“Make Them Forget They Have a Headset on” — How to Build Compelling VR
Lessons from the one of the creators behind Lands End
Peter Pashley is Head of Development at Ustwo Games, the creators behind the award winning Monument Valley and more recently, Lands End — a VR ‘game’ thats plays more like an immersive experience that has gotten some of the best reviews in recent memory.
This is one of the first Beyond the headset interviews with a game developer and we tried to hit on the points that would allow other developers to really hit it home when making top notch experiences.
We talk about many aspects of the creation of an experience, common mistakes developers make, the importance of getting lost in the experience and forgetting you’re wearing a headset.
I hope you enjoy.
On Inspiration
I know the art styles are very similar between Monument Valley and Land’s End but where did that all come from?
PP: After I spent some time playing around with the Gear VR prototype I realized that what I wanted most from a virtual world is to be able to explore it, to have the feeling of wow! I’m in a different place and I can actually move around in it.
So, you know if you are in a real place you can go for a hike and look at some beautiful views. Just the fact that you can walk down there and look at that lake makes it so much more real than if it was just painted on a sphere around you which is the case for most computer games.
So I had an idea of what I wanted to do with our time in VR and that was to prove that we could provide an experience which was about the exploration of a virtual world, which helped you to believe in that world that you’re seeing because you can move around it. Movement and exploration was my inspiration from the beginning.
We wanted people to feel like they were in a place and it felt real enough that they could believe it, but it didn’t have anything from modern life intruding into this place. I can believe that I am here, but at the same time, there’s nothing that I expect to be hyper real here, so it’s like a dream-like environment.
I’ve been told that Land’s End is an exemplary example of something that didn’t really abide by any existing rules of VR games. How did that come about?
PP: We always try to approach games with a fresh eye. We try not to rely on tropes and that helps us to make experiences that are accessible to everybody because we don’t rely on people already having an understanding about the medium.
So that’s an approach that we always take. But with VR especially, there was nothing. There were no existing examples to look at and be like, “Alright that’s a great way of doing that thing, I’ll just do it like that”.
“Alright that’s a great way of doing that thing, I’ll just do it like that”.
It was absolutely making it up from scratch and that’s one of the things that really appealed to us about doing it. We were working with a blank slate and helping to define what a standard might be in the future. VR itself is also a medium which is unlike any of the existing mediums, and so pretty much all the rules from those other mediums don’t apply to VR.
You cannot translate video gameplay into a VR game because what works great in VR is not what works great in a traditional game, and what works great on TV screens often doesn’t work great in VR.
Lessons
So you’ve written a lot of new rules and you’ve learnt a lot of new lessons. What are some of those?
PP: The first one is that you have to be very careful when designing VR not to just use cookie cutter techniques. You have to think about what you’re portraying as well as how you portray it.
So with Land’s End, we had an initial idea of the landscapes that we wanted to portray and how we wanted to allow people to move around.
That evolved with different games with the movement in different directions. You can’t design the movie mechanic without understanding the place that you want to move around in, and the place that you want to move around in has to fit a mechanic.
In Land’s End, we initially wanted the title to be wide open fields that you can move around. But the way our move mechanic works — which is moving between preordained points — doesn’t work with that.
So we had to massage both of them so that we ended up with an environment that felt realistic but didn’t feel like you are being constrained artificially, that still actually pretty much ended up being a series of corridors for you to move down.
Another thing to be very aware about is that what makes you as the developer feel not just fear in VR is quite possibly different from a lot of other people and that will be a range of sensitivities to that. So user testing, testing on a wide range of people and testing on the actual device in VR rather than just looking at stuff on screen is just essential to actually providing a good VR experience.
What’s limiting you as developer on either the hardware or software end of things?
PP: VR content is expensive to make, especially at the moment because we are having to learn how to do it and having to do a lot of trial and error. Just the the level of detail that you require for an environment is higher than in traditional games or traditional film or TV and you can’t fake things. A lot of the time, you have to portray something accurately rather than just putting a practical effect on it.
And I think that the expense in creating all of that detailed environment, props, characters or whatever is a big thing that’s holding us back from creating really long full on experiences. Even the highest quality experiences, things like the Aperture demo, even that’s not a full game, that’s a partial experience. And it took them a lot of time and intensive resources to actually create that.
I think that probably is a world where all developers start to lean more heavily on commercially available props rather than building everything themselves. They just buy a bunch of assets to create a world.
What are some common mistakes that you see a lot in the development of games in VR?
PP: Well the most common one is people making experiences that prevent motion sickness in players. I think that there are a minority of people that have iron stomachs and they can do all of that stuff and it provides a great VR experience for them.
For VR to become a proper mainstream thing, you don’t want an audience thinking, “Oh! Not sure if am going to do that cause it might make me feel sick”. That’s just a perception that hopefully the industry can get over.
“For VR to become a proper mainstream thing, you don’t want an audience thinking, ‘Oh! Not sure if am going to do that cause it might make me feel sick’”
I think the second one is people not thinking too much about what makes VR different as a medium from traditional games. For example, it’s quite common to see people bury traditional gameplay in their VR experience so really it’s just a different way of looking at the same stuff. It’s a different view on a traditional 3D game really, and I think the VR interactive experience needs to be things that you can’t do on a traditional 3D screen.
It is fairly obvious that the best experiences in VR are going to be ones you can’t get outside of VR and I think it will be great if more people thought more carefully about that when they were proposing working on a VR title.
Do you have anything any other advice you want to share to game developers or VR developers?
PP: I don’t know if it’s advice, but an analysis of why I think people like Land’s End is that when people play it, most people get quite lost in it. People talk about presence in VR and your brain really believing that you’re in a place. Now I don’t know if Land’s End achieves that but what it does achieve is emotion and forgetting about the real world.
There’s a lot of things that go into that but it’s primarily a design decision to do everything that we could, not to remind people about the real world. That’s one of the reasons why we only use gaze tracking because it means that the player can just put their hands on their lap, they don’t have to think about tapping the touchpad on the side of the head or using a controller.
You don’t have to think about the real world at all while you are in it and that helps you to relax and just slip into just thinking about what you’re seeing. I think that’s a lesson that there are certain types of experiences in VR and, in my opinion, the most powerful experiences are ones that are relaxing. They don’t have anybody thinking “Shit where are my hands, how am I controlling this thing”? It’s more about sitting back and enjoying a place that you’re in and the fact that the experience you’re trying to do is a relaxing one.
“And once they relax, they forget about the fact that they’ve got this headset on”
And once they relax, they forget about the fact that they’ve got this headset on, and that’s when they start to truly forget about the real world and hopefully truly begin to feel like they are in this virtual world. And for me, that’s the end game for VR is to transport people, to let people forget about the real world for a while and just have their brains mulling over the stuff that they are seeing in these new virtual worlds. That’s the exciting place that we can take people to.
You can follow Peter on Twitter @Two2Heads
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— Me
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