Introduction
Networked VR experience based on HTC VIVE and Leap Motion. Two players act as a giant and a small guy, cooperate with each other by sharing limited asymmetry information and solving space puzzles.
The world is a silent amusement park waiting for the guests to bring it alive. The goal of the game is to give guests the feeling of enabling, exploration and strong connections with each other. The scale difference between two players creates an extremely asymmetry experience. And even though it’s the same world, the view, interaction and feeling are completely different.
Duration: 3 weeks (Oct 31 - Nov 20, 2018)
Team Size: 5 (3 programmers + 2 artists)
Assigned Theme: Make an interactive experience for ETC Festival
Platform: HTC VIVE, Leap Motion
Technology: Unity, UNET, C#, SteamVR
My Role: Designer, Programmer
Demo
Achievements
This project was highly graded as one of the best festival projects in ETC. During the festival, guests ages from 5 up to 60 enjoyed the experience and many guests played it twice to experience both roles.
My Contribution
As the designer
Designed the concept of two large scale different characters cooperate to bring the space alive.
Designed the high-level mechanism to be the giant to figure out the big picture of the building, the small guy to solve the puzzle inside of the building, then they cooperate together to figure out the big puzzle.
Design the interactions of the giant to be rotating the building, winding up the key, and rotating the needle of the clock. Then
Designed the coop mechanism to be hiding the instructions and clues of how to solve big puzzle inside of the building, where only the small player can see.
*The detailed design process will be described later.
As a programmer
Implemented the gameplay, interactions of the giant, sound engineering,
Helped to improve and reorganize interactions of the small guy.
Organized playtesting and through iterations to figure out the best parameters for avoiding motion sickness.
Define problems
Problems:
First I tried to define the problems we are facing and going to solve at the end of this project.
What’re the key elements for an immersive experience?
What makes it special in VR?
How to make players communicate in the experience?
Choosing a platform
Why VR?
Among many goals, we try to achieve at the end, immersive is the most important one for this project. Among different platforms, VR platforms definitely provide highest immersion feeling. Because VR creates the entire virtual world around the guest and separates the real world by blocking both visual sense and hearing. In this case, VR provides most possibility and space for us to manipulate with visual and sound effects, interactions. So VR was decided to be our choice.
Among VR, why HTC VIVE? and why leap motion?
Movement in VR is a big deal. Because of the awareness of the headset, cables and space limitation, the guest usually very careful about where to go or if they should move or not. Between move or not move, we choose to provide guest with the largest freedom of movement. In this case, we had two choices, move in the real space using HTC VIVE, or move/teleport in the virtual space by some mechanism like a vehicle. We playtested in both situation and found out moving virtually has a huge problem of motion sickness. So we ended up with move in the real space, which leads to the decision of HTC VIVE, which provides the largest play area among current VR technologies.
Using controller us always a big problem, it keeps reminding the guests that they are holding a device. It hinges the feeling of immersive a lot. So I decided to add leap motion to our technologies.
Ideation
Concept
Based on our problems, we need immersion, unique element that especially works for VR, communication.
I came up with the idea of the scale difference because we will never have the chance to experience such a thing in real life, but it’s especially possible to do in VR. Guests will usually come to the ETC festival with friends or family, when they enter the experience and see each other in such a huge scale difference, it will already be interesting enough. They will automatically want to communicate with another player.
In the game, the giant player can activate triggers by interacting with winders and buildings using leap motion hand, the small player needs to walk around and tell the giant player what the giant should do based on the instructions inside the building, which can only be seen by the small player. This also ensures two players to communicate with each other to complete the journey.
Interactions
For the giant player, Leap Motion was used to bring more intuitive interactive experience. Two basic interactions are winding the key and rotating objects such as buildings and clock needle. Winding keys play a significant role in creating a sense of enabling. Moreover, winding keys are the key element for our theme, it makes the whole world look like a doll house. Guests will just naturally want to wind them up. Through playtests, we confirmed that the first thing the most guests will do as a giant is winding up those keys.
For the small player, controllers were used for multiple interactions, such as climbing the ladder, touching buttons, grabbing the string. These interactions require more precise operations than just touching, so controllers provide a more stable experience than leap motion.
Playtesting
Balancing available information:
The first minute for guests is the hardest moment. VR is special because you are in a completely unknown place in a sudden. So guests were having a difficult time to find where are they and where is their friend. Originally we don’t have a name for the starting building outside. The small player can see the instruction inside saying they are in the Sudan House, which caused a big problem. Because the giant has no idea where is Sudan house at all. In the end, we added the name of Sudan house to the model (Unfortunately not in the video above because we changed that before shooting the video)
Giving sufficient feedback:
Af beginning, we didn’t have a sound effect for door open because we thought it’s such a silent and magic world, it’s not necessary to have door open sound. But it’s not true. For every interaction and change in the game, feedbacks are super importance otherwise guest will lose their way.
Minor detail matters:
Details are super important in VR because guests observe your world in a 1-1 human scale and they can see every detail. The color and shadows create the whole world and are tools for guests to determine the distance. We had a huge issue in color selection before the guest steps out of the sky wheel’s car onto the platform inside the clock tower, we used the same color on both the platform and the lower level floor. As a result, two platforms blend together and many playtesters couldn’t tell there is a platform and they refused to step out because they thought they will fall onto the lower level.
Challenge
The biggest challenge of the project was how to deal with the motion sickness of the small player’s experience. We experienced many iterations and finally solved it by mainly two methods. First is use the SmoothDamp function for any movement to avoid any sudden start and stop. Secondly, we applied tunneling technology from Google DayDream. During movement, the camera is cropped and a high-contrast stable background is displayed in the user’s peripheral vision. This technique effectively decreases the chance of motion sickness for the small player.
