Shooting a bow and arrow in VR is a satisfying game mechanic. It uses both hands in a 6-DoF interaction that can only happen in VR. VR Unicorns’ #Archery takes this bow and arrow shooting mechanic to the logical extreme in a quirky fashion that’s similar to #SelfieTennis, and it’s now available on early access. I had a chance to talk with developers Jakob Johansson and Max Nilsson at GDC where they talked about their game jamming and rapid prototyping process that’s motivated driven by novelty and getting bored easily.
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There are a lot of mini-games interspersed throughout these different shooting experiences that range from shooting newspapers into mailboxes, ingredients onto pizzas, boxes from conveyor belts, moving targets on the top of a roof, and even ice cream cones onto the heads of children. There’s a tablet interface available at any moment to navigate between the different environments and games, and there’s a range of mechanics ranging from impossibly difficult to casually destructive to training your brain to switch contexts and pay attention to many rapidly changing variables. Overall, #Archery is a lot of fun, and you can expect that the developers will continue to rapidly prototype and develop new and quirky game ways to shoot things with a bow and arrow.
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Music: Fatality & Summer Trip
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. My name is Kent Bye and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. So at GDC this year, I had a chance to try out a number of different games, both from the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. And Valve had made available to a number of different developers, different experiences that they wanted to show. And Valve was really looking for new, innovative gameplay mechanics. Whereas I think the Oculus games at GDC were much more focused on sort of polished, finished experiences that should be coming out later this year. So I tended to get a little bit more experimental and innovative gameplay mechanics that I was seeing at the Valve booth. And so one of them that I'm going to be featuring today was the Hashtag Archery from VR Unicorns. They're the development shop that did selfie tennis, and they're game jammers. They rapidly iterate, and they are constantly trying to evolve and put in new mechanics into their experiences. So Archery is basically combining the archery mechanic that you would see in Valve's The Lab with a lot of interactive minigames that you're kind of hopping in between. And so you have a lot of agency to jump in and out of these different experiences. And so I had a chance to talk to the developers Jacob Johansson and Max Nielsen about their rapid iteration game jamming process on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. But first, a quick word from our sponsor. Today's episode is brought to you by the Voices of VR Patreon campaign. The Voices of VR podcast started as a passion project, but now it's my livelihood. And so if you're enjoying the content on the Voices of VR podcast, then consider it a service to you in the wider community and send me a tip. Just a couple of dollars a month makes a huge difference, especially if everybody contributes. So donate today at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. So this interview happened at GDC that was happening in San Francisco from February 27th to March 3rd, 2017. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:13.855] Jakob Johansson: My name is Jacob, and I'm doing both programming and graphics in this game.
[00:02:19.357] Max Nilsson: I'm Max, I'm the other half of Archery. I'm helping out with, yeah, I mean, there's the two of us, so Jacob tends to do most of the work, and I help out on the side, programming, graphics. Everything, I think. Yeah, since there's only the two of us working on the game.
[00:02:38.393] Kent Bye: Cool, so I think that the thing that was really striking to me is that it felt like a mashup between Job Simulator and Valves, the lab, shooting arrows. And so it seems like you're taking a mechanic that's very satisfying and then trying to gamify it in different ways. And so maybe you could talk a bit about what you're doing there.
[00:02:58.376] Jakob Johansson: Yeah, it all started as a game jamming thing. I had a very early prototype of the bow and arrow and we were just game jamming and then Max said something, maybe we should be like baking pizzas. And I was like, okay, how do we combine that? And then we were like thinking about, okay, we can spew ingredients on the arrow. Okay, and then we have like the targets and that were the pizzas coming in. So it all started like that, and then we just wanted to make, because we were watching, we were looking at other archery games as well, but they all went like, they wanted to be realistic, medieval stuff, and we just wanted to do something quirky, and I mean, me doing graphic modeling and stuff like that, I mean, I'm not the best at it, so I had to come up with a style that actually works for me to do, so I mean, that's why it ended up being like this, and doing realistic stuff, it's not my cup of tea, so I wanted to do something quirky.
[00:03:50.044] Kent Bye: Well, yeah, and I think that, you know, it's in the vein of Job Simulator in that same sense, that same aesthetic that actually I think puts me into this mindset of just wanting to break the rules, let's say, or like, you know, do things that I wouldn't normally do and just like really explore, like what I can shoot windows and So it seems like you've got a number of different elements here. You have these, like, different environments, first of all, where you're shooting things, and then you have these little mini-games where you're kind of transported into a first-person perspective, and then you kind of, like, are playing out with different mechanics with your hands. Maybe we could talk about some of these mini-games that you have within the context of this archery game.
[00:04:26.916] Max Nilsson: Yeah, and I think the reason why they're there is because Jacob is so damn fast developing the game. So when he's bored, he just wanted to add more stuff and more stuff. So he just came up with this like additional level of stuff like, no, we should have minigames inside of the levels. So he started to add them, come up with a few ideas. And then we just started to like add them on whenever we had a good idea. So we have, can you tell about Julie's mom wanted to
[00:04:57.316] Jakob Johansson: She wanted to have a florist game or whatever, so I added a florist game where you cut flowers into the pizzeria, so if you shoot outside, there's gonna be a florist game so you can cut flowers. But the fun thing about the minigames is also, I was thinking about the... I mean, you shoot a bow and arrow and you do the same motion a lot, so I wanted to mix it up a little bit, you know, do something else with your arms, so you don't do the same thing all the way through. And then again, I mean, as Max said, I get bored quite easily. So when I'm waiting for something, like if I'm waiting for Max to finish something, I'm like, I'm going to add a minigame. I actually have like a prototype for a computer game inside the game, which I'm also thinking about adding, but I haven't really added it. So, I mean, and there's a lot of levels that is like, we don't have them in the build right now, but we have a lot of levels. I mean, we're just trying stuff.
[00:05:50.470] Kent Bye: Yeah, you know, I played Valve's The Lab with Archery, but I agree, I just get bored. It's a mechanic, it's fun for a little bit, and I'm not the type of person to always want to just get the global leaderboard high score. So I think in this game, the other thing that you have that I think is really innovative is that you have this little iPad that you can pick up and you can transport yourself into the different worlds. And I think that is really interesting to allow the user at any moment that they're bored, they can like switch their context and go to a completely another world that has a different mechanic of what you're trying to shoot. So maybe you could talk a bit about, you know, developing that and what you were trying to do there.
[00:06:29.567] Jakob Johansson: I think it started as we just heard somewhere that it's bad to have a real UI in VR games and we were like thinking, okay, so what should we do then? And then we had like a little phone from the beginning that we can just control with one hand. But then we wanted something bigger because we wanted to display scores and stuff. So I think that's where it came from. We were just thinking about VR being in the game using real world stuff. So we were just thinking, OK, let's add a tablet. So that's where it actually ended up. And about the minigame stuff, because we actually added like a minigame app to the tablet as well, but that's not finished yet. So we might have minigames on the tablet as well.
[00:07:13.288] Kent Bye: It's like a metagame within a metagame. It's many levels of Inception here. You're in a VR game and then you're playing a minigame and then within that minigame you have a minigame of minigames. It's games all the way down.
[00:07:25.058] Max Nilsson: I guess you notice the TV in the apartment. We have like this start scene. It's your apartment. There will be some progress. You see your trophies and you also get some So fun stuff showing up, depending on what you're doing in the levels. And of course there's a TV there, and we're thinking about using the TV for...
[00:07:45.956] Jakob Johansson: I was thinking about you have the vibe controllers and if you played Wii then you could have like a type of game console that works like the Wii but you can play it on your TV so I mean you can do I mean I'm just thinking about the main game is archery but then I just want to try different types of interaction in VR so I if it's good I'm gonna add it into the game if it's not then I at least tried it so playground
[00:08:13.820] Kent Bye: I think one of the most fun levels that I had, and Julie said that it's the one that you guys have been playing a lot and enjoying as well, is the game where there's unicorns of different colors and you have to shoot all the other ones that are not that color. And there's kind of like a labyrinthian going through this little area where you have to get the timing just right. So you're kind of pushing the mechanic of all the different things, everything from long range to like short range to like trying to mix it up. So when you think about that and you're designing these different levels, how do you kind of think of the groups or taxonomy of different types of games that you're doing within this archery? You're really kind of like innovating on all the different types of things you could do with archery. I'm just curious to hear you, your design process for each of these.
[00:08:59.589] Jakob Johansson: I usually, so my design process is I usually put my kids to bed and then I sleep for an hour or two because I always fall asleep when I put them to bed. And then I get up and I always have like some fresh idea in my head. And then I just try stuff. I mean, but I'm trying to limit myself to, okay, you're an archer and you're, I mean, we have levels that we haven't showed. We have like a cinema. People are picking up their phones and you're supposed to shoot them in the face with a boxing glove. And also we had like an elevator we were standing in that goes to different floors. It even opened up into a bathroom where people were doing all kinds of stuff. They were supposed to deliver a package to one person at that floor. So I mean, I don't know.
[00:09:43.573] Kent Bye: So you're shooting, you're in a pizzeria, you're shooting vegetables onto a pizza, you're shooting newspapers into a mailbox, you're shooting an airplane with balloons going by, you're shooting long distance
[00:09:55.796] Max Nilsson: Bullseye graveyard with zombies you need to fend off.
[00:10:00.720] Kent Bye: The one that I felt like that I didn't get like I got transported into the world and there was like these kids running around and so then like the kid comes up and flips over the the thing I was like wait what what's what are you doing and then Julie's like you're in an archery game you're supposed to shoot the kids and I was like but it's their kids. So you shoot them with ice cream cones. So it's a little less than killing them.
[00:10:24.636] Jakob Johansson: I think you have to add that. If you just say you shoot the kids, people might be offended. But if you just say, OK, but it's an ice cream cone at the end. So they want ice cream. That's why.
[00:10:37.042] Kent Bye: So you're delivering ice cream cone through a mechanism of a bow and arrow to their forehead.
[00:10:40.764] Jakob Johansson: You don't have to raid your ice cream cart. You just have to fend them off, because they're all hopped up on sugar. So that's why they're running towards the ice cream cart.
[00:10:50.187] Kent Bye: Now, there's also a number of different trophies that are showing up in the apartment. So you have this sort of like, you're building this world, rich, full of kind of mechanics and different things that are happening. And you're playing in here in order to kind of discover different things. So what's going on with the trophies that start showing up in the apartment?
[00:11:09.067] Jakob Johansson: Well, that's more like steam achievements. If you do certain things, for example, if you shoot all the outhouses, you get like a... I think it's currently called Michael Bay because you're blowing shit up. But we might change that name. But I thought it worked. So we have all this kind of stuff we're doing. But mostly we want the game to become a party game. So we're thinking about adding more stuff so that you can play with your friends easily. When you're sitting on the sofa at home or whatever, you just play and you try to beat each other's scores.
[00:11:46.574] Max Nilsson: The headset and then also thinking of adding Mechanics for someone playing with a game controller like watching the screen maybe playing as the chef I mean just fuck around like be in the way of the person trying to complete the pizzas or maybe Be helpful like to collect the score for the pizza you actually be running and catch the pizza, like in a pizza box or something, and if the person misses, the team doesn't get the score for the pizza and they need to complete more and more pizzas. Maybe be able to drive the pickup, like slowly, to side to side, or trigger other stuff in the suburbia. level, there would be lots of things to be able to trigger for the people sitting in the zone.
[00:12:31.011] Jakob Johansson: Spawning stuff like, maybe like Paperboy, I mean, you know, runs out or runs in front of the car, whatever, maybe we can just add more gameplay. I mean, we haven't had like a multiplayer test. There's a lot in this game that I'm just trying out, so.
[00:12:47.730] Kent Bye: And so I'm curious to hear your guys' own skill level of archery as you're playing. I know that as I was playing this, I wasn't a great shot at all. I mean, I just felt like I was missing a lot. And so it's got a little bit of a skill that you have to develop. But I'm just curious from you as a developer if you feel like you're still kind of like improving your archery skills within VR.
[00:13:07.803] Max Nilsson: Yeah, I guess. And we actually changed the bow a few days ago before coming here. Yeah, so I'm adjusting to the new bow. It's really nice, but yeah, some adjustments and yeah, I mean, I've been playing it for almost a year now, since the inception of it.
[00:13:29.123] Jakob Johansson: Real life pro. The thing is that I would really try real archery just to see if I'm actually good at it because, man, you should see me in the paper delivery scene. I break every window, I deliver every newspaper.
[00:13:47.249] Max Nilsson: Perfect score. But you can also see that when you try it on new people who haven't played it. There's like a minute when you're like, oh god, it's not working at all. And then it just seems to click. Like the mechanics you need to... pull it like quite far back to get speed and range of the arrow and then to just start playing with it. Especially the scene that picks up the most when I try it on people is the park scene with the ice cream. People like feel the joy of shooting kids and... Feel the joy of shooting kids, yeah.
[00:14:21.232] Jakob Johansson: In the face with ice cream, yeah.
[00:14:23.622] Max Nilsson: No, but it's always in the beginning when people don't get the bow mechanic, like if they're like first time on the Vive or whatever, but usually takes one or two horrified minutes as you as a developer look at them helplessly trying to shoot, but they're usually clicks, then they start, and of course, I mean, they will miss, they will like shoot very like not so far, but every minute they improve and then I think Everyone reach a really good level in just a few minutes usually and can play around with all the levels without any any help or so That's really fun to see like it takes just a few minutes to get into this
[00:15:02.527] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think just from what you were just saying about changing the physics of the bow and you having to adapt, I think that could actually be an interesting mechanic where you like somehow change the weight of, or maybe you go into weightlessness or like extra heavy density and you like have to adjust, but at the same time you get into a certain rhythm, but yet, you know, there's different distances and moving objects. There's basically the mechanics of distance and then moving objects, but then there's the, physics of it all that I think that you could potentially start to have like going to outer space or I don't know how else.
[00:15:33.391] Jakob Johansson: We actually have the, which we're not showing now, but we have an aquarium where you're standing in the bottom of the ocean and there's swimming sharks and fishes around you and they're trying to break the glass. So you have to fix the glass by shooting bubble gum arrows at it. Just, you know, seal the glass. But then, if the glass breaks, we have, like, slower arrows, and you get blurry vision, and you're trying to fend off sharks until you get eaten. So, I mean, yeah, we're trying different stuff, but who knows? We might end up in space.
[00:16:06.994] Kent Bye: So what do you guys want to experience in virtual reality?
[00:16:11.926] Jakob Johansson: I think I'm just... What do I want to re-experience? A really good multiplayer game, I think. I have tried, like, Onward. I thought that was pretty good, actually. But to really experience, I don't know. I think I'm trying everything myself. I'm just doing prototypes, testing stuff, so... I don't really have anything that I can put my finger on that I really want to try.
[00:16:37.543] Max Nilsson: I think I want to try, like, RPG game like maybe The Witcher or Final Fantasy game where you're at an actual party and actually feel the other characters in your party be with you and actually feel that they're there maybe fighting with you or in between fights experience the story and actually know like as I feel you being here have that proximity to other characters. I haven't seen anything of that yet in VR. I think that would be really cool to experience.
[00:17:11.758] Kent Bye: Great, and finally, what do you think is the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:17:23.142] Jakob Johansson: Having a really good social experience, I think. Be able to meet a lot of people. I would like to be able to have a better tracking of the body and stuff, so you really feel the presence of other people in VR. But I think socially it's going to have a huge impact, I think.
[00:17:40.699] Max Nilsson: Yeah, social experience, definitely. I want to be able to, like, do ballroom dancing with someone who's not present in the room. That would be awesome.
[00:17:49.742] Jakob Johansson: He's single, by the way, so... Awesome. Well, thank you so much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.
[00:17:58.016] Kent Bye: So that was Jacob Johansen and Max Nielsen. They are developers for VR Unicorns on Hashtag Archery. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, I had a lot of fun playing this game at GDC. And I think the thing that was just so delightful about it was just that there's a lot of different context switches as you're doing essentially the same mechanic, but they're adding different kind of ring training exercises on top of it. For example, in the pizza experience, you have to look at the recipe and basically shoot the ingredients onto the pizza. When you're in the toy laboratory, you have to see the targets that have a bullseye on it, and you have to be able to hit just those and prevent those from going into one of four different conveyor belts. So you have to be able to have a situational awareness and be able to look all around. And a number of these experiences are essentially like three strikes and you're out. And they're not that easy. I mean, you have to be able to both be able to look at the different variations of shooting things, but you also have to be a pretty good shot to be able to hit these targets that are coming up and down. They're moving. It is fairly difficult and I think it is a type of game that it takes a lot of time to practice and play and get up to a certain level of competency. But for people who've already been playing a lot of these different archery games, both within Valves the Lab and other experiences like Hollow Point, I think the shooting a bow and arrow mechanic is something that you end up seeing a lot in these different games just because it is pretty satisfying. It's a mechanic that you actually have to use the movement of your hands in 3D space in order to shoot. And I think it's something that's completely unique to virtual reality. And you can't really do on a 2D screen or with a abstracted controllers. It's really using the 60 degree of freedom mechanic in a way that is just satisfying. And I think if you enjoy other archery games, then this one is just going to kind of take it to the next level in terms of the different types of ways that you can score points in these different experiences. Now, I will say that it was pretty odd in playing this game the second time, shooting ice cream cones into children's faces. There is still something that is slightly unsettling about that, that I would say, after kind of playing it and looking at the implications of that. I mean, it's sort of ridiculous and absurd that you'd be shooting ice cream cones into children's faces, but You know, it was something that was unexpected, surprising and kind of funny when I played it the first time. And then upon playing the second time, it just, I think it was a little bit more disturbing, especially if you start to talk about, you know, shooting ice cream cones into children's faces. And, you know, it's kind of got these quirky animations and they fall down and run away. And it's not like you're killing children with bow and arrows, but. still just kind of shooting at humans, I think is something that is a level of lack of abstraction that can be a little bit of the pushing against the boundary of what kind of feels okay to do in VR. And it kind of raises larger ethical questions. I think that, you know, generally within VR experiences, you've seen this abstraction of shooting robots or zombies. And, and there are other games where you are playing kind of capture the flag or onward that they mentioned where you are shooting other people. But so, you know, there's just something to kind of look at that. This is kind of like an edgy experience that is pushing that boundary in a way that feels quirky and fun, but also kind of questionable at the same time. But overall, the aesthetic of the game is that it is kind of ridiculous and funny that you'd be doing these different things, you know, like you would never actually be shooting ingredients onto a pizza. It's just more of a gameplay mechanic. So I think within the whole context of the entire experience, it's just kind of like this weird fantasy world. And in hearing the game jamming ethic of the VR unicorns, you can expect that this is the type of game that you're going to see a lot of new mechanics and experimentations and new mini games, new levels continually be updated in this type of experience. And the one thing that I would say right now is that just to think about, you know, the music and sound design is something that I think is kind of taking a backseat to some of the other gameplay mechanics that are there. And not having a very rich sound design is kind of taking away from the overall kind of quirkiness of the experience. And at the same time, I think that this is something that they're going to quickly address and rapidly iterate on all sorts of different mechanics that they've been experimenting with. They mentioned a number of them that didn't even make it into the first round yet. So they did end up having a global leaderboard and some of the high scores on these levels are just absolutely ridiculous. I think that you have to get to a certain level of expertise to be able to really stay in the game for that long. Just because, like I said, you get like three strikes and you're out in a lot of these different levels and it's pretty brutal. Once you're first starting out, you kind of feel like, Oh my God, I just suck. I'm terrible at. being able to hit these, but I think playing these types of mechanics over and over again, you get better and eventually you're able to start to get better and better scores to be able to go after the leaderboards. But the other thing that I really loved about this game is that at any moment you can pick up the tablet if you're bored and be able to switch scenes and switch into different experiences. And I think that mechanic of having a tablet within a VR experience where you're able to navigate around these different experiences is something that is just super effective and I think we're gonna see a lot more of. I know that High Fidelity has started to be using this tablet mechanic as a UI to be able to navigate around. And it's just something that is very intuitive and makes sense. So we're just going to start to see that a lot more. So that's all that 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 become a donor. Just a few dollars a month makes a huge difference. So donate today at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
