Budget Cuts is a first-person stealth game that’s one of the more fun and engaging room-scale Vive experiences that I’ve played. You’re an aspiring spy trying to infiltrate a robot-protected building in order to approve your job application. Part of the intention behind this game was to push the limits of physical action that was incorporated into the game play with sneaking around, looking around corners, and peaking over obstacles. There’s also a very unique teleportation method where you can look through the lens of a Portal-like window that you can sweep around an area in order to preview your next teleportation destination. I had a chance to catch up with Neat Corporation’s Jenny Nordenborg and Joachim Holmér at Unity’s AR/VR Vision Summit to talk about their design goals with Budget Cuts, some of their favorite stories and reactions to the game, and some of their future plans. Budget Cuts is expected to be finished sometime later this year.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:12.196] Jenny Nordenborg: I'm Jenny Nordenborg, and I'm the co-founder of Neat Corporation.
[00:00:16.379] Joachim Holmer: I'm Joakim Holmier, and I'm also the co-founder of Neat Corporation. So tell me about Budget Cuts. So Budget Cuts is a first-person VR stealth game where you're infiltrating a building where there's a lot of robots in the way. So for this demo we have here, your job is to find your job application and approve it.
[00:00:34.426] Jenny Nordenborg: To become a spy. To become a spy, yeah. Yeah.
[00:00:37.409] Joachim Holmer: Yeah, so it's sort of what we're doing is that we really want to push room scale in VR and have people move around a lot and, you know, crouch behind cover and look around corners. So it's a very physical VR experience.
[00:00:47.862] Kent Bye: Yeah, I thought it was definitely one of the more fun experiences that I've had in VR where you shoot a little teleportation portal and you have this very unique mechanic where you get a little bit of a preview by kind of having a little circle and you kind of get a preview of where you're going. So talk a bit about like how you came up with this teleportation mechanic and then why that works in VR.
[00:01:11.855] Joachim Holmer: So I think it all started when we had like two weeks of prototyping and we of course we wanted to find out a way to move larger distances or longer distances. So you know we started experimenting with a classic you know the blink mechanic where you point somewhere and you press a button and you like immediately teleport there or fade there. But it feels kind of unnatural, and it's very harsh. So we wanted a smooth transition. So we just ended up trying to think of ways to do that. And of course, we've all played Portal, and we're fans of that game. So we just thought that maybe we can have a Portal in VR and still be able to look through it. So we have depth perception and everything. So we still have the stereoscopic rendering. So after a while, we did the tech for that, and it just worked really well. So that's sort of what we did.
[00:01:57.382] Kent Bye: So maybe you can talk a bit about your experience of playing the game and then developing it.
[00:02:02.526] Jenny Nordenborg: I think we're sort of used to playing the game now. It's really magical to see people play for the first time and how happy people look when they take off their headsets.
[00:02:11.693] Joachim Holmer: Yeah, it's kind of interesting that we've sort of played it way too much. So we're very used to everything in the game. So yeah, like Jenny said, it's really exciting to see new people play the game. It's like we rarely get that feeling anymore because we played it too much. So I think it was for me, it was like just a few days ago, I was just playing the game. I was going to try something by the end of the level. So I just sort of speed ran through the entire game and just wanted to kill all the robots to test that. But then I missed one of the robots, and I wasn't playing with sound, so I had no idea where it was. So I just turned around, and it was just standing there. And I sort of got that feeling again of playing it for the first time, where you're actually horrified of the robots. So that was kind of why we started making a stealth game, because we just realized how intimidating enemies are in VR, especially when you're at gunpoint. So yeah, it's an interesting feeling.
[00:03:00.060] Kent Bye: Yeah, definitely having those robots there at any moment that could sneak up on you or shoot you, I think, does give that element of pressure to bend over and peek behind. And, like, it took me a moment to know that I could even, like, teleport through a vent, you know? And it's sort of like, the way you have it set up, it's sort of like you have to really be a spy. As you're designing these levels, you know, how do you balance that super cool mechanic of feeling like, oh, I'm a spy and I figured it out, versus people who are, who may not get it the first go-round?
[00:03:29.530] Joachim Holmer: I mean, we're of course always trying to introduce things in a nice pace, but it's very hard for demoing because we have a very limited amount of time. I think we have five minutes for every person now. Since we're making a game rather than a demo, we sort of have to remove some features to make it easier for new players to jump in and play. But people usually get used to using the teleportation. So it's usually not a problem. The problems we're having is mostly for people to detect where the buttons are sitting and being able to press them, because we're using the squeeze trigger or the side buttons. So it takes a while for people to get used to that. But once they've done that, it's like they walk through, I think, three or four rooms. And then after that, it's fine. They've gotten used to it after that point.
[00:04:10.725] Kent Bye: So what have been some of your favorite stories of watching people play Budget Cuts?
[00:04:14.915] Jenny Nordenborg: Probably when you jump up onto the roof and you can look down, and people forget that there is an actual floor. So they sort of bang their head against the floor. And then they come up and feel really stupid, like, oh my god, why did I do this? And then a few seconds later, they do the same thing again. It's so nice to see people forget that they are in a real room. They're really in the game.
[00:04:37.294] Joachim Holmer: Yeah, we also heard from the people behind Job Simulator at Alchemy, so they tested the game as well, and Carrie, one of the people who worked there, so she tried the game and as soon as she met the first robots, she ended up being detected by that robot, so she had a gun pointed at her. So apparently she just curled up into a ball like in fetal position on the ground and just screamed until she died. So it's kind of interesting how people react to these things. And you know, like, as soon as you're in VR, you feel like you're in the game rather than you're controlling an avatar. So it's really interesting how you can trigger all of those emotions.
[00:05:11.652] Kent Bye: I guess that's a challenge that I see, like, the more I play it, the magic of those first times, you know, tends to be gone, and I haven't played through the whole game, obviously, and for you as game developers, I'm wondering if that's a concerning sign that, like, does that mean that you play through your game once and then you're bored, or, you know, how do you ensure that there's replayability factor to a game like this?
[00:05:34.975] Joachim Holmer: So I think for us, the replayability is not going to be coming from playing the game the same time again. Like, it's not going to be that much more exciting. I think you're going to get used to it after a while, but we're making sure that you can play the game by speedrunning as well and add, you know, extra challenges. So I think that's the replayability from our end at least. But then again, I mean, we've gotten used to this demo, but we haven't really done any more levels than what we have right now. And again, I was scared by the robots a few days ago. So I think as soon as we have more levels, it's going to work out well.
[00:06:07.514] Kent Bye: One of this phenomena that I've heard about going around now is this concept of time dilation, where you're in VR and you really have no idea of how long you've been in, where you kind of come out and you look at the clock and you've been in there for three to 12 hours and it doesn't feel like it. So have you personally experienced that and time dilation in VR?
[00:06:26.218] Jenny Nordenborg: You just forget about time and space and everything. It's always weird to come out of VR. There's something wrong with the lighting in real life.
[00:06:35.827] Joachim Holmer: That's actually a good point. It's not only time, it's space as well. You forget where you are, you forget what you're doing, and you forget how long everything takes. Like, people tend to think they've been in there for just a few minutes, but, like, we had someone over for lunch, so we were eating lunch and then playing the game, and I think it was playing for 45 minutes, and he was like, oh, wow, I need to get back to work, it was just lunchtime, so he completely forgot his time, and it's the same thing here, like, people want to play the game more, and I mean, I think it's with most entertainment, like, If you find it compelling enough and fun enough, you know, time just flies. I think it's just that. I don't think there's anything magical about VR specifically when it comes to time, but I just think people think it's too fun.
[00:07:17.643] Kent Bye: Well, there's Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, which, you know, he's written this book about flow, and you get into, like, these flow states, and I wonder if being in the flow is part of it, or, you know, I just wonder, like, what other different dimensions there may be of people's experiences of why we lose track of time.
[00:07:34.221] Joachim Holmer: It's probably a combination of both flow and fun and presence. Like, you're somewhere else. Like, they're in some other world, and I'm guessing people might think that, you know, oh, this place has a different time, I guess. So I'm not in a real world anymore. So I can just pause the real world and go here and do something, and then come back at the same time. But yeah, I don't know. People just think that the time is just much slower for some reason.
[00:07:58.127] Kent Bye: And so what do you want to experience in VR then?
[00:08:01.627] Jenny Nordenborg: I think it's getting back to playing. Like, just doing things for fun. That's where we started with this game. We want to make something fun. This feeling of being really happy and excited and scared at the same time. It's so rare in games these days, I think.
[00:08:19.723] Joachim Holmer: Yeah, like, there aren't that many games that actually trigger emotions that much. Like, there are many games that are kind of serious games, but not really. Like, there are games that are kind of serious and then the most fun you'll have in the game is sometimes when a bug happens. Like, that's when you actually laugh. but it maybe doesn't happen anywhere else in the game. So I think we want to reach those emotions without using bugs, I suppose. And I think it works quite well. Like, we can trigger those emotions without making a horror game. So we're not making a horror game, but people still find it frightening, but they're still smiling while they're really scared. So I think that's a really nice feeling. So, yeah.
[00:09:00.696] Kent Bye: When is the sort of target release date for Budget Cuts?
[00:09:03.757] Joachim Holmer: End of the year.
[00:09:05.364] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you see as kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what that might be able to enable?
[00:09:14.452] Joachim Holmer: I think for me, I don't know what that is, and that's the exciting part, because there's so much stuff happening all around it. Everybody's learning something new every day. Even for us, if we think of a system we want to have in the game, we just implement it, and then we try it, and we're like, oh, this doesn't work at all, because of insert whatever human reason it doesn't work. So we just have to redesign everything, and I think that's super exciting. So it's really hard to tell what's going to happen, which is pretty cool.
[00:09:43.457] Jenny Nordenborg: Yeah, it's going to be something that we have no idea what it is. Yeah, it's going to be something completely new. That's just so cool.
[00:09:51.586] Kent Bye: OK, great. Well, thank you so much. 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.
