Why Google Blocks is the best tool for VR gamedev ever.
Keep it simple, VR doesn’t need AAA to make it home.
The best way to design for VR is to use VR.
As someone interested in VR design I sometimes struggle to grasp how different this medium can be from its two dimensional counterparts. When coming up with ideas for games or experiences I found myself copying existing “flat” content too closely. I didn’t want to stand in a room and play another FPS game, I wanted to move around and be immersed.
So I haven’t built a full VR experience, yet.
If you want to build for VR, you have to get started before you know how. Why? because no one knows how so no one can tell you how. Movies have been filmed for a century, books written for millennia, and sports played since time immemorial. VR has only existed in consumer level quality for a few moments. The masterpieces of VR are so many years away, some of their creators haven’t yet started.
How do you make a good VR experience?
The most played games on your growing VR installed list all share similar features: Social features and competition between players. While telling an epic tale is an awesome adventure, I find myself drawn to player competition. The physicality of room-scale VR plus competition makes me think of one thing: Virtual reality could bridge the gap of eSports and real world sports.
Real world sports are based on team competition, fitness, and strategy. So how do you learn to build a game based on team competition, fitness, and strategy? Your player's input is powered by a headset and two motion controllers and their play-space is a few feet wide. More movement than sitting in a chair, yet constrained.
To look for answers we could grab a whiteboard and sketch ideas all day, conduct a round table or two to argue our points, and maybe write a scifi novel expressing what it could have been like.
Or we can just get started.
The way to learn a new medium is to immerse yourself in that medium. Loads of quality content exists there for VR today, not to mention a growing amount of new content coming daily. Thanks to tools like Unity, VRTK, Google Blocks, and a trusty search engine for free tutorials it’s never been easier to create content for Virtual Reality.
Not to mention social platforms like RecRoom, Sansar, and High Fidelity who encourage user generated content.
Lets get started.
I’d downloaded Google Blocks a while back, intrigued by its ease of use, but not impressed with its[my] capabilities. That is until I saw more and more videos popping up on Reddit where someone used Google Blocks in their work flow.
It seemed time to give Google Blocks another try. The best I had done before was a simple landscape comparable to a rough outlined pencil sketch. But don’t all projects start that way? You erase a few lines and sketch a few more. Just because these are 3D models doesn’t mean they can’t be continually reworked.
Creating things with Google Blocks.
Within minutes I was able to create an (albeit simple) accurate representation of my desired player models. A simple shape based on VR that only tracks head and hand movement. As the shapes grow distant from the tracking source, they decrease in size. Some simple squares spiraling down make for an easy prototype particle effect to represent the player’s “legs”.
Meet “HitBox”, the first combat style in a virtual combat prototype:
Build a scene by stepping into it.
Now that I had a character, I needed a stage. From my 2D pencil sketches I “Blocked out” a 3D version of a combat arena in Google Blocks, filled it with crates and short walls, and placed a few copies of “HitBox” around the arena. I repainted four of my character models to indicate teams.
Now I had the beginnings of a 4v4 brawl! Though, “Hitbox” looked a little stiff with those hands just hanging there.
Thankful for the scale tool Blocks provides I was able to zoom in and embody each and every “HitBox”, leaning around corners, peeking over walls, and reaching for a goal. In a short time a scene emerged, two teams pitted against each other, both trying to capture objects and place them in a central goal: Purple power crystals and a mysterious chest in the center of the map.
Having these “HitBox” figures play out a scene helped me better understand the movements players might take in an arena of this size with a team of 4 on their side. I can’t imagine a better way to think through a game mechanic than to stand in the shoes of a player, literally.
GameDesign Ideas: Each team’s starting hexagon is surrounded by a spawn protection shield that allows view of the center stage and blocks views from the side lanes. I see these shields as a potential game element, perhaps disabling the enemy team’s defenses temporarily, or as an effect for conquered hexagons in a territory control game mode. The imagination runs wild in three dimensions, for now we just need to keep things simple.
A cinematic approach
Creating a 3D scene as a means to imagine player reactions in an environment has other benefits as well. Thanks to the poly.google.com 3D model viewer, I was able to make this neat little shot showing a few of the “HitBox” players duking it out. What a wonder it will be to see this scene moving and polygons made real.
If you’re an animator, this could be the perfect tool for sketching out content in your workflow!
After enjoying my foray into 3D art, I moved on to Unity to see how I could get in on the action and start testing features, like player locomotion. Turns out, it’s pretty easy! Within a few hours I had my Blocks environment placed in VR and a playable HitBox character to use. I could teleport around and shoot physics based projectiles from each hand. The start of something grand.
Until next time!
