Beyond the theme
It’s too late. The anthropogenic damage inflicted on the environment is irreversible. Rather than addressing the cause, refine your jetpack skills. After all, it will be the primary means of transportation between the city skylines of the future once much of the coastal rooftops are submerged by the rising sea levels.
This description intentional maintains enough vagueness about Jetpack City to not necessarily encompass the game mechanics. Partly, to avoid an overly verbose description, but also to let the mechanics floating around in my Stormboard fluidly drop in and out as I progress through the project.
I feel this is a good approach for the larger game loops, which will likely change throughout development, but the description was also only drafted once I had decided on my core loop.
The core loop came about once I asked: What did I fundamentally want from my game?
I will strive to come up with a completely unique idea when moving onto a new project. Recently this has deviated towards ideas that stem from a minor tweak upon an established game mechanic. This has felt productive in my pursuit to better understand game design. Once I complete the GAJ, I look forward to returning to my existing progress on a variation of the classic Nokia Snake mechanic.
Now I had to evaluate ideas, new or tweaked, against the Google Cardboard’s I/O layers, of which I currently have no direct prior development experience with.
What can VR do?
I had briefly tested the Cardboard demos when a co-worker returned with a headset from Google I/O. I don’t recall it being anything memorable, and certainly didn’t perk my interest in VR at the time.
Comparatively, access to the HTC Vive in recent months has felt life-changing, no hyperbole. The immersion of the sharper, wider visuals, paired with dual 6dof controllers, has been enough for me to feel like we are now in the early days of a medium that will soon cause global change, well beyond games.
Many of my recent prototypes have involved fiddling with the unbelievable flexibility of the Vive. To be honest, this has often been overwhelming, and to establish the limitations of Cardboard was conversely enlightening. This is not uncommon, and akin to Geisel’s word limitation giving birth to “Green Eggs and Ham”.
Rejection of a norm
Cardboard provides a single, rather unresponsive button, along with a tunnel vision-esque viewport that often seconds as a “3dof” controller and primary input for many games currently available.
Much like any VR experience, immersion is generally achieved via the first-person perspective. Of course, this feels natural. It also explains the surplus of a certain game genre that appears to flood the market.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy shooters, and there are plenty of other first-person VR games that adopt other genres and creative elements… I just didn’t come up with anything similar during brainstorming!
Now, this is the part where I have to question myself.
Who am I to dictate that something is tired, in an industry I am not actively part of? It is an easy way to go down the wrong path, but it turns out I will find out the hard way how much my uneducated critique may affect my final product. Watch this space.
The design
Jetpack City’s design is built around my aversion to falling into what I may regret calling “just another VR shooter”. This certainly buckets a vast majority of Cardboard (and all VR) titles into this offensive heap, including the impressive InMind 2 educational experience. The intention is not to insult these titles, but rather highlight the creative limits I struggled with when trying to find an interesting concept within the constraints.
So here goes. (Psst, scroll down to the prototype animation below if my rambling explanation becomes non-sensical). My game’s camera will not represent a first-person perspective, nor trail behind a single third-person avatar. The viewport will be your stock-standard 4th wall access to the game world, no different than the panning screen of a 2D platformer. To make use of the available 3D environment and the limitation of a static camera’s perspective, the environment will surround the player but will interact at a distance with the common pointer found in all* Cardboard games.
The core loop
In Jetpack City, you are an air traffic controller of sorts for a city flooded by water. With the occasional rooftop extended above the sea level, and multiple jetpack-equiped people standing on said rooftops, you are tasked with navigating individuals to their desired destinations, other rooftops.
Controlling these city dwellers with 1-to-1 mapping of your camera’s focal point would likely be enjoyable in it’s own right, the way games would commonly map a 2D joystick to the vertical and horizontal direction of the character’s gaze. When the “natural” expectation of pitch and yaw mapping is replaced with pitch and roll, the fun is (hopefully) found in the controls.
When pitch is used to control a jetpack’s lift, and roll to direct around the level’s 360° circular plane that wraps around the player, a more involved control scheme is born. Conceptually, this will tie a tilt of the head to the “floaty” feeling of traversing with a jetpack (or so I could imagine), along with freeing up the player’s yaw to pan around the level at the same time.
Time to prototype
The theme is planned, the core loop feels solid, and an idea of implementation is in mind, time to prototype!
This did not take too long to produce, which reenforced my appreciation of planning before diving in. A number of primitive placeholders represented the core elements and the enjoyment of the control scheme was quickly confirmed.
While this was a huge win for kicking off the project, it did highlight my concern of limited immersion. This will be kept in mind while producing further interactivity.
The immersion conundrum
What is gained with this game when played within an inch of my eyes?
When I create a game build without the VR dual camera perspective, the experience is as enjoyable when held at arms length and tilted with the wrist rather than the neck. I may be making use of the controls for Cardboard, but am I taking advantage of the viewport?
Interestingly, when I consider the same experience for other first-person Cardboard VR games, I’d suggest the same concern still applies. Maybe there is nothing to worry about, and I need to ignore these perspective concerns, for now.
