Killing Floor: Incursion is a horror game featuring lots of gore that is sure to evoke visceral reactions in players. I had a chance to play a demo at GDC, and I can say that it’s definitely an experience has stuck with me. The mechanics of beating enemies with their dismembered limbs had an extreme amount of blood splattering that it was a mix of being at the same time grossly disturbing and ridiculously comic. I had a chance to talk with project lead Leland Scali about the horror genre in VR, pushing the boundaries of how far to take gore within immersive VR, and their deeper game design process of creating an experience within their Killing Floor universe.
Scali admits that they’re treading a fine line of it being funny or amusing versus taking it too far, and so it’ll be interesting to see how VR gamers and the larger media react to this experience as it could be a catalyst to larger discussions about the impact embodied experiences of gory violence within virtual reality. He says that this is not an experience about rainbows and happiness, but rather one that’s gory & dark with a dash of quirky humor. Ultimately it seems to be about power — specifically giving the player the power to complete the task, and assaulting them heavily to see if they can handle it.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. My name is Kent Bye and welcome to The Voices of VR Podcast. If there's any one genre that is particularly visceral and intense within virtual reality, it's the horror genre. And I've personally tended to shy away from a lot of these types of experiences but at GDC this year I had an opportunity to play this super gory game called Killing Floor Incursions and this was an interesting experience because first of all it was on the one hand very disgusting with a lot of the blood and the gore and that within itself has kind of stuck with me But then there's the whole kind of sociology behind it and the visceral nature of it. Some people, this is their thing. They go into these types of horror experiences. So this is a kind of a new realm for me. So I'm just like asking one of the lead designers of this game like, okay, what's going on here? Kind of breaking down for me. So we really talk about a lot of the other game design components within Killing Floor Incursions because within virtual reality, there are these four major types of presence. There's the mental and social presence, emotional presence, embodied presence, but also active presence. How can you express your agency? How can you explore through the world? How can you locomote? And these are the types of things that I think the Killing Floor Incursion is really exploring. This high agency exploration game that is unlike anything else that I've experienced in virtual reality before. So that's what we'll be covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Leland Scali happened at the Oculus event happening right before Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, California on February 26th, 2017. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:57.748] Leland Scali: My name is Leland Scali. I'm the project lead on Killing Floor Incursion at Tripwire Interactive.
[00:02:02.612] Kent Bye: Great, so maybe you could give me a little bit of a background in terms of other games that Tripwire has created and your foray into virtual reality then.
[00:02:11.921] Leland Scali: Tripwire is responsible for Make Something Unreal Contest Winner from their mod contest. It was Red Orchestra. And then we moved on to Red Orchestra 2. And then we created a game called Killing Floor, which this is a game that came after that. So then after Killing Floor success, we decided to make a sequel. We made Killing Floor 2 for PC and just released on PlayStation 4. After that, we decided to try something in VR and really just expanding the Killing Floor universe and trying to do something story-based, which we were a multiplayer-only company, so it's nice to try something different. And so Killing Floor Incursion is a string-together campaign experience. It's a lot different than the original Killing Floor or Killing Floor 2, which is more of a horde mode.
[00:02:56.145] Kent Bye: Yeah, it seems like there's a combination here of a number of different elements, which is the first-person shooter, wave shooter that we've seen a lot of in VR, but also some puzzle elements. So maybe you could talk a bit about how you're combining those two.
[00:03:08.878] Leland Scali: Well, like I said, the goal was to not make Killing Floor again. We had already made that game and we've always wanted to do more of a linear narrative. And one of the best ways to do that is to block progression as you go along. So the idea of adding in puzzles and, you know, harking back to games that we loved in the survival horror genre and really making this more of a survival horror game rather than just a straight up arcade horror game.
[00:03:32.535] Kent Bye: What are some of the other games that inspired you in the creation of this?
[00:03:36.415] Leland Scali: I mean, just going back, games that inspired me, period, were, you know, Dead Space and Resident Evil and games that had more of a linear story-driven narrative that carried you through. And whenever you needed to get past a certain point, there was usually a puzzle of some sort to solve or... Yeah, there's kind of like this omniscient voice that comes in to give you little tips as you're going along.
[00:03:57.121] Kent Bye: So maybe you could kind of describe that process of the types of puzzles and also, you know, when you're deciding to give the player a little bit of assistance.
[00:04:06.065] Leland Scali: Okay, so pretty much in the game you are a part of the Horzine security forces, which Horzine is our big company in the Killing Floor universe that you work for in Killing Floor 2, and you're pretty much going through a simulated training for their security forces in Killing Floor Incursion, and you have a training advisor who comes in through a simulated little guy called Node, and he is the on-the-field training assistant for people in the real world, And so during the simulated training, you have a node and they speak to you through that. So if you get stuck in a certain point for too long and you can't figure out what to do, node does come out and your advisor will kind of give you a hint as to what to try to do. And that's really just to help you through.
[00:04:49.495] Kent Bye: Yeah, the thing that I also noticed in playing the game is that there's quite a lot of gore and blood and stuff flying around. And I'm curious to hear that process as you were creating this game, whether or not you felt like you had to dial it back because it's an immersive virtual reality, or that balance between what you can experience on a 2D screen versus what is comfortable within a VR experience.
[00:05:13.217] Leland Scali: So yeah, I mean, Killing Floor 2 in general is super, super gory. So we were coming off of that and everyone expecting us to do that, at least that's what I thought was going to happen. And then we had some mild gore in the beginning through development and it just felt like everyone kept saying like, oh, I want to cut off this guy's arm and then grab it and then beat him with it. And I'm like, you know, that is pretty gross but let's do it anyway and we did and it just depends on the type of person you are right like if you get in there and you're a terrible person by default yeah that might make you feel really powerful and awful but most of the time it's funny it is amusing to grab a guy's head and like flap their jaw around and then throw it at another guy and he stumbles and I don't know. It is a fine line, right? I don't know if we're on the right side of that line yet, but I'm hoping that we are, and I'm hoping that it's okay. Most of the people that end up playing it just end up laughing hysterically, and having a good time, and messing with their partner in the world, and sticking a head in their face, and wiggling around, and it's pretty amusing. Honestly, man, I don't know. We're on uncharted territory here.
[00:06:26.104] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I think that there's this whole thing with zombies and monsters and creatures that, you know, it kind of primes you to be in this fantasy world. And, you know, if these were actual humans, I think it would be a lot different. I think that if they were running around and more human-like, I think that actually would be like way too much. But because it is like this fantasy zombie, I think, you know, maybe you could talk a bit about that.
[00:06:48.518] Leland Scali: Hmm. That's a tough one. I mean, you're absolutely right. If it was real people, it would be way darker. But because they are creatures and you see them and you instantly want to shoot them because you're like, ah, bad guy. It doesn't feel like it's another human. You know, they're not begging for their life. It's not terrible. But really, I mean, the idea of just making a horror game and we had to carry on the Killing Floor universe. It wasn't like we could go and make a game full of rainbows and happiness. Like, we had to make a Killing Floor game. It's gonna be gory, it's gonna be dark, but at the same time if you ever played Killing Floor 1 it had this kind of quirky sense of humor about it. There was a lot of humor in it and a lot of the dialogue was funny and even in Killing Floor 2 there's a lot of funny dialogue and there's a lot of jokes. I mean, I like to think of it more as the Zombieland, Shaun of the Dead motif rather than going just straight dark slasher film. So, I don't know, we try to keep it light and keep it enjoyable. And even an incursion that your training advisor likes to joke with you or like tease you a little bit when you do something dumb or so.
[00:07:53.360] Kent Bye: Maybe you could talk a bit about the different mechanics that you found were satisfying within this experience because you have a number of different weapons and there's a number of different things you can do in order to kill the enemy. So maybe you could talk a bit about the different types of mechanics that you've found to be enjoyable within a VR experience like this.
[00:08:10.993] Leland Scali: So one of the main things that I've noticed in other VR games that we definitely wanted to combat was if you make an action as the player and nothing happens, everything feels broken. Where on a screen if you click and maybe something doesn't happen, it's not as apparent, but if you swing your hand and you pass right through an enemy, right there it's like, oh, something's broken. So making sure that everything the player did affected the world in the sense of fighting enemies. Because when you're panicked and you just grab your gun and whack the guy in the face with it and he stumbles back, everything feels right. Or if you take your pistol and you throw it at him and he stumbles, it feels right. Really just making sure everything that the player did, they didn't feel like something was wrong with the game. They felt like every action they did to an enemy actually had a repercussion and they could use that to their advantage.
[00:09:00.477] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think that there's this principle in VR design which is that you make it plausible so that anything that you're doing, whether it's cutting off the head or the arm, that it's reacting in the way that you expect. And I don't think you can be perfect in that way because you have to do emergent animations. So you have a number of fixed, authored types of animations that you're doing. such that it's not like completely 100% responsive to things I'm doing. But I thought it was still at the same time pretty good. So it seems like there's a balance you have to do as of like create a set of fixed animations and mechanics that you could do. But I think in the future, I'd imagine that you want to be striving more and more towards these more emergent reactions such that you're able to do a collider on the entire body and have all sorts of different reactions.
[00:09:45.802] Leland Scali: Yeah, I mean one main thing that is pretty tough to deal with is you can't stop the player So you can't give them any resistance because there's nothing to resist them with in the real world So yeah, occasionally it feels floaty and you can have that happen But there's really nothing the developer can do about it until the player has like rubber bands strapped to them in some way or can be restricted or we can pull them back or It doesn't take multiple bashes to the neck to take a head off the way it probably would in the real world. But there's nothing to stop them. They're just going to pass through after the initial hit.
[00:10:21.763] Kent Bye: The challenge I think with the Oculus front-facing cameras is that I just kind of wanted to turn naturally with my body and it felt like when I did that I had more presence but yet I found myself facing the opposite way with just front-facing cameras and so I had to have this mental tracking of whether or not if I look down on the ground I see the arrow and whether or not I'm actually facing and then I'm doing the comfort mode turn where I'm actually clicking 15 to 30 degrees to be able to solve it. But whenever I do that, I got a little bit disoriented and losing my sense of place. So I tended to not do that. But at the same time, I kept getting turned around. So maybe you could talk a bit about, as a game designer, the challenge of trying to create a world that is open and realistic, but yet try to manage that front-facing constraint.
[00:11:06.542] Leland Scali: So yeah, front facing, it's a problem. It was hard. We did the best that we could, given that you have comfort mode turn. A lot of people aren't doing that. And their solution is don't let anything ever come from behind the player, which that's not a good solution. If you had a 360 setup, you'd be fine. You could just turn all you want, you don't need comfort mode, and everything works fine. But if you are a two-camera setup, that's our solution. That's all we could do for the player, so they didn't lose tracking. And we also have the guardrail system, which was a system we made for front-facing cameras specifically that Once your controllers are no longer tracked because you're completely 180 degrees from the cameras and the controllers are in front of your body we bring up a wall and It kind of goes into slow motion says please face the sensor and then you turn your physical body in the real world back around and then slow-mo kicks off and the action resumes and So, yeah, we just tried to come up with solutions to help the player not get killed because their controllers weren't tracked where, once again, in other games, if they're not tracked and they let you turn around anyway, you're going to die. There's nothing you can do about it. So we tried our best.
[00:12:13.503] Kent Bye: So I noticed that it was going in slow motion. That was because I was turned around the opposite way and it was trying to get me to turn around. Is that what was happening? Or is that just part of the aesthetic of the game, just sometimes it would kick into slow motion?
[00:12:25.235] Leland Scali: Correct, yeah. In Killing Floor 2 and Killing Floor 1 we had Z-Time, which essentially if you did a certain string of things that were allowing of it, Z-Time would kick in and it would go into slow motion. And then depending on what you were doing while in Z-Time, you could string together multiple Z-Time triggers. So if you just kept getting headshots, you could keep stringing it together and you would stay in slow motion for a longer period of time. And in VR that's really useful because if people can't aim very well, and they do trigger Z time once, then because they move at normal speed, we can't constrain their hand movement or anything, they have time to set up a shot while in slow-mo and keep stringing that together and, you know, if they're overwhelmed... And your little friend Node that comes out, your training robot that the advisor speaks through, he can also trigger Z time when you're about to die. He'll come out and shock all the enemies who are currently around you and stumble all of them back so you have time to save yourself. And that happens once in a while. But we used that also for the guardrail system just to make sure that the player understood what was happening because there's a big blue wall that comes up and it says, face the sensor. So we wanted to make sure that they also knew, hey, wait, I'm also in slow-mo. Something's going on. I'm having time to react to this. But yeah, normal slow motion will kick in, just depending on what you do in the world.
[00:13:43.418] Kent Bye: Can you talk a bit about the multiplayer design that you had to do here? Because I imagine there's both a single-player and multiplayer mode. And how do you do the design of that experience to accommodate both?
[00:13:54.543] Leland Scali: Well, it's not much different. We kind of went with the philosophy that if you're doing it single-player, puzzles may just take longer. But we didn't want to make very specific differences between multiplayer and single-player in the puzzle aspect. I mean, there's more enemies for multiplayer, and they come at you much faster, and there's more ammo. But for the most part, it's almost an identical experience, so the person who doesn't have any friends doesn't lose out. except that in multiplayer, there's something about having another person in the world with you that makes it pretty great, and being able to mess with them and laugh with them and talk over VoIP and stuff. It feels a lot different in that aspect, but gameplay-wise, there isn't many differences.
[00:14:38.638] Kent Bye: Do you have a favorite memory or story of you playing this Killing Floor incursion with other people within VR?
[00:14:45.718] Leland Scali: Well, I'd probably say the best stuff is after the dismemberment came in, because you're sitting there, you're shooting, you're kind of freaking out. And then all of a sudden, the head appears like around you, like and starts fake talking to you. And you look and you're like, wait, that head's not attack. Oh, that's the person you turn around and someone's holding that head and like mouthing words and just being stupid and Yeah, I mean stuff like that is pretty great or I had this idea to do this and then when I did it, it worked really well, which was I grabbed a head, went around a corner when there were no enemies and I just waited until my partner got near it and then peeked out real slow. And they're like, wait, what was that? And I peeked out a little again and then just started flapping it around and like talking and yeah, it's great. I mean, you could just freak people out or, you know, just have fun with them.
[00:15:32.003] Kent Bye: So what's next for this experience? When is it coming out? And what are the things that are yet to be done?
[00:15:38.164] Leland Scali: Stuff that I'm not going to say. I'm not going to answer either of those questions. But so far, I mean, we were showing two-handed weapons here and two-handed melee system. And both of those were new features. The dismemberment was a new feature for this show. And we're in the process right now of just tying everything up and finishing up the game. We don't have a projected release date yet.
[00:16:00.666] Kent Bye: I'm curious to hear more about the horror game genre and what you feel like is, in VR, satisfying in terms of a horror experience. Is it a matter of tension? Is it jump scares or gore? What are the things that you think, the main ingredients, components that, for you, make a satisfying horror experience within VR?
[00:16:21.589] Leland Scali: Well, that's tough because there's different genres, right? You just said them. The jump scare genre is a pretty popular one in VR and people love doing it. They love scaring the player. But in all honesty, I think that's not the game you come back to. After it's worked once, it's over. Whereas we're going more for the you can get better at it. If you're a terrible shot, you're going to suck the whole way through the first time. But by the end, you're going to start getting better at shooting. You're going to be like, oh man, I can do this better. And when you go back, it's going to end up being headshot every time. Or you're going to really enjoy playing melee for the first time. And then you're going to be like, you know what? I want to see if I can beat this level just with beating a Zed with their own arm. Just to see if you can so I guess in the killing floor world and even on the PCN. It's about power it's about giving the player the power to complete the task and then just Assaulting them heavily to see if they can and a lot of people come back to killing floor for that reason because it's a challenge and And it's not a challenge where when you lose, you feel like the game beat you. You just feel like, I can do this better. Whereas our knife throwing mechanic, you know, there's still people in the office who are like, how do you throw the knife so well? And it's like, you practice it. You do it like you would do it in real life. Or how do you get headshots so often? And it's like, well, you learn how to aim a gun, and then you shoot it. You know, if you can't aim, then you're going to miss. Because everything is dead accurate. If you can shoot a gun in real life, you can shoot a gun in Killing Floor. It's pretty interesting. So that's kind of what we're going for. We're not a jump scare game. So if you want that, this isn't that game.
[00:17:56.402] Kent Bye: I'd be curious to hear if being able to shoot a gun in real world and how you feel like it compares to being able to shoot a gun in VR.
[00:18:05.333] Leland Scali: Well, I mean, a real gun has more recoil. That's about it. In VR, you can more accurately hit the target faster than you could in real life, where you have to wait a second for the recoil to die down. We still have recoil, simulated recoil, and we have haptics, but it's not the kick of a .45. Great.
[00:18:26.139] Kent Bye: And so what do you want to experience in VR then?
[00:18:28.724] Leland Scali: Oh man, all the things. I want to experience a ton of stuff. I'm not the kind of guy who wants to do the jump scare game. I'm not that into it. It's fun for a little bit. Flying games are cool, but they can get nauseating depending on what you're doing while flying. Really, I just want to see all the genres get reinvented again. You know, Lucky's Tale did a really good job of reinventing the third-person platformer, and I've seen a lot of RTS attempts recently, and those are coming out pretty cool. The shooter's obviously the one that a lot of people are doing, but they're doing static shooters, so you're just standing in one place and it's a shooting gallery, pretty much. The more adventure-oriented shooter, everyone's dream of Skyrim in VR. That's obviously something that would be really cool. It's just, once again, it's all about that melee combat. It's about finding a way to make it feel good enough and responsive enough without being able to actually restrict the player from continuing their stroke. It's a hard one. But yeah, I mean, open world games would be fun. I'd like to be Batman, that'd be cool. But like, Arkham City Batman, not like the VR Batman they actually made.
[00:19:38.180] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think one of the challenges with the teleportation mechanic is that you could potentially use it as a defense mechanism if you were really savvy, but I don't know if it'd necessarily be satisfying, but do you find that, you know, in some levels you would actually have to jump around a little bit in order to actually get past the level, so it's actually part of the strategy to not just move around and be in one spot?
[00:19:58.253] Leland Scali: Yeah, absolutely. A lot of the boss fights, that's how it feels. Like, you would lose if you didn't get out of the way. They are running at you full speed, charging you, swinging at you, spinning at you, and you need to move, otherwise you will die. So, yeah, I mean, Teleport, that's exactly what it is. The thing that Teleport helps a little bit with is Like in the original Killing Floor games, there's a lot of backpedaling and kiting large groups. You'd think that would happen more with teleport, but it doesn't, because people rarely ever teleport backwards. They teleport to the side. So, I don't know. It's not terrible. With our cooldown, so you can only teleport a certain distance, and then you can keep teleporting, but it'll be shorter distances until your cooldown bar fills back up, and then you can teleport the max distance again. So it kind of combats that a little bit where the player just can't keep spamming teleport and jumping super far away and then turning around and fighting. So yeah, you kind of have to use it as a strategy and think about what you're really going to do.
[00:20:57.186] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you see as kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what am I be able to enable?
[00:21:05.166] Leland Scali: Man, that's a really hard question. I don't know, just doing anything you've ever wanted to do and actually feeling like you're doing that thing. We're not there. We have a while, and everybody knows it, and that's cool. It's just fun to be a part of it now, to be the baby steps of getting there. I will say my ultimate goal is not to murder real people and beat them with their own limbs, but maybe a more intense version of what we have with monsters. That could work.
[00:21:32.861] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thank you so much. Yeah, thank you too. So that was Leland Scully. He's the project lead for Killing Floor Incursion. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that, first of all, I will be really curious to see the reaction to this game, both from the players as well as from perhaps the more popular media and the press. this is the type of experience I think that could kind of catalyze a larger discussion about what's it mean to go into these virtual reality experiences and experience this high level of gore and blood and death and you know usually when you're killing something within a virtual experience there's a certain amount of stylization as well as like it's very clear it's not human it's sort of a dehumanized monster that is humanoid or it's a robot and you're kind of dissociated from the fact that you are in the process of killing these virtual creatures. So there might be something that's qualitatively different from having a direct embodied experience within a game like this. For me personally, I can definitely say that it's kind of stuck with me and I just kind of remember that I played it and it was somewhat oddly compelling and new and novel and different and unlike anything else that I had ever done before, which I think is definitely interesting to experience what that feels like to have that experience. But yet at the same time, I don't feel compelled to go back into it and to play through the entire game. Now, I think that there's also just a lot of other interesting design challenges that they had to face with, with the multiplayer and having to deal with the front-facing camera. If you are going to get this game, I think that having a third camera to do a full 360 is just going to make a world of difference. I think that this is a design decision that Oculus made to be able to do front-facing design. It puts an additional burden on the player to be able to manage your spatial relationship into reality while you're immersed within a virtual reality, because you have to know where your sensors are. So that ends up being like these little arrows and other different slowing down time to be able to give you hints that you should be turning around to not lose tracking. Now they wanted to be able to not just have a zombie horde mode where you weren't having things coming from behind and no ability to locomote. So there's these different trade-offs that I think that this game in particular is allowing you to locomote and move around and to tune the gameplay mechanics in a different way from what most people have been doing with the affordances of VR, which is to not locomote around too much. So this is a horror game genre within the same Killing Floor universe. And as Leland said, it wasn't like they could just go and make a game full of rainbows and happiness. It's very dark and gory. There's the other dimension of the multiplayer aspect, which I found interesting to hear kind of the anecdotes and stories of how you're in this kind of disgusting universe with lots of gore and you're just messing with your other co-players by holding up decapitated heads and body parts and whatnot. It was also interesting to hear how in terms of doing melee in these types of games, there's a challenge between not actually having the ability to give you any hard feedback. And so they have to design the game such that you are just swinging your arm as if they were a ghost and to somehow make that make sense. So at the end of the day, what Leland said is that it's about power. It's about giving the player the power to complete the task and just assaultingly have a Demooner to see if they can handle it. So it's a very high agency active game. So that's all that I have for today. 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 my Patreon. This podcast is listener supported and I rely upon your gracious donations to continue this type of coverage. And if you'd like to become a member and join some of the upcoming events, then check out the Patreon at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
