like even this game, people can choose where they feel like the most satisfied and how they play it, where if they want a little bit more order, they can use the hand track controllers. If you want a little bit more chaos and make it a little bit more challenging, you can use the hand tracking controllers. And then this is the type of game where I played all right hand, which is my dominant hand. This is the type of game where I could like, well, if I want to increase my agility in my non-dominant hand, I can play in my left hand and also play through it. And so I feel like there's a lot of things you can do to make it more challenging for yourself, even just if... you're doing the hand tracking versus the controllers and kind of where you find the most satisfaction when you play a game like this and the different trade-offs that you have from the haptics that you have with the controllers versus just this different type of embodied feeling that i got when i did it with my hands that was a whole nother level of satisfaction so i feel like i want to play through it again with just my hands in the quest and then like okay now i'm going to try my left hand and now okay now i should go back to the apple vision pro you know i feel like there's a lot of richness to be explored in the game just to see the differences and nuances and try to make my skill as I've gotten better. And then the whole looping is a whole other thing I haven't even dug into yet. So I feel like it's the type of game that has a lot of levels that can keep people coming back to it.
[00:46:43.156] Brian Gibson: Yeah, that last level, yeah, maybe it's a spoiler a little bit, but there is a gameplay arc to more chaos. And that seems important that the final level of a game just almost has like a paradigm shifting twist that like, changes everything up and you're just like you're being challenged in a completely different way and it's we want it to be kind of emotionally like intense and dark and sort of like you've you've really like opened pandora's box or something i don't know how to describe the feeling that we want to convey there but i think having this like this feeling of chaos and that you used to be able to rely on order and prediction and now you can't rely on that anymore but also tuning it so you can manage it. There's a predictability to the behavior of these unpredictable things. You can see they all will start to move in relation to you in a particular way. Probably if you play a few times, you start to be able to actually get a rock how things are going to start to move around. There's a lot of randomness and chaos happening, but you can We haven't really, uh, like tested it enough to know that you could like S rank all of those waves, which, which for us is like crazy person on the internet.
[00:47:55.804] Mike Mandel: That's going to do it though.
[00:47:56.905] Brian Gibson: Never getting damaged and getting combos, like in every single one of those waves. Uh, yeah. It seems possible. We'll find out.
[00:48:06.835] Mike Mandel: You mentioned, uh, playing with your non-dominant hand. It's interesting because. the earlier versions of the game weren't necessarily one-handed. And there were that experimented with, OK, objects, you actually use both. And you flip back and forth between your hands. And there's certain things you can only do with your left hand and certain things that only get destroyed with your right hand. And we kind of backed away from that Some people are very sensitive, me included, of like, my dominant hand, I just am so much better at playing the game. And it's like almost a handicap to force people to use their non-dominant hand. So we kind of like made the decision that this is going to be like a one-handed game. But it's interesting, like I can't imagine people challenging themselves and saying, all right, I'm going to play this entire game with my non-dominant hand and see what I can do. Well, it'll be interesting to try. Now, folks can, in the game, switch between, at least on the quest, you can, while you're playing the game, switch hands dynamically. And there may be some techniques out there of switching from one hand to the other if your amdextrics like that. The creature will go between your hands pretty quickly when you switch. So I don't know. There might be some techniques there. But let's see. I think Brian covered the chaos side. I guess one other thing I wanted to mention kind of relates to like the themes of the game there are these themes of birth and death in the game and there's sort of like you know you start the game you hatch out of this egg and in every level you become at the end of every level you sort of like fly into the light and you emerge in the next level as sort of a different creature and then also you sort of start in a more primordial place and you go to on this journey that in the end is really chaotic and so We don't want to necessarily say what the story of the game is per se, but these themes are sort of cosmic in nature. So the idea that it gets chaotic at the end, and I'm not going to reveal what happens in the end at the very end of the game, but there's something that happens that's kind of interesting that relates to all of this. And so, yeah, so having the gameplay get chaotic like that on top of these themes of birth and death and being reborn, there's something that's sort of a satisfying arc to the game. That's part of why the gameplay does that.
[00:50:10.148] Kent Bye: Yeah, definitely. I was surprised with some of the twists that happened at the end, but also was happy to be able to figure out a strategy to kind of get through and to see the full ending of everything. Brian, could you maybe speak a little bit about designing the music? You said there's 27 different tracks and maybe like what were your thoughts in terms of the different types of, I guess, emotional journey or musical journey you wanted to take people on?
[00:50:31.809] Brian Gibson: Yeah, that evolved iteratively over time. We tried a lot of different kinds of music. I think in the very beginning, I was basically like an extension of a lot of the stuff I was doing in Thumper. And we kind of realized that this game, maybe it was like a little more tonally expansive, wouldn't be as emotionally one note, which is the thing I love about Thumper. But this game was going to be more of a wide open exploration. And I think for me, making music for a game is just about high throughput experimentation, like doing a lot of different ideas and throwing them in there, sitting with them for a few weeks and being like, you know, this one's better than that one. Maybe I'll try to make it more like that one. And then everything just slowly evolves. And at some point we kind of had a breakthrough that as the level design was developing, that the game is basically a journey to the boss. Every stage is a journey to the boss. And you start off as this like small creature and you develop and you get bigger. So have the music start small and sort of add elements as you progress and get closer to the boss. And then the boss is kind of a different, like is a completely different musical theme, but just have a musical progression that mirrors the growth of the creature. And then another thing I kind of, found worked was a lot of arpeggios like a lot of like sequences of notes just to me maybe on some subconscious level just sort of um also mimic the sequenced nature of the creature and how it's kind of undulating and passing through space like having some phrases that are undulating and passing through time in a similar way just seem to like feel right and feel like I could latch onto that as something, confidently latch onto that as like, yeah, that's something that this game, that's how the music of this game should work or something. Yeah. But yeah, I probably, you know, it's 27 songs. There's probably like a hundred songs. There's so many things that got thrown away. For me, so much of this stuff is just about working really fast, not thinking too much about it, not like coming up with some master plan, but just like getting things in and reacting to them, sitting with them. And things usually evolve in a direction where it like arrives at some place where I'm like, wow, that works. So I'm pretty happy with where things arrived, but it could go on forever. Like the game in a year would be a different game if we kept working on it. But I'm pretty happy with where we are.
[00:52:58.036] Kent Bye: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Well, great. Well, I guess as we start to wrap up, I'd love to hear what each of you think is the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable.
[00:53:09.199] Mike Mandel: Well, I guess for me, I sort of think that it's about breaking down barriers of distance. Like I got a little preview of this during the pandemic. You know, I've been talking about VR for 10 years and my friends sort of roll their eyes, but it wasn't until the pandemic that my close friends had VR. And even though there is some friction to getting together, like being able to go on adventures, you know, mini golfing and driving go-karts and playing paintball together. There's this glimmer of magic that we can like connect in VR and like hang out and it's way different and more like meeting in the real world. You know, we, we get on zoom calls and we sort of shouted each other, but this technology has the chance to basically make, when we can't be together, distance doesn't really matter. We can go on these, we can hang out, we can go on adventures. I also had a little bit of that feeling, you know, when using FaceTime and it's sort of share play infrastructure on vision pro. where you get over the avatar when it pops in and then you very quickly are just like hanging out. You've got access to all the content that you care about, like all the pictures of my kids and the vacations I went on and I can just sort of seamlessly float up content in front of people or show a view from what I'm seeing. For instance, I was on a FaceTime call with someone And they were like, I'm going to walk my dog and I'm going to leave, you know, share the video feed, you know, hands-free from my headset. I mean, even though it's a little weird to walk around your neighborhood with the Vision Pro on, it was still this, like, I saw his neighborhood and like saw his dog. And it was like this interesting social dynamic that I hadn't experienced yet. And it's like this glimpse of when this will just be normal. We'll just connect across distance. Of course, being in person is very important and very, you know, I don't want to lose that, but I just can't be without all the people that I want to be with all the time. And so this technology just has that ability to break down those barriers of distance. And then a slight aside, I'm interested, a little scared, but interested in how AI will eventually kind of integrate with XR in a way that makes our real world experience sort of the opposite of what I was just saying, our ability to go through the world and just sort of have these superpowers and keep us in the moment and have these amazing adventures, you know, a star Wars ship flies up in a field and we have a battle with a bunch of friends. Like I, I can see the world just sort of transforming when that's a possibility. So I'm excited. I'm psyched about the future where this technology is going.
[00:55:38.884] Brian Gibson: Yeah, I feel like VR is maybe the first evidence to me that as opposed to even film or any other art form that your senses can really be hijacked to trick you into believing you're in a completely different space. And it's just kind of like evidence that in the future, this might evolve to become some kind of brain computer interface type thing where you are fully immersive. The barriers right now with the headsets is like there's the motion sickness stuff. I don't know. I mean, it seems possible that that kind of stuff could be overcome in some time. And then, like what Mike said, AI to me, it's interesting that VR is evolving simultaneously with AI. And I can really see that it would become social experience that people have they go into these other realities but then there's also some kind of interaction with like some intelligence that's basically in real time you know creating an environment for you or just like if you imagine like a dungeon master in dungeons and dragons or something and you're just like living out something and there's something guiding you or taking you through some experience that's like you know almost like something nobody could ever come up with but it's I don't know what's going to happen, but it does seem like there's a lot of converging things that will probably come together. And it seems like VR is this like glimpse of, yeah, you can be tricked into thinking you're somewhere else. And it's only a matter of time and solving some problems where this just like completely envelops your whole reality. And hopefully it's like safe and beneficial for people. I don't know. It's a... I tend to be an optimist, but I know a lot of people have a lot of concerns. You know, when you speculate about this kind of stuff, usually people have a negative reaction, but I tend to be kind of optimistic that at the very least people will not be having like experiences they don't choose to have. I don't know.
[00:57:36.622] Kent Bye: Right. And is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:57:41.364] Mike Mandel: Well, I guess I just want to thank folks for supporting us, our little game and please check out the game when it comes out on Quest and Vision Pro on July 25th. We're really excited and happy to have the chance to share more about the development of the game. So thanks.
[00:57:54.637] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, Brian and Mike, thanks so much for joining me here on the podcast. I really enjoyed playing through both the versions of the Apple Vision Pro and the Quest. And I feel like there's some core mechanics, like you said, the ribbon dance. I feel like that's a really great metaphor for people to kind of understand the kind of the feeling of the game and that You're sort of taking that idea to the logical extreme of adding little gameplay elements and making it more challenging and difficult. And yeah, I just feel like there's a lot of ways that you're digging into a format that actually works quite well on both platforms with track controllers and hand tracking in a way that has different trade-offs and different feelings. And yeah, but overall, it's just a really satisfying game experience that you've been able to create. I'm excited for folks to go check it out for themselves. So thanks again for joining me today to help break it all down.
[00:58:39.924] Mike Mandel: Awesome. Thanks so much.
[00:58:41.705] Kent Bye: So that's Brian Gibson. He does the art, music, and design on Thrasher. And previously he worked as the artist and composer behind Thumper. And then also Mike Mendel, who does the programming design as well as research and development for Thrasher. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that, first of all, I think that the core mechanic of what this game feels like is just a lot of fun. I think it's a really innovative mechanic of like having this ribbon dance mechanic where you're moving your hand around and there's a bit of a delay and that delay makes it fun as a game because it's like you have to try to predict what it's going to be like and it's difficult. As time goes on, it does get more and more chaotic throughout the course of the game. Especially if you are doing it with hand tracking, I found myself going into infinity mode a lot more, although that may turn out to be that there was some bugs that got fixed in the midst of me playing through this. And so I did actually get a chance to play this for Rain Dance Immersive. I was on the jury for the different indie games, and this actually was the game that ended up taking home the top prize for the best immersive game of Rain Dance Immersive 2024. just because it is such a rich and deep game that has a really satisfying mechanic and they're able to progress it through a fully fleshed out development throughout the entirety of the experience. I think the music was a little bit more like trying to create this anxiety and tension that was feeding into this kind of pressure that you're trying to get this in a certain amount of time, but it wasn't necessarily like relaxing or vibe out mode. I found it a little bit more anxiety-provoking, but I think that feeds into the experience of playing the game. There are these two different modes that they talked about, which is going for the best time and going for the leaderboards, versus this completely other kind of vibe-out, chill-out, zen, or trying to get into these different flow states. So I definitely think that they could change a little bit of the mechanics into more of a flow state. That could be a completely other different way that they start to design different elements of this game. But I do think that there are like completely different audiences. And so they may have to like reconsider like, okay, it's not maybe just like flipping a switch. If they do end up pushing out an update with more of that flow state mode, that's something that I'll definitely come back to because I'm not as interested in trying to get to the high score. When I first played through this game, I had no idea about how any of the combos worked. It was completely opaque to me. And they were saying that, you know, they're hoping to add more videos and to have like on the leaderboard, that's one indication that you can add more time. And so when I was playing through it, that wasn't as much of an interest to do those combos. I just kind of played through it without any of that. So you can definitely go through the whole game without doing these more advanced moves. But it is there if you want to dive into it. And they have released now some videos after I had a chance to play through it to other press folks. And they're on their website as well with a little bit more information. as to like the specifics of how their game mechanics are working so if you do want to add up those combos and go for the high score then you can certainly do that but i do think the experience of playing this game is such that it gets me into like these deep flow states especially by using just the hand tracking i mentioned it again and again but i almost really preferred playing this game just with my hands because you can just use your index finger to move things around and it is less precise and you have less control than the hand track controllers but you It's just a different embodied phenomenological experience to feel like this entity is like an extension of your body. And this is something that Doug Northcook has talked about. He's a part of Creature, which is the label that's helping to market, distribute, and produce Thrasher. So I'll be talking to Doug Northcook in my next interview just to unpack a little bit more of creature and how they're focusing on both mixed reality games, but also VR games that have like innovative game mechanics by these different indie VR studios. So definitely look for that because he has a lot more thoughts on this space eel as an extension of your body, which I think is super compelling just as a mechanic. So this is the type of game that I played all the way through twice on two different platforms. And so I feel like it's satisfying to be able to do that again. Like I said, the harder mode is to play it on the hand tracking. And so I feel like if you start there and then you go into like the hand track controller mode, then you'll just feel like it's a lot easier. You'll feel, I noticed at least there's a big difference between having that hand track controller. I was able to be more precise, but there's just like a different embodied experience of the game. So I almost preferred just the hand tracking. And like I said, this is a game that works actually quite well on the Apple Vision Pro, just in terms of that lower refresh rate of 30 hertz on at least the initial version of Vision OS 1.0. With the 2.0 version that's coming out, they're going to have like a higher refresh rate. And so it may actually be a little bit more compatible with the Quest. This is actually a really good game to test the input differences between what a game experience is like between the hand track controls versus the hand tracking experience. And between the Apple Vision Pro and the Quest platform, whether it's a Quest 2 or Quest 3. At the end of the day, they didn't want to change the core mechanics of how this game operated between the hand track controllers versus the hand tracking. And so there is a little bit of bias towards those hand track controllers because, you know, that's where they started. The hand tracking wasn't even a thing when they started into this. But in order to really launch this on the Apple Vision Pro, they needed to really implement at least some version of hand tracking. It's definitely a game to see what's possible with the hand tracking and the type of interactive gameplay that you can start to have. And like Doug Northcook says, it's like this feeling of it being an extension of your body. And I really, really had that experience when I was playing through it. And yeah, just kind of like this seamless embodiment and an extension of my body, man. So it's like almost this spacey old character is like an extension of myself as I was playing the game. So yeah, It's something very unique and something that I highly recommend folks check out, especially if you just use the hand track controlling and just use your index finger to kind of flick this thing around this kind of ribbon dance core mechanic. There's something really there. And it does remind me of Kibibo's Blarp, which has this kind of like slingshot type of effect where there's a bit of an abstraction. And I think if you think about the predictive coding theory of neuroscience, where your mind is trying to make predictions about what's going to happen and that it's if there's a little bit of an offset between what happens in the end result, then it's got this inherent novelty and funness that you have to try to constantly close that gap between what you're doing for the input and what the output is. And so there's a lot of ways throughout the course of the game design of this piece, trying to play with that to kind of like the logical extreme of all the ways you could iterate and have different permutations on this kind of ribbon dance mechanic and Different abstractions and different power-ups from the thrash ball where you have to collide it into it, and it's almost like a billiards into the dash and the auto dash, which are two different ways of going from one point to the next point. One, it locks your location for where you're at, and the other, it doesn't. It allows you to kind of draw a line And then the thrasher gun, you have to kind of spin around. And as you're doing that spinning, then it splays out these bullets the more that you're spinning around. And then the thrash attack as well. So it's a little bit more of a berserker mode, which when you get it, then you just kind of crash through things until you get to the next one. And there's also a slow-mo power-up, which is also quite fun to have everything slow down. So yeah, from all the different power ups to all the different ways that you're trying to avoid the obstacles. And then at the end, they have more of these semi autonomous chaotic entities that are like chasing you around. So yeah. Yeah, just overall a really fun game. Highly recommend it, especially just for the pure experience of it. And there's just many layers to this game that you can dig into and watch the videos to get to those next levels. But I recommend just kind of playing through it, learning the core mechanics and seeing what you can kind of figure out on your own. And then from there, going back and trying to do some of these more advanced mechanics. So that's all I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a listen-supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.