I talk with Ikrima Elhassan of Kite & Lightning about their new tabletop VR game called Bebylon Battle Royale, which is a “Vehicular Melee Party Brawler.” Kite & Lightning has a made a name of creating high-end cinematic VR experiences such as Senza Peso as well as Insurgent movie VR experience. Bebylon is K&L’s first foray into developing a comedy game, and so we talk about their game development philosophy as well as the challenges of creating innovative gameplay with support for both gamepads and touch controllers.
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Ikrima says that VR game developers can choose two out of the three of the following: innovative VR gameplay, support for gamepads, or support for touch controllers. By choosing to support both gamepads and touch controllers, then they’re forced to go with a lowest common denominator gameplay that both controllers can support. They can do innovative gameplay design with either the gamepad or with the touch controller, but not with both. Because they’re planning on focusing on creating a launch title for the Rift, then they’re choosing to support gamepads, and not commit to touch support until they’re further into the development cycle.
Ikrima also talks about the choice on going with a miniaturized tabletop aesthetic in order to have all of the action within the nearfield sweetspot of VR, which maximizes the parallax effects and magic of VR. The other competing player will be represented in a 1:1 depiction enabling the players to express their creativity through a number of taunts, humiliation animations, and overall boasting. Ikrima says that a smoke bomb released on the race track could also temporarily block your first-person perspective of what you avatar can see. The miniaturized VR action will also lend itself well for spectators to watch the action from within VR as well.
The Kite & Lightning team has relocated to Paris in order to focus on prototyping and developing this game. They’re still early within the development process, and so they don’t have any gameplay footage or trailers to show just yet beyond a piece of concept art which shows how the immortal “beby” characters are trapped within the bodies of a 2-year old baby. Ikrima says that surreal and humorous nature of these “beby” characters helps to defy your expectations and overcome the uncanny valley with their stylized cinematic reality art direction. Ikrima describes the game as a combination of Mario Kart party mode and Super Smash Bros, and they are targeting their launch to be within a month or two after the consumer release of the Oculus Rift.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:18.415] Ikrima Elhassan: And we are here to talk about, you know, kind of a big announcement we have, which is that we're making a game. We're back to making an original Kite and Lightning experience. And this next one is going to be a comedy game. And we've kind of been tucked away in Paris for the last three months. We've kind of relocated from Los Angeles to kind of like, bury ourselves into just working on this next thing to kind of get away and hide from all the distractions that are in LA, to be able to just kind of focus on this thing. And now we're finally talking about it after three months of brainstorming, ideating, and prototyping.
[00:01:00.130] Kent Bye: And so I know that Titan Lightning has been very involved in cinematic VR type of experiences. And so does this have a story element or a cinematic quality? Or maybe you could tell me a bit more about what it is that you're actually creating.
[00:01:15.374] Ikrima Elhassan: Totally. So, you know, we definitely are super excited about cinematic, narratively driven, you know, VR. There's definitely going to be a lot of those elements in this. The best way I could describe the game is that it's a vehicular melee party brawler. So if you can imagine Mario Kart Battle Arena mode plus like Smash Brothers, Except instead of Mario and cute characters, it's babies that are duking each other out in these Mad Max-esque style vehicles. So it's a comedy game. We've kind of done the art house drama thing with Sense Peso. We've experimented with doing action with Insurgent. We've done some science and sci-fi stuff with GE for the neuro experience. We were thinking, what about comedy? That's going to be the next thing that we want to explore. No one's really done an interactive or a comedy game in a long time. you know it's kind of interesting to be able to explore like how do you do comedy as an as a game or how do you do comedy even as an interactive experience and then what can you do in vr from a comedy standpoint that you can do in other places. So that kind of spawned a bunch of ideas and we were kind of like experimenting and prototyping and we love this idea that we've kind of settled on now. So the name of the game is going to be called Babylon Battle Royale. I'll play on the word Babylon. We're not talking too much about the details and the concept and the backstory, but the high-level gist of it is that in the future, humans discover an immortality pill, but the side effect of it is that no one physically ages past the baby stage. You have all these baby-looking adults in the future, and then the only way to settle things, because everyone's immortal is through humiliating people in these battle arenas. So you get to like control this, you know, your baby, you know, in a kind of a tabletop miniature third person point of view. But the beauty of it too is that we keep you, your avatar and the other person's avatar in it. So even though you're playing, you know, against like a this third-person viewpoint tabletop where it feels like you're basically like, have a remote control car that you're like dashing around and like throwing missiles and like, you know, humiliation bombs and taunts to the other combatant on the tabletop. You can still see the other person's avatar across the tabletop. So that opened up some really interesting dynamics. Like for example, you know, the whole game is very adult humor based. You have this kind of beautiful contrast of these cute kind of babies, this kind of fun art style with super adult mature humor. So like if my baby combatant is running around and I choose to do like a classic quote unquote crouch hug, to the other combatant, I can either like taunt the other baby that's on the tabletop, or I can have my baby kind of like fly up to your face, you know, into your avatar, right, and like flip you off. So now it's kind of like you've never been able to kind of have that this dual layer of like interaction where like I'm playing against the combatant that you're controlling but I'm also playing against you in VR because I see your avatar and it feels very much like when we were back in the day playing you know games you know in front of the TV you know with like your friends on the couch and like you know whenever you beat them in a race or you beat them in Mortal Kombat or Soulcalibur or Smash Brothers and like you'd hear their reaction you'd see their facial reaction that was like half the fun beating the shit out of your brother or your friends. So all of that has kind of gotten us really excited, and then we felt that this was a killer concept or a killer idea in this huge world that we want to build out. And we're like, this is going to be the first thing we do. This is going to be our launch title.
[00:05:23.153] Kent Bye: And so maybe you could tell me a bit about why does this need to be in VR? What is virtual reality adding to this experience that you couldn't do in, say, 2D?
[00:05:33.035] Ikrima Elhassan: Totally. VR on a baseline just has this dimension of amplifying whatever emotion that you can create in an experience. So on a baseline level, it's this magical feeling of seeing these babies and these cars running around duking each other out. So it's hilarious just being in there and seeing these miniature babies running around and duking it out. The taunts are funnier, like the comedy that just gets amped up a lot more. The beauty of that is that now, kind of harking back in VR, is that now that I have you as an avatar, so it's like me, I have my avatar in there, and then I also have my baby, which is the miniature thing that's running around the tabletop. And in VR, nowhere else can you really get that in a 2D experience. If me and you are playing against each other outside of being in the same room, if we're just playing each other online, and let's say playing Mario Kart or something like that or Super Smash Brothers, better example. If I'm beating you, I'm beating really the combatant that you picked. So if you pick Mario and I pick Sonic, it's like I'm beating this removed representation of yourself. But in VR, we can be duking it out, like my Sonic can be attacking your Mario, but when I have my avatar that represents Akrima in there, and I see your avatar that represents you, then I can see all your reactions. and you can see all my reactions because you have my head movement, you can see my hand if you have the controllers or if you have the vibe, and I can hear your voice. So we have this dual-layer mechanic of playing against just the other combatants, so me and Sonic, my Sonic, and your Mario duking it out. But I can also play against you yourself. So for example, there's a lot of interesting interaction that we can do now. So take a flash grenade, for example. or take a smoke bomb, right? So like I can do that as just a very simple example. I can throw that like in any traditional game, right? You throw the smoke bomb and the smoke bomb is like around like the character that you're controlling, right? But what's really interesting is like we can start to do that where we can like start to throw like a flash grenade at your avatar and if it lands right in front of your like you know, where your VR headset is in space, it would kind of blind you as you would expect. And so that dual layer of interaction has like opened up a huge area of things that you could only really do in VR. And then there's other things too that like in VR being able to spectate is fantastic even if you're not playing. Like spectating on a 2D game is kind of interesting, but spectating in VR mode, especially when this arena style game where it feels like you're back to the days of like gladiators and shit. is really exciting. And then it opens up ideas and worlds of being able to have interaction from the spectators. So just like you can have the spectators on the sidelines of the arena be part of the level, or they can mess around with the players, like throw tomatoes at them. and do all sorts of things to change the gameplay a little bit in interesting ways. So for us, there's all this amazing stuff that we can now do in VR and we can now, it's really the first chance we get to have in-depth interaction design in our experiences because we're not limited by a specific time slot that we have to make the experience under and the production schedule and the production budget's a little bit bigger, so we can really dive into all of that. And then, of course, when you add touch and the hand controllers, there's all sorts of awesome stuff that we can do now that you could never do in a 2D game.
[00:09:26.464] Kent Bye: Right. And I want to address this comedy point because it's really interesting that Oculus Story Studio originally conceived of Henry as being a comedy. And what they found was it's not really a comedy at all. It's more of like you go in there and It's like this really heart-centered connection. And there's this quote from the director, Sacha Unseld, where he says, it's funny because with Henry, we said it was going to be a comedy. And we learned from Pixar to make a laugh really land, you have to really care about a character. And so I think Henry, for the most part, is more emotional on a sad spectrum. You feel for Henry. You want him to have a hug. And continuing this quote, it says, it's funny how most people come out saying, I didn't laugh a lot, but I was crying. And we're like, that's it. We just wanted to make an emotional connection. So it's funny to kind of think about this VR medium, that in order to make someone laugh, you have to care, but yet It's sort of, when I watched Henry, I didn't laugh at all. It was more of like, I did feel this really heart centered connection, like the sadness when he wasn't getting a hug. And so I'm curious what you think about that and how to do, you know, your experience of Henry, but also how to approach comedy in VR.
[00:10:36.819] Ikrima Elhassan: Yeah, no, it's, I mean, I think that Henry was definitely not a, there was like funny moments in there for sure, but it was definitely not a comedy per se. And Story Studio has this slate of shorts that they're producing, and so they're doing the same things, you know, like exploring the different genres of these shorts to see kind of like what works and what doesn't work, and like how does y'all change these different kind of genres. And I think that's exciting, I think that's super smart and I think it's the same thing that we kind of are doing in that as the best way to figure out how to make the best thing in VR I think is to kind of explore the space quite a bit and try a lot of different things so that you can see like what works in one area and apply it to another area and what doesn't work in one area and might kind of like work in the comedy setting. So for example, for us, one of the beautiful things about making this thing a comedy-based thing as opposed to a drama is that a lot of the characters that we have in VR are now actually, we've turned them into kind of advantages, right? So if we were kind of traditional, like, photoreal, you know, cinematic, dramatic kind of experiences, the VR has a very high performance requirement, you know? So you're fighting a lot of problems, you know, to make something look photoreal, right? And it's technically demanding and it's technically Ancient law is super expensive. And so, in a drama setting, if you wanted to tell kind of like a human-based, character-driven story, and you don't hit that mark, right, like where your characters, your people aren't photoreal, or even if the performance and everything is great, but like the lip-syncing is terrible, you know, between your CG character and the audio, that will kind of like be a big detractor and take you kind of out of the experience. Whereas now, because we've made this thing, we've chosen to do something in comedy, that constraint of that performance and that really difficult production technical bar to hit is now a bonus because unique aesthetic, it's not photo real, it's this unique style that's funny. So there's all these things when playing in the realm of comedy that are really easy to get around, and that's just one example of them. So a lot of constraints where it's like things that break reality but in a comedy cartoonesque setting like becomes like really funny and magnified because we can exaggerate it. We can like make everything like a caricature. And then not only does it become really really funny but it also works well within the technical constraints that we now in VR.
[00:13:18.239] Kent Bye: And so have you been able to prototype some of this and kind of actually see what makes you laugh or what is funny?
[00:13:25.542] Ikrima Elhassan: Oh yeah, totally. We've been prototyping for the last month and a half and it's amazing how awesome watching babies like the classic taunts that you have in any animation in any game in VR it's awesome because it's visceral and then it's like Baby, like there's one of our favorite characters that I kind of like playing with now is this Irish gangster baby. And having him like get out of his vehicle, you know, the vehicles are all open air design. So it's like you see the characters and the baby in them. It's kind of like Mario Kart. You know, you see all the characters, you know, they're not hiding inside of some, like, vehicle. And the idea is that, you know, when he's, like, flipping people off, or, like, dancing, it's, like, absolutely hilarious, and then it's absolutely hilarious, it's, like, you do that, and, like, we see, you know, each other's reactions on the headset, you know, and someone goes, like, wins, you know, you end up being, like, oh, goddammit. The art style has kind of been super ridiculous. Some of the specials and moves that we've kind of come up with has kind of made us laugh hysterically. And then there's a lot of things that we're not ready to quite yet talk about because we don't want to over-promise anything until things have kind of settled. But there's this whole slew of things that we've kind of been playing with and testing out. Every day we're just in the studio just laughing our heads off like, oh man, this is going to be awesome.
[00:14:47.379] Kent Bye: Yeah, that's the thing with VR is to be able to have experiences that you can't have in real life and to have these baby characters that are tattooed with skull buckles and just these hats and, you know, really adult facial expressions, you know, like, but in a baby's body is kind of ridiculous, so. Right. I mean, it's ridiculous in the way that it just, it's sort of absurd and could never really happen in real life. And in some ways it's like fighting against the uncanny Valley because it does have this very stylized look that it's not anything that you would really ever expect. And so you probably have more freedom to kind of explore that, uh, that realism, but it sounds like you're kind of moving around. How are you dealing with a locomotion? Sim sickness?
[00:15:35.432] Ikrima Elhassan: There's a couple of different level types that we're playing with. The one that's really easy is the tabletop analogy. You and I's avatar would be like, imagine if we were sitting across a giant table, right? And we're just kind of looking down at the table. And then the babies are like running around miniature on the table. So the babies are moving around quite a bit across the school. But you and my avatar were locked so it's like third person fix. So that won't make anyone sick because your avatar and my avatar wouldn't be moving. We've explored with some amazing things about being able to shift from third person to kind of like still third person, but kind of maybe over the shoulder of the baby. You know, so that's kind of a little step up depending on what your comfort level is with the motion sickness. You know, for me, I can handle that mode, especially when like miniaturized because we like overcrank the IPD so that the babies and the world feels miniaturized. And so as the kind of like the boom camera, you know, like you're kind of moving with the baby in this other mode. But it still feels not too bad because everything is miniaturized and for me personally, it works well. Then there's another type that we're kind of playing with and exploring and that is like the couch knights. You know, if you played couch knights, your avatar sitting in the world, right? And then you have kind of these, the chibis that you were like running around, controlling the game path, kind of running around you. So our avatars are still fixed, but you know, the combatants are kind of running around. We're exploring that as kind of some of the level designs where it kind of enables us to kind of do different things, you know, like we have the level that you're inside of, like you're in Manotaur affixed, but like the world around us can kind of like change and morph from one thing to the other, and that's super exciting.
[00:17:27.371] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think that playing Lucky's Tale and seeing that kind of third person perspective, it really, to me, shows the power of that sweet spot of VR, the near field VR, where you have these kind of tabletop miniaturized experiences. And I think, to me, those are going to be some of the more compelling experiences in VR just because whenever you play with like a dollhouse, you never see the characters like really come alive. And when you see that in VR, the stereoscopic effects of it just are super compelling. So I'm really curious to see how this plays out. And what was your kind of inspiration to go that route?
[00:18:02.595] Ikrima Elhassan: I mean, I love third person miniature VR experiences. They just feel so visceral and magical in a different way. You know, I think, you know, first person is an obvious thing. You know, it's like, you can imagine why, like, first person VR would be really awesome, especially if the experience was made really well. A third person for me, personally, is way more interesting right now because there is this kind of uncanny valley of presence, you know, so more realistic things are. the more everything has to work the way you expect otherwise and then presence becomes this very finicky thing that you can destroy. So for example, if I'm in a first person point of view and I'm trying to, I think I expect you to die. So it's like I'm trying to unscrew something and if I pick up the screwdriver I expect that to work. But if I also pick up the knife or something and try to turn it, I expect that to work because now I have an expectation that the more real it gets, the more I have this combinatorial explosion of how much everything has to fit and feel like the real world. The second it doesn't, you get yanked out of it. In third person, I think you avoid a lot of that because it's already a disconnect between It's not one-to-one mapping of reality and this virtual world. You still have presence, but you have presence in kind of a different way. Like, everything feels real. Like, if I'm third person and floating kind of like Lucky's Tale, for example, the art style itself is already kind of cartoony. It's like... I feel that he's there and he's a real thing, you know, but I don't have this expectation. It's because I'm never in real life floating, you know, falling behind some kind of animated. So that opens up a huge world of possibilities. It allows people to suspend their disbelief much easier.
[00:19:57.434] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah. I've totally found that as well. And, um, with that third person perspective, then how, how do you expect to kind of use the, the motion controllers then what could you be able to do? Are you actually picking up the characters and moving them around or what are you doing?
[00:20:13.958] Ikrima Elhassan: Well, so yeah, the game is definitely coming out for launch in May or June next year. You know, we're not ready to talk about yet whether we're going to or not going to support the touch controllers. It's just not one way or the other yet. There's kind of some fundamental challenges to deal with because, you know, I kind of tell people you can have two out of three things. Gamepad support, innovative VR input gameplay, or touch support. Trying to do all three of them is super challenging, you know. Because fundamentally, the thing that you can do with touch controllers is widely different than what you can do with a gamepad. And the thing that makes one of them good makes it shitty for the other thing. So you have to pick the lowest common denominator. So that kind of takes out innovative VR input gameplay. And then you can have really good support for the gamepad and the touch controller. Or, you know, you can have really innovative VR gameplay with a gamepad, but then anyone who has a touch controller, it's not going to get the optimal experience. It's going to be kind of, like, shitty. And then same thing if you do something really innovative with a touch controller. Like, what you can do with touch, especially in a combat, you know, like, competitive multiplayer game, like, you know, what you can do with touch can, if you make the game built around that, is, like, awesome and amazing for those touch controllers, but, like, If you have a gamepad, you'd be like, screwed, you know? So there's a lot of open design challenges around that, but we'll kind of announce later on as the months go by of kind of like what our plan is. Fundamentally, we are supporting the gamepad out of the gate.
[00:22:00.530] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what's sort of the next steps for you as you're moving forward towards the launch?
[00:22:06.815] Ikrima Elhassan: you know, have first announcement and then, you know, what we're going to do is, you know, if people go to bedlawnvr.com, they can kind of subscribe to newsletter and see your updates and the blog. And we're just going to have a, an open kind of development style as we continue. And you'll be sharing more details like concept art, like design a game. And, you know, some of the, the things that we're making. We're building the experience. In the next episode, we'll be making some bigger announcements.
[00:22:38.583] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks for having me. And thank you for listening. If you'd like to support the Voices of VR podcast, then please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash Voices of VR.
