Key mobile virtual reality game design tips from Tommy Palm

okay so my name is Tommy palm i'm one of the founders and the CEO of resolution games always very happy to be back in helsinki again been here working fight Lak would not care back in the days yeah this was announced as the google keynote google daydream keynote and i just want a small disclaimer that i can't speak on google's behalf i'll talk about them a little bit but this is mostly about mobile VR in general and some of the advice that I've kind of gotten from from working with that now for a bit I'll stand over here so you can all see me all right I grew up in the 80s and I played a lot of video games on my condo or 64 and one of my favorite games was this Bruce Lee it's a kind of a platform

beat em up game can see race van how many of you actually play this game all right and this is a great very accessible take on multiplayer you could play with a friend and friend could join us one of the like little ninjas or yamu the the green guy i was very easy for them to drop in and out and one of the things that really fascinated me about video games already back down as well if it's already this cool imagine what's going to be in a couple of years from now and like the 10 year old version of me would have been blown away if if i could show them somehow I'll battlefield one or any of this modern games look like yeah I decided to leave my well-paid job at King when in november two thousand fourteen i saw the samsung gear vr headset and i realized that this is a phone that can already provide a really great user experience in term of

of VR and I will talk about draw some parallels about the early days of mobile game development and that industry I've studies resolution is my fifth startup and I've been in mobile games for a long time and I definitely see some parallels viore is certainly not a hit platform yet and there is a lot of interest for for VR so I'll talk a little bit about why and if that's justified and these are the three main topics so so I'll speak about design and also about a dream occurs all right so if you look at what V or really is it's it's about trying to to trick the brain into thinking that this world is the new

reality and if any one of you who have worked on a 3d game engine you know that there's an insane amount of calculations running in the background in order to to do this and envy or it's much worse because you're doing it twice and you're rendering about one hundred and seventy percent of every scene for both eyes and you need to do it at a speed at least 60 times per per second so that's extremely demanding obviously for for the hardware under it but that's a game developer you really don't have to care that much about it as long as you come up and you run at this performance rate you don't have to think about what is actually going on in the background our interface to the world is based on these five senses obviously it's visual hearing smell taste and touch and when it comes to the first 21 visual and audio we are

pretty close to trick the brain into believing that we're actually been teleported somewhere else i would say we're about 80% there of giving you a complete tricking you that you're there and it's very obviously if you go into a horror experience in VR that your brain is reacting strongly that this is very very credible smell and taste are not so super important for games so there is there is research going on there but it's not one of the more important one the most important ones is touch obviously if you can reach out and feel the texture surface and then feel that the resistance of virtual objects that would be great and that's something that we see a lot when we try game experience on our new users that first things that come out is their hand I took this picture on a 3-1 guy was trying a VR game wasn't my game and you typically

see people trying to use their hands to interact with things and 2016 is the first year will we have consumer hardware out and i took this slide you're familiar with a lot of this on the left hand side you have the mobile handsets as cardboard and Samsung gear VR and schematics of the daydream had set in the top we have HTC vive which is a little bit different because you have room scale you're actually walking around and in the world we have rift and Sony and coming out later um one of the big obstacles we are right now is there is the actual input people the optimal thing would be to use your hand we are not quite there yet there is a lot of experimentation going on around that the oculus controllers are one of the best

ways of actually using your hands once you learn how to use them they're they're very very smooth they will come out later this year and a gamepad is used quite a lot for for controlling VR which is I've never been a big fan of that control mechanism at all because it's very abstract and it one of the great things with smartphone games is that you have this direct control where you're manipulating the items and you would see that that opens up for a lot more people other than than hard core audience so just comparing a little bit what we have on the PC or console side right now we have the cord and we have a lot more power i would say about 200 times more graphic processing power in general we have kind of an old-school audience there a little bit that are more hardcore gamers they have expectation on what their VR experience going to be

like they want to play Skyrim where you can interact with everything you can somebody shoot an arrow at you'd pick it up and shoot it but right back that is not gonna happen just yet we'll come there eventually but we're not there yet so we'll see a little bit of backlash I think when when we're seeing this platform rolls out and we can't have the games that people were hoping to get right now on the pc side we have positioning absolute positioning so you can lean in and look closer to things you can't do that on any of the mobile device says yet and that's definitely a big difference it helps a lot if you can if you can move your hand around and get absolute positioning for for your hands on the mobile side on the other hand we have a very attractive price point because you probably got your smartphone for multiple reasons not only for gaming and it's a very portable thing so it's easy to bring with you and demo it it's

it's a really painful to try to demo something that you've done for the vibe at this point if you bring it to show you need a lot of room to set it up so I believe that mobile VR has definitely a much more better potential of reaching mass-market quite soon and also it's a multi-purpose device so if your xbox one breaks down and you're in adult and you have family and you have a lot of things to do you're less likely to instantly go to the store and to try to get it repaired whereas if your phone breaks the day after you'll make sure that you have some way of communicating so these multi-purpose devices are really happy for that recent mobile VR is very different from mobile games in general in the fact that it's it's not a casual experience it's not something you have on the bus and you'll pick up and play a little bit as you're commuting to work this is a great examples 1 by 2 my friends Paul who was

trying our game and my other friend here and it was instantly messing with him as he was trying to do it so you typically play more in the where you would play console experience it's competing with the time where you're watching movies or video you're mostly home in your sofa so won't replace the smartphone just yet now two things that VR is great for is is presence this feeling of being teleported somewhere and the other thing is focused yeah this is a scene for the matrix when neo has weapon training and as the real world disappears you get a lot of more time that you can focus on something that's in the VR world and I think this is something that's great for education and has the potential to really be meaningful for for those things when you want to learn something

it's great to be in an interesting format and V are definitely has a lot of potential there view is very isolating at this point that's one of the comments we often get when we do user testing especially on non hardcore female testers they go from being together with a lot of other people and you put this on you put the headsets on and all of a sudden you're alone and you're not anymore in a social setting that can be a handicap but it can also be a very powerful thing if you if you use it correctly it's since you have this feeling of presence being together with somebody else is is really really strong I don't know how many of you have tried the oculus toybox demo as a social experience but that's extremely convincing how interesting it is to be in a virtual world and just play around with a friend and I personally think that the MMO genre is finally going to come back we

have these persistent world where you can hang out with France it's it's kind of had a slope for a while but but it's this is a great opportunity for it so just show briefly into a couple of V or design tricks that we picked up on the way working with this one thing that is obvious but it can't be repeated enough don't move the camera around it should be kind of dedicated for for head movements for the user you very easily become cybers aquarium competitions and once you get a game that is shaking you around you're nauseous for four hours and it's very painful dork scenes tend to be much more convincing than bright scenes and better in general if you have if you have a phone you very often have

a heating issue that you as a developer need to take into consideration the phone heats up if you're using all its processing power and so darker scenes are also better in the sense that they are not consuming as much energy and sounds are very important for this feeling of presence so if you're demoing the games make sure that people are using headphones because it does make a big difference and characters have a deep something special happens if you have a well implemented character on this platform you form an emotional bond to it that you don't do on other platforms just briefly on this kind of design dilemma that it's very easy to design for the swivel chair but it's not a very likely user scenario you're much

more likely going to be in a sofa or something where you can turn around and play seamlessly behind you so it's better to design for a 120-degree and make sure that you have the content in front of you even though you want to have something back because sometimes people turn back yes to see but you typically don't want the gameplay to go on behind the characters all right so more about daydream daydream were was announced earlier this year on Google i/o and resolution games was included on a slide about launch partners so we were very happy to see our company side by side with with other companies like Electronic Arts and Ubisoft it's an open platform that is not dependent on the single hardware manufacturer as the Samsung gear the Samsung gear VR is a fantastic platform for from a developer point of view but

it's limited to only people who are having Samsung devices where's the daydream platform is an open specification so if your android phone or following the specs then you will be able to to utilize this vr platform much like the car board is and it's launching later this year it also has a controller that allows you to to manipulate things in the 3d space and that's one of the things that also been one of the bottlenecks a little bit with Samsung gear where you had a touchpad which is a way of controlling but it's definitely one of the more limiting things about about that platform and this new controller for the dayroom will work similar to a wiimote so if you imagine holding a phone in your hand and getting input from accelerator and gyro that's

pretty much what it what is going to how it's going to work and we announced that we are working on an amusement park game it has zero rollercoasters in it because of this viction problem I think roller coast is one of the worst demos of the powers of VR I still see a lot but this title 10 blade is a kind of non-violent easy accessible game where we try to maximize the new exciting and things on the viewer platform and we worked with it for a bit now and we're truly excited about to see the launch and what what it will bring one of the great things is that this already has a website support you any developer can download everything you need in order to development content for

this and you can make your own emulator if you have two phones according to to this google has always been very great that supporting developers so if you want to be there at launch there's still an opportunity for it for that so just mentioned a few common pitfalls I personally feel very much like bad V or apps it's like rotten food your brain will help you to remember how you got into that situation and you reluctantly you will be very reluctant and doing it again so stay away from from cyber sickness one thing that seems to be becoming standard Isis that you use this teleportation method for for moving around if you want the player to move and you still want the first person view where you this is from budget cuts scene where you you hold up something and you click and you come to this other area

that you're targeting and performance is super important you need to keep up the 60 frames per second for your game it's it's vital otherwise you'll induce nausea and that's not good so a quick look behind the scenes on our bait game this is the fishing game we released earlier this year we announced that we had 700,000 download so it's already four for samsung gear vr so pretty big numbers for being so early in the market um we typically have about 50,000 polygons up to maximum of 50 draw calls what that means is that it's much easier to do indoor scenes and outdoor but obviously if you want to do fishing you it's much better to be outside and so I thought kind of look briefly on behind the scenes how we did this and so this is

what that scene looks like from above we're using unity some of you might see and we typically put a lot of these polygons very close to the user on the objects that are there so we have trees and parrots and fishing equipment near you and and then as we go away we cheat more and more and if you zoom out even more you'll see that this is since the player is standing still you you can cheat quite a lot on where you add objects and where you put your resources but there's also a lot of great performance trick on on the oculus development blog smart people like John Carmack is thinking a lot about how to optimize for mobile we are and we definitely picked up a lot of things there as I said before 2016 is kind of

year 14 for VR as we're seeing the first generation hardware coming out now and I personally believe that we've seen this development it used to be the mainframe computers it started become personal computers in the 80s and now it's about your smartphone and laptops connecting to the internet on the cloud and the next logical step in computing is VR and n AR and we're going to be much closer to two virtual objects and we have ever been before so my final slides I definitely believe that development has been demek democratized quite a lot it's never been easier to change the world than it is today all you know is all you need is internet computer and know how to and you can reach a global audience and it all goes back to the same reason why I got into

games in the beginning from the 80s if it's already the school today just imagine will be like in a couple of years from now thank you any questions hello hello hello mr. pom how you thank you for that I was guys questions you talked a lot about technology and a little bit about what's coming from google and stuff what um in terms of the global kind of markets we've been doing quite a lot of work in China recently work where do you see the biggest kind of VR hit being because it fills me right now Asia's a long way ahead in terms of actual units in the market and I measured with a dream that let me continue would you think about that yeah from what we see from the data that we get from the bait the fishing game we did we see currently a lot of interest

from like us and traditional Western market but that's because that's where those headsets are being pushed a lot and where we're seeing a lot of nusa I long-term I definitely think Asia is a super interesting region 444 we are and and maybe China especially I think since it's competing with with the console time and the TV time in Sweden at least where I'm familiar to then there is a lot of competition we're in India and China and Brazil that's still a very very exciting market that has a lot of growth potential you