Jeff Pobst admits that it’s probably not a new Rift owner’s first thought to go out and buy a tower defense game, but Defense Grid 2: Enhanced VR Edition proved to me how compelling a tower defense game can be in VR. It’s a tabletop scale strategy & puzzle, building game where you’re trying to stop all of the waves of aliens before they steal all of your cores.
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Hidden Path Entertainment has integrated a lot of really interesting information visualizations including a heatmap overlays and a point progression graph so that you can compare yourself to your friends. These are some very interesting visual cues that enable to track your progress and efficacy of your decisions over time, and one that was difficult to implement but dead simple to understand.
There’s also a very simple interface that even supports the minimalist input of using an Oculus remote, and Jeff said that they wanted to have a limited set of simple verbs and actions you could take. This allows you to get deeply immersed within this beautiful levels and while completely focusing on the strategic gameplay.
One of the more delightful surprises is that Defense Grid 2 integrates a hidden object mini-game that encourages you to fully explore and look at their beautiful miniaturized levels in great detail. You can switch between the third-person tabletop view and a first-person tower view in order to watch the action up close, but also get a lot of new perspectives on the different levels.
I had a chance to catch up with Jeff Pobst, the CEO of Hidden Path Entertainment, and the Oculus Game Days event. I was struck with how excited and passionate he was about this game, and it’s one of those games that actually works really well within VR even if it’s not a genre of game that you immediately associate with wanting to play in VR.
Jeff says that there’s anywhere from 14-15 hours worth of gameplay in addition to the many difficulty levels, and a variety of different puzzles and opportunities to cultivate your strategic decision-making skills. Defense Grid 2: Enhanced VR Edition is an Oculus launch title with a comfortable rating, and sells for $29.99.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:00.068] Kent Bye: My name is Kent Bye, and I host the Voices of VR podcast. And back in July of 2015, I quit my job to do this full time. I just love doing it. But I do need your support to help continue this podcast. I've got lots of great insights from GDC and a lot of other conferences that I want to travel to and kind of be the proxy of the virtual reality community. So if you do enjoy this podcast, then please do consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:41.873] Jeff Pobst: I'm Jeff Pobst from Hidden Path Entertainment. I'm the CEO and I was the executive producer for Defense Grid 2 Enhanced VR Edition.
[00:00:49.411] Kent Bye: Great. So tell me a bit about the game that you've developed here.
[00:00:51.773] Jeff Pobst: So we've taken Defense Grid 2, which is arguably one of the best tower defense games there, and we've completely rebuilt it for VR. A year ago, the folks at Oculus came to us and they said, hey, we think your game would be good for VR. And we didn't think they were talking about Defense Grid. We thought they might be talking about Counter-Strike, which we built for Valve but is not our game. But no, they were actually talking about Defense Grid because people love a tabletop experience where you have this miniature world in front of you and you're in complete control. You're seeing it all animate. You're seeing all the things happen in front of you. There's a real delight of looking around, of enjoying it, and then on top of it you have the strategy and the planning and the creative construction of what your best defense is as you battle the aliens in Defense Grid.
[00:01:30.755] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think I have to say that something like these miniaturized worlds do have a really compelling effect in VR because it's like that near-field, miniaturized view on the world. But you can also switch between two different views. Maybe you could talk about the two views that you have.
[00:01:45.200] Jeff Pobst: Yeah, one of the programmers, while I was out on a trip one day, put in a feature and he goes, I know you're going to hate it, but look at it. And it turned out to be, no, we loved it. We all loved it. It was called Tower View Mode, and basically what it did is we put the camera up above the level so you had kind of a God's eye view and you could move around and any of your actual motion would let you see the level and kind of even get close to it. But if you really want to get in close, we actually can now teleport you down to where the towers are and look around. And the worry was, you know, the reason why I think there was some concern at first is it's a strategy game. We don't want you feeling like you have to control the towers or that you have to be directly shooting. You're trying to plan out the perfect defense. But we think we came up with a view that not only gets you in the action, lets you look at it, but you can teleport around to different towers. You can play the game entirely from that position. You can upgrade other towers. You can build other towers. And you can navigate around the map yourself. And you still feel that strategy sense and that sense of being in control without feeling that you have to actually directly control things. And that's why we love it so much. So Mike did a really good job.
[00:02:46.879] Kent Bye: So talk a bit about some of the actual gameplay in terms of the strategy for a given level.
[00:02:51.653] Jeff Pobst: Well, I think one of the things that's exciting about Defense Grid is it's a building game, a kind of a strategy puzzle mix, so to speak. You have some things, we call them power cores, that an incoming force is trying to come and steal and take away from you, and your job is to defend it, and defend it efficiently with just the right amount of resources that you have. And so if you just want to stop the aliens, of course there's multiple different levels of difficulty, and you can come up with a defense, and that's great. But often what people want to do is they want to really compare themselves to how efficient they were. So we have bronze, silver, and gold medals for how efficient you are. And then we also have leaderboards and friends leaderboards to compare you to your friends. And we even have a curve that's going real-time in the game. to show how you are being efficient compared to your friends, which is really very impactful. It's like, oh, oh, oh, here's where he was beating me. OK, I've got to be more efficient at this part of the level. And it's really fun. Typically, you'll have anywhere from 20 to 30 waves of aliens coming in trying to steal cores. There's 14 different kinds of aliens with different kinds of abilities. The ability to heal other aliens, to actually disrupt and turn off towers for about 15 seconds in an area around it, to be able to move fast when in the straightaway but slow in the curves. And then you have all these different kinds of towers, you know, standard gun tower or an area of effect tower such as an inferno or a concussion. based on different areas, long-range towers like missile or meteor, and using these different combinations of towers against what you know the aliens will do, you can come up with that perfect base defense.
[00:04:24.401] Kent Bye: What are some of the core competencies that you think is really developed when someone's playing a tower defense game? What kind of skills do you need to have?
[00:04:31.307] Jeff Pobst: It's funny, I think it really is applicable to a very large group of people. We have 80-year-old grandmothers telling us about their strategy and defense grid. We have young kids who love playing it. One of the things I think we try and do is we try and take core game mechanics we love and make them super accessible to a very large audience. Now VR is going to make them accessible in a completely different way where you're actually put in the world. but that ability to have a really simple interface with really simple verbs. There's where I want to build a tower. This is the tower I want to build. Okay, that's done. Now, where do I want to build the next one? The things you do are very simple, but the thought behind them and how you want to optimize becomes much more complex. So by having a simple interface with a lot of deep gameplay, with lots of variables that you could ignore or you could really try and optimize and pay attention to, it opens up for a lot of people to be able to play.
[00:05:23.754] Kent Bye: Yeah, I noticed that there's a lot of really interesting information visualizations that you have, you know, have a heat map to kind of judge where you're the most efficient or, you know, where they're getting through. Maybe you could talk about some of those layers of information data visualization that you have in a game like this.
[00:05:38.733] Jeff Pobst: Yeah, absolutely, that's exactly right, is that at first all you want to do is be able to play the game, put stuff down, see what happens, but one of the things that's not always obvious, especially in the pathing levels, at a pathing level being a place where you can put towers to redirect where the aliens are going, is what is the current plan for the aliens? So we have an overlay that you can adjust, you can even turn off if you want, that shows where the aliens are currently going to try and get to the cores. And if you move or build a tower and change that path, then we update it in real time. And that's a real good value for a new player who's kind of trying to figure out, okay, where are they going to go, and they can't quite predict as much over skill. Later players may go, no, I see where that's going, and they can turn it off. But for advanced players, they want to know, where am I being the most efficient? Where is most of my damage being done? And so the heat map feature that you mentioned was something that was actually a pretty tricky feature to build, but we really wanted to get it in the game because it helped you identify, oh, this is where I want to spend more time upgrading my towers, or this is my best kill zone, or I've got a good kill zone over there, but I'm not as one over here that I thought was going to be better. Maybe I can do some things to try and make that one better. And the heat map kind of gives you that at a glance. And I think the thing that we're really trying to do in the game is make it about the decision making, make it about the strategy. If we put in UI pieces of information, it helps you make decisions quickly. One thing that's really interesting in the game is that we have a HUD that's kind of up in the sky for many of our levels, but we don't want you to have to ever look at it. So you're looking down at where your build menu comes out, it has the icons of the towers, but we also show a little graph It's really small, it's not very obtrusive, that just shows how much of that purchase is going to take away of the amount of money that you currently have. So you can go, oh, that's really expensive, I don't want to do that, and make real fast decisions. So our goal is to get the interface out of the way and make it all about your decision making, and as you spend more time in it, the interface literally just disappears.
[00:07:28.935] Kent Bye: It seems like that type of decisions and trade-offs would add a lot of replayability to the game because you'd be able to play through it, maybe beat it, but maybe you wanted to do it more efficiently or do it with a higher score.
[00:07:39.446] Jeff Pobst: Yeah, it totally depends on the kind of personality, but there are a lot of people who play our games who will play a level 40, 50 times, will go to sleep thinking, I have solved the level, it can't get no better, and then they'll tell us. They wake up in the middle of the night and they go, oh my god, I know completely how to change that level, and then they have to get up and go play. And so it can be this thing where it's that problem to solve that's in the back of your mind that's easy enough to be something to grab onto, but has enough depth where there's always just a little bit of things you can do to change it to make it a little bit better. and some people love that and it can be a highly replayable game. We have a 15 hour kind of straight through story campaign for a lot of people that's what they'll play but many people will play the seven or eight different challenge modes that are there for every map and then they'll want to get gold medals on every map and now it's find all the gold cores on every map and they'll collect all the different tower items that get dropped and get on to the hardest difficulty levels using those tower items so they can just kind of keep optimizing all the way.
[00:08:38.329] Kent Bye: And so you said that you actually played the game for like five hours in one sitting once and tell me a bit about like that experience in terms of what were you trying to do there?
[00:08:46.192] Jeff Pobst: Well one of the things that happens in VR is because you're putting on this headset and you're literally from your body and your mind's point of view going somewhere else. right? We're providing this fantasy by putting this headset on. It's like you go into VR and you come out of it as opposed to I play VR. People don't use those words. And so when you go into this other place and this fantasy, one of the things that's really important is making you as comfortable as possible. Now there are some thrilling experiences that are very intense and they move you around and there may be some disconnect between the actual motion. Your inner ear says, no, there's no motion. I'm not really spinning around a corner or going anywhere, but your eyes go, yes I am, yes I am. And for some people that can make them a little nauseous, but they can get used to it and they can overcome it. For this game, because it's a tabletop strategy game, we want it to be the most comfortable. We wanted no nausea, we wanted people to have the very best, simple, calm, easy, comfortable experience. And so then one of the questions become, well, I put this headset on, how long can I play for? How long do I want to play for? Can I play the entire 15 hours and feel comfortable? And so a couple weekends ago, I went and played front to back. I wanted to know what the experience was like for the new consumer myself. And I played it for about 15 hours. I did it myself in three settings, about five hours each. I think the only reason I really came out, as we were talking about, was because I got hungry and I wanted food. But really, it was super comfortable and I was really happy about that.
[00:10:06.978] Kent Bye: Yeah, and you've also got a lot of really interesting little mini-games that are happening as well in this sort of diorama, mini-worlds that you have. Maybe you could talk about some of the additional things that people could do in addition to doing the Defense Tower grid game, but to pique their interest as well.
[00:10:21.190] Jeff Pobst: Well indeed, one of the things we found is that because you now have the headset visor on, you have immense amount of peripheral vision. You can see all over the entire level. Before, in any 2D presented game, even if the assets are 3D, I can only show you a screen size worth of what's going on. You're looking through a window. Here you are no longer looking through a window and you can see everything and you can feel everything. And this leads people to want to explore. And they're looking around and instantly when we first put the camera, the 3D virtual reality camera in the game, People are looking around. They're looking under levels. You are looking under levels. People are looking all around. They want to see stuff. And so we go, wow, we really need to enhance that experience. People want to do it. Let's go with that. So we added a lot of detail where people would go and look so that there was that nice, fun detail to find. We added a lot of interactive objects where you can find them and your cursor will glow. You hit on it, it animates or some particles come out and will give you achievements for finding those. And then we added a mechanic called the golden cores and we add five golden cores to every level, and they're kind of a hidden object game, and it's about finding those golden cores and collecting them throughout the levels. And that's been so compelling to so many people, it's really fun to watch. You know, we set out to make the world's greatest tower defense game, and in a way, we also seem to have a really compelling hidden object game as well.
[00:11:35.919] Kent Bye: Yeah, I would say that for people who are not into the defense grid portion of the game, it's really kind of a fun, fascinating game for non-gamers to put them into that experience and to have them try to find those objects.
[00:11:46.678] Jeff Pobst: Yeah, and in fact, for non-gamers, one of the things, because our interface is so simple, we support the Xbox One gamepad, but we also support the Oculus remote. You can hold the little remote, just press the center button and be able to do the entire game, use the four corners of the D-pad around the center button for a couple of features. In fact, some of our programmers, it's their favorite way to play the game. They just tether on the remote to their wrists, they always have it with them. He's even taken it home sometimes at night. But the remote's there with you and you're playing the game and kicking back and relaxing. It's always been the kind of game you could have a soda or a beer with while you're playing, and that still even happens in virtual reality.
[00:12:23.079] Kent Bye: So what do you want to experience in VR then?
[00:12:25.353] Jeff Pobst: Well I think the thing that's so fun about VR is so many of the things we've learned about game development over the years apply but not in the same way and a lot of new things that we never had to worry about in game development are really important now. The sense of presence is super important and you can do things that break the sense of presence and all of a sudden you don't feel like you're somewhere else and that really ruins the experience. In the past game play, that loop of what you're doing and what responds and what you do next has been always the most important thing in creating fun and really figuring that out and trying to make it happen. And now we've got to create fun without breaking presence. We need to enhance that nature of you looking around and feeling like you're in a different place and having that sense of presence. but not try and overuse it or make it difficult for you. There's just so many new cool things about VR. You know, in the quest for the holodeck, we have taken a one giant leap towards that.
[00:13:21.709] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you see as kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:13:27.247] Jeff Pobst: Well, I think the thing that really is exciting about virtual reality, that feature that just is not provided by anything else, is that sense of presence. And by that sense of presence, we can take you to places you haven't been, we can explore new kinds of fantasy fulfillment for entertainment, which is often what we as game developers do, but we can also take you to places you can't normally go. We can give you access to locations that aren't as common. We could put a virtual reality camera on the red carpet at the Oscars and you can be standing next to your favorite stars from movies and that will feel really different. You could potentially be sitting in a chair right next to Jack Nicholson at the Laker game courtside. These places that normally people cannot go can actually be potentially opened up by VR. Virtual tourism is expected to be huge by people who may not even be able to travel. being able to feel like they're really there by putting on the VR headset. Other colleagues of mine say they think intimacy is going to be one of the most killer apps for VR. This idea of actually having a connection with another person because so many non-verbal cues come from that sense of being somewhere else, having wide peripheral vision, feeling like you are there. And so the interactions we may have with characters in future games or movies or whatever could be far more powerful than we've even experienced so far.
[00:14:42.607] Kent Bye: Awesome. Anything else left unsaid you'd like to say?
[00:14:44.948] Jeff Pobst: I'm really excited about this game. I know when people buy their VR headset, they don't go, oh, my first thing I want to do is get a tower defense game. But I think if they give this one a shot, they'll find something super rewarding and exciting for them. And I think we've got something really special here. And I hope the folks who get the headsets really find that out. Awesome. Well, thank you so much.
[00:15:03.592] Kent Bye: Thank you. 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.
