Cameras, HUD and WTF: improve usability of the next VR game

XEODesign founder Nicole Lazzaro has extensive experience in the gaming industry. She participated in a variety of projects that helped her formulate design theories in the book 4 Keys to Fun.

Now she is working as a lead engineer of the Follow-White Rabbit VR game (in the image above). At the VRDC conference in San Francisco, she gave a talk and shared lessons on how to create convenient and friendly VR games that she and her team received. This is a quick overview rather than a deep dive, but VR developers can find there useful tips on how to make virtual reality games more exciting and interesting.

“No matter how amazing the technology is, it cannot guarantee the quality of the gameplay,” says Lazarro. XEODesign spent a lot of time learning how and why people play VR games. One of the most important discoveries was that most do not want to play VR for more than 15 minutes. According to Lazarro, the first thing to understand about virtual reality is that it captures and touches people on a much deeper, emotional level.

“It affects the central part of the brain,” says Lazarro. “Emotions in virtual reality are deeper, stronger and more personal than anything else we had to work with.”
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Nicole warns that it is easy to forget how such simple things as depth greatly influence the player’s perception of the game. If you do not take advantage of the depth - for example, in your VR game all objects will be at the same distance from the player - then you will not be able to use an important tool from the game designer's inventory.

“Moreover, I argue that if the game cannot be played only with the included depth map, then you could not create a real VR sensation,” adds Lazarro. She highlights the five most important aspects that should be addressed in order to make the game comfortable and exciting.

Be careful with camera movement.

Lazarro strongly discourages VR developers from using a third-person camera in their first game.

It’s very easy to make players nauseous when playing with a third-person camera, so setting it up can be difficult. Instead, Nicole recommends using something like an external camera frame: the camera is out of the playing area and allows the player to turn his head to look around the scene.

Lazarro proposes to take as an example the scene with the ferry from the movie "Jaws". The camera there seems to be attached to the handrail of the ferry, she is watching the communication of the actors, at the same time the background behind them moves. This is a good model for creating an external camera frame in the game.

But what if you want to make a first-person perspective in virtual reality? Slow motion, or bullet time, is another great way to move a camera to minimize player discomfort. Lazarro also proposes to see how the player’s peripheral vision area is trimmed when accelerating flight in Ubisoft's Eagle Flight . This is a good example of how a player can move quickly without causing motion sickness.

HUD is usually a bad idea.

Lazarro agrees with the popular opinion that the development of a user interface for VR games is very complex, and offers developers who have problems with it to look at examples such as Northway and Radial Games Fantastic Contraption from Owlchemy Labs studio Job Simulator.

These games were successful where most VR games failed. In both examples, “the user interface is the world itself,” says Lazarro. "The interface is both your hands, and the UI is the world."

If you can’t get rid of the UI and you need it in your game, then Lazarro recommends looking at something like Defense Grid 2 , where the UI jumps out of the objects in the game. So the interface becomes more comfortable for the eyes and provides greater immersion. It also allows you to create color coding UI, so that it stands out from the rest of the world.

We must strive to create a “design for the look” - always think about how the player will move his head, and build a design based on that. It is easy to forget such a trifle that the movement of the camera in virtual reality is often not tied to the movement of a finger on an analog joystick - the player can turn his head as he pleases.

Looking up and down is inconvenient for the neck, so Lazarro suggests that developers avoid vertical movements in the basic game cycle. Turning heads to the sides is also not very comfortable, but they are always easier for the player than moving up and down.

If you manage to create different depths for the UI and the 3D cursor (if available in the game), this will emphasize the depth effect in the game, and perhaps players will be able to dive deeper into the gameplay.

If you want to copy the popular game mechanics, make it interesting in VR

As the game industry grows in virtual reality, many developers start experimenting with adapting the established game design (for example, tower defense or first-person action movie) in VR.

"In fact, you should not clone the gameplay," - says Lazarro. "But if you have to do this, there is something to think about."

If you are engaged in just such cloning, Lazarro suggests first to answer a simple question: what will be the interesting thing? She says that many VR developers don't always ask themselves the question “What's the Fun?” (WTF). If you are at a loss with the answer to this question, she recommends reading “4 Keys 2 Fun” about your model.

“Cloning can capture you, but you really shouldn't clone,” she adds.

VR creates strong emotions, so use them carefully

“Virtual reality can create very strong emotions, and this is great,” says Lazarro. "But you need to be careful with them."

She believes that many of the problems of virtual reality design are easier to solve if designers take into account the emotions and feelings of the players.

“The polarity of feelings is quite a strong principle that feelings actually have polarity — they either enter our body or repel oneself from them,” says Lazarro. Anger and disgust, in her opinion, repel outward - they can force the player to take off his glasses from his head and drop them.

Nicole considers the most dangerous feeling to be disgust caused by poor movement, the effects of the " sinister valley " and such usually disgusting scenes as blood and violence.

But feelings such as curiosity and surprise, attract - they can make the player plunge into the game more deeply and spend more time exploring the world. This is a much higher level design area, but Lazarro thinks that developers of VR games should remember this (and possibly developers of any games) in order to make games better.

Be careful using audio.

XEODesign with partners experimented with the impact of sound on users of virtual reality. Lazarro argues that the results indicate that sound is a powerful tool in the inventory of the developer of VR games. Unless, of course, use it correctly.

“We want to attract, not alienate users. Therefore, the sounds should be arranged as if their sources are outside the body, somewhere in the room. ”

She means that when developing the next VR game, one has to remember that players are much more involved in the game than in traditional video games. Therefore, for example, players moving in virtual space should feel that sounds come from the space itself. You can use sound with positioning, and use it so that the player never feels that the sound comes from where he cannot come from, for example, from his body when he moves to the point of the sound source.

“You should also provide the ability to transfer depths. We want to give the sound space and for this we add an echo, but the echo itself also contains information, ”says Lazarro.

As with all other aspects of game design, "you need to strive to use information that attracts players to your world."