Making of ASTRO BOT Rescue Mission: Reinventing Platformers for VR

[Music] my name is uh nicola dusay i'm the creative director and producer of the game over at sie um worldwide studio japan studio and first things first on behalf of sob team they are the people behind the game i want to a big thank you for coming today so we're going to be together for about one hour and i hope you know it will be both informative and then we can have fun together as well okay so um if you if you are new to astrobot rescue mission is a quick video [Music] [Music]

all right so if you like the music of the game the composer is in the room you can approach him and to work on your game right okay so that's robot rescue mission it's a vr platformer it was released last october for psvr and it was a sub team's first commercial title so if you learn me today we're gonna i'd like to take you on a journey and show you how we got around to making this game and there's quite a lot of content so i'm going to be going quite fast if you end up speaking too fast and you can't understand what i'm saying just you know wave and yeah we'll get there so a little bit um before we go on that journey i just want to rewind the tunney and introduce a little bit about myself so um i grew up in the south of france in 80s and my youth was pretty made up of nature organic things and a lot of japanese anime and of course a

lot of video games like you guys i'm sure you know from both america but with a strong influence from japan at 18 i moved to uk i began a career in games i worked as a qa a tester for companies like idos ea and eventually i entered lego and i was exposed to the family game market for the first time and it was a really wonderful time really onboard the really really wonderful family and five years later i entered london studio still in uh at sony computer entertainment and i was expected to find a really kind of cold heart-tech company of course it was playstation but i expected to find a lot of kind of techie guys but in the end i was surprised to find a studio focused on the family market with games like sync star itoy and so i joined the studio as a producer on the itoy franchise and during the ps3 era i worked on an augmented reality game and that was my first time as a creative director and then i made a big move in 2011 i said goodbye to fish and chips and hello to sushi and i moved to japan studio and it was like a kid's dream really for

you know somebody like me who grew up you know playing and video games from japan in 2012 a serbia team was formed so that the team mission was to research gameplay using the new playstation hardware and by the way the name asubi in japan means to play and we picked it because it should be a reminder that we should all be about play and it's something i borrowed from lego actually which is also part of the how they you know the name lego came to be and this is a world exclusive it's a sneak peek but it's not a sneak peek at all peak at some of the iteration of geoshock 4 controllers that we got to work with and using these controllers we would try to come up with gameplay prototypes that could showcase the new features and also share them with other developers the way we work is that we organize our thinking around four creative pillars they're magical innovative playful and inclusive and these pillars really define the dna of the the team and even astrobot was created with these four

key pillars in mind then we spend quite a bit of time brainstorming with the team how how to use these new technologies it's a relaxing time where everybody gets to get all their ideas out and of course we have game designers but we like to think that actually there is a game designer in every one of the team members whether they're programmers artists or audio producers um and then our ideas kind of all go and post it it all begins on a post-it to be honest and these are all overall walls in the office and the concept of astrobot along with all the game mechanics started on post-its like like this so once we select an idea we turn it into a very very basic design document we don't do big design docs and these are mostly visual with minimal text and the reason for that is because we want to visualize the experience really quickly but also because writing and reading in japanese and in english for us is actually quite a big hurdle so we prefer like simple sketches and talking face to face it's quite a fairly old-school way of working it's very much like an indie indie kind of team but

we find that it works really well for us so once we've decided on a prototype to create the prototype we generally take two weeks for a core mechanics so for example a boss battle in astrobot would have been two weeks of this programmer and so that makes the gameplay programmers really central pieces to your development because they are the beginning of everything really it is them who are going who are going to give the gameplay that initial kind of burst and so um later i will show you a lot of prototypes of course for this presentation so going back to holidays as a team after creating lots of tech demos we kind of polish them and the best one the best ones were eventually put together inside the ps4 known as the playroom so perhaps you've known the playroom and it contributed to giving ps4 a warm inclusive image at launch but you needed a camera to play this game and it was a great training round for the team as well because many of the members actually never worked on a game before it was their first time ever in 2013 the vr headset project morpheus

came along and so we jump on the opportunity to reiterate with this kind of gameplay research and we started researching new opportunities to play in vr so once again we created many demos particularly around like multiplayer so we had this concept of being able to play in vr and on the tv and i did a talk in gdc 2015 i think about this so if you want to know more about these prototypes you can look at that and during this that phase of trials we also tried third pass on platforming and that was strange because he felt really like he wasn't like very much like a vr should be of a first person virtual hands but we kind of wanted to try it and we did and we found it actually it was pretty cool and this is what it looked like it's our first vr platformer prototype [Music] so as you can see uh some of astrobots trademark like jumping around jumping from the controller were already in there from the beginning

and the controls were very simple you could move around and jump there was no punching or enemies at the time [Music] and then we included uh moving into zed you know so navigation and finally the character looking back at you that was something that we did a quick test for and we we thought that it gives a lot of charm to the experience and then eventually it became robot rescue and robot rescue was included as part of the playroom vr and it was a single stage it figured the character at the time you know there was no astrobot he was but the core mechanics were there you could rescue little robots there was one gadget which was the hook shot some verticality some vertical gameplay and the whole game lasted about 15 minutes and it was created by half a dozen people in three to four months he was part of a bigger game collection and the bigger collection was called the playroom vr and it was mostly a big party game and as a result uh us

um robot rescue was kind of the odd one already but we put it in because we really if we didn't if we didn't put in at that time he would have just gone to waste if they've gone lost so we wanted to make sure that you know we would still use it and so he was like the old one out and he was put into the playroom vr and that was the end and that's it and i remember that was like christmas 2016 and around that time the holiday time and i was in bed and i thinking right next year we're going to have to start a new project and you know the team should be busy from the beginning what we're going to do you know we're going to do like a bigger party game and really inside of myself and i think the team as well we really wanted to make a big platformer but he really felt like it's not a true vr game and there's a bit of a trauma there i think because you know we've heard so many times that you should be first person and virtual hands that you know he felt like and um we kind of you know i slept on it and eventually the answer actually came from the community so looking back on the on the net for reviews of playroom vr we came across a

lot of requests actually from gamers you know um playroom vr kind of worked with dad and the kids and playing as a family but the gamers actually they really resonated with a [Music] robot rescue and they wanted a bigger game so that was the last push we needed and then came new year we began working on the cleverly named super robot rescue so that was an internal name to just make it clear to everyone yeah we're making the big the big version right but actually that name stayed on for very very very long you know scaryly long in fact so robo rescue was really cool and fun but we needed a bigger game and we couldn't afford to just copy and paste those 15 minutes and stretch them so we needed variety and lots of it so we're finally hitting the the meat of today's talk really so today i'm going to take you through 10 topics that we focused on to make astrobot what it is and of course that's not everything but i think it encompasses some of the most important elements

of the game design all right so let's go so i'm a kind of retro game fan and if you if you know games like castlevania or goose and ghost you know you know the map you know the quest so only we're not saving a princess we're making a game so it starts with a fairness so vrness okay it's probably the number one feature of the game design in fact that differentiate this game from traditional you know tv games so early on we established that to realize the full potential vr you have to become the only way to operate the camera in a game and so we decided to continue not using the right stick and instead look for fun ways for you to use your body and that became the vrnes so behind the barbaric use of english you know it's an ensemble of gameplay mechanics that take advantage of vr so for example perspective play that lets you kind of see behind an object vertical play with kind of big drops and

kind of you know game gameplay that kind of forces you to look up and down in a way uh 360 player around you and then near and far play which is playing with distances between you and your main character so we're going to go through each one of those in in detail now so perspective play so this is by leaning with your body to see behind the wall for example and that complements platforming really really well it works really well as a set with jumping around and so we've been using this at every opportunity in every level so here you can see you're leaning you see some coins that's a guide and then you can use it as a way to surprise the user as well so we thought like here you're leaning you're not seeing anything and then the moment you you lean you can see two enemies and you have to take them on and these enemies actually come up from behind the wall and that's a really useful way to create a hint because once these enemies come from behind the wall the next thing you want to do is like oh what was behind a wall and then you lean so you don't have to give people too much of a hint it's good to build it as part of the you know the game world really next is vertical play so we made really

heavy use of verticality through the levels you often drop down really really far with large play areas down below um really far away and then uh the change of height is really powerful using bumpers is an effective way to quickly switch from the bottom to the top and then you can see like you know gameplay from underneath this is another type of gameplay from underneath it's really dramatic to be able to control your character from this angle and then um you can see here parts of astro are sticking out and that's really important i'll touch on that later on for bosses as well you know you punch a boss and the boss falls down and that's again to create verticality and that's another boss you know attacking you from behind and then creating gameplay at the top so at every opportunity we've been thinking about ways to always verticalize the experience so as you saw in the video sometimes you can get your view obstructed easily especially when you're seeing astro from underneath so what we've done is that we've developed platforms that you can see astro through uh for example leaves you know let you see the shadow or glass material was really really useful

but also like being able to have parts of astral that are sticking out so where the location of those platforms would be placed so that you know according to your physical position you can always catch a glimpse of of your character also a couple more vertical users we make enemies fly up when you punch them and that's not by accident it's because we want the player this kind of firework moment you know which is both satisfying but also kind of unique to vr and equally some enemies sometimes get stacked up to create that verticality okay near play so in vr getting close to your character that's and seeing all the details is really really powerful stuff so we took them every chance to create moments where astro ends up nostals with you for example like ledges that stick out very very close to your face they're really really useful this rope was put there to create that moment this ledge here was put there so that after rescuing the little guy astro is right

next to your face and underwater is really really useful too because you get 3d control so you can get really really close to your your character or your your character can get close to you and you get stuck to your face as well so these nose two nose moments your eye to eye moments are really really important and so once again we dotted them at every every chance we had and then the opposite is also true so sometimes we do far play so with our play we take a straw away from the player and surprisingly compared to normal tv game it is totally possible to keep playing because of the depth perception that you get from from the vr headset and this section very much feels like a 2d platformer and sometimes we just we just do special moments like that where we send the player really far away just just to have a little adventure just to have a moment there's no particular gameplay there you just go to the island and then you know with the bumper quickly come back but once again this is something that you couldn't do in a normal game or you could do it but it would just be different so with vr here we're kind of separating

the player and and then bring them together again so with far play uh platforming can become a little bit difficult because sometimes you may kind of drop down without realizing at the back of the the level so we to we kind of reduce the gameplay to 2d plane momentarily and with a 2d constraint so you could put an invisible wall or just like you know have a 2d spline and and that worked and you really don't notice the difference you know when you go to from full 3d to kind of 2d gameplay and then mixing near play and far play uh can be used as an emotional lever um where you you have the player and astro together then you separate them and then you bring them back together and then people told us that you know they really felt worried when you know astro was going getting away from them because there was a moment there was a feeling that you know they were kind of powerless to help him um so we can't use that as an emotional trigger as well and finally the 360 gameplay so these moments are the ones we prototyped a lot of them but in the end there's only one

left in the game um they do to take advantage of vr fully but they're physically quite demanding so here you can see you've gone all the way to one side you have to turn around and then you have to finish your your your your um movement you know you can see it from the outside there so the guy in the middle that's the vr player yeah and these kind of things they're really good but it's largely depends on how flexible the player's body is and it can become quite a tiresome experience so we only kept one in the game and that's the one moment where you really get a 360. so that was vrness and these were we made sure that every level had at least one of those memorable use of vrness from each category and essentially means that you're making a physical experience out of the out of the game so a good way to know if the game is enough to be honest is simply watch people's neck and uh if they're not moving quiet enough then perhaps it means that we know we need to adjust the level to stretch the play field and create more of these moments so that was the case for us you know we watch people and sometimes

we feel like well there's not enough movement you know okay so next on our quest is astro and you so i could have called this physical play a part two to be honest because it is an extension of the honest in many ways but it focuses on you as a physical player in the game so you exist in the world you're a giant robot following astro and saying your body is something we really want you to incorporate where possible so you can see your own shadow and people really love that we also look for opportunities to place tv screens where you can see yourself and move around and we made a vr player body that is very stretchy so that moving in front of a mirror is a fun moment of self performance and it's also an opportunity to create like some kind of goofy moments where you know you come out of water here you have a snorkel and you have like this kind of seaweed attached to your face so these moments are the kind of things that people remember so we made sure that we put like one of them every three to four levels you know so that is just enough to make people feel oh yeah

okay the eye contact so that one is huge and it's a little bit linked to the previous one the near play astro looking back at you in vr that was incredibly powerful especially when you know it's a small character quite cute and astro does that a lot like so astral bends in all directions to look at you at every opportunity he waves at you a lot really a lot and um it's kind of layered on top of all the action animations so that you your control never changes but even as he's jumping around he's always looking at you yeah you think he's got a problem he's just waving all the time but it's not just astral some of the npcs as well so they all have big eyes and the reason for that is because we want the world to be looking at you so this big flower here mimics the movement of your body when you get near you know it get near and um and so the kind of i suppose the kind of goal is that we wanted you to be the star of that game and so having all these characters you know like turning and looking at you was really really powerful

so the eye contact with astro that's really special but particularly i think the game would never be the same without it it really validates your existence in that world as well as a parental figure so astro is kind of small cute with you know with weaknesses and you are the protector you know so that makes a huge difference with normal games and as an anecdote if you're playing a classic game let's say you're playing gold four and then you die or cry kratos died you're going to be saying hey die that's what you're going to be saying but in um astral but what we realized people apologize to astro they go oh little guy i'm sorry you know i wasn't there to help you which is very strange because you know it is the same relationship they are controlling the guy and they are dying but you know there is a that's proof that they see astro as an entity of its own and i have a real kind of empathy and that's a really powerful stuff and i think it's largely carried by this look look at and the waving the constant waving from australia so with playing the other previous game we also understood the head butting was great really satisfying mechanic so we used um

that to make you participate in the game to knock down walls push beams or you know you can push a beam and then that creates a path for astro and head butting is one of those mechanics that is uh really like small input but with a big output so it's very satisfying you know here you have an entire section of the level coming out here and you can also like take you further so we kind of turn that into a mini game you know there are some kind of vr soccer games i love that so that was interesting to put down inside some of the levels here and equally uh dodging that's something we re used from a playroom vr i mean you know of course in vr we all know like you know that's kind of that kind of touching stuff feels really good um we use that in the bosses we use that for traps so here the boss is kind of sending some you know like feathers and stuff like that um so dodging became a key mechanic as well that we used you know in many situations and then we started combining it with the head butting so here you're dodging you're dodging and then at the end you head batting and you can have this kind of that's

another enemy in the game it's a wasp enemy you kind of dodging and then that exposes a weak point and then you can head back and as for penalty so if you miss your dodge we used to have actually health in the game and you could actually game over based on you know your physical uh kind of damage but then it was too complicated you had astro to estros health your health so in the end we just went for visibility uh penalty so you get like your vision gets impaired and then you the outputs are strong at risk we also use the psvr microphone to create a few blowing mechanics so we find it difficult to create really rich gameplay because it can be triggered it can be actually turned off by the user as well but we used in a light small magical touches and there's no real way to fail uh these ones and people you know some people who noticed it they were really really blown away by that and so for example underwater you have some bubbles and uh that was a funny so i had another personality that my brother calls me and he told me playing astro boat and he was really

cool i had a cold and every time i was in the wood i was coughing i could see bubbles coming out and it's kind of nice because a lot of people actually don't know there's a microphone in a headset so when you use it it's always a little bit magical you know it's like it's a it's a good one to use i think and then of course 3d audio so um it's hard to tell from this video but basically we use 3d audio as a way to locate these missing robots so right now there's one at the very top left and you can hear it through the you know the 3d audio and in the end it works well but it requires a lot of balancing between the environment the music uh and sometimes you know a character that is really far away cannot be heard because of the the distance so we had to kind of cheat and increase the volume and vice versa when he's too close to you we've had to reduce the volume so it's a case-by-case basis and there are 220 of them in the game to rescue so it was actually a very important core mechanic of the game okay

we're making good progress there controller use so we use the geoshock 4 for this game and we start for with dualshock 4 uh because it is perfect for us uh it is trackable but also it has an analog stick and the button alignment was perfect for jumping and punching you know for this kind of platform games and the controls are super simple on purpose um we we thought that the vr would be what would add richness so the control scheme could be very very simple you know the richness of the game should come from um everything to do with vr we also inflated the size at one point one uh sorry one to one the size was really it was correct but it felt small so of course it's a matter of ipd as well but not just that it's also a matter of perception so we inflated the controller to 1.3 it felt you know nice and chunky in your hands and that's what we did um also the guns are the gadgets are effectively guns so there's a bunch of gadgets coming out of the controller and we imagine that people are sitting in a sofa in very relaxed way and we don't want them to have this kind of very

physical hard physical effort so we've made all the gadgets effectively guns that you can shoot from your default kind of position and even the rope which is a physical object stretches so basically everything is kind of stretchy and the target targeting is very very loose very generous you can see that the big circle there that's the actual hook shot attach kind of detection zone yeah and the same thing for the shuriken so the show you can here there's a there's a little marker the user doesn't see that that's for debug but basically we make a very very generous auto aiming so that you know you it's much more satisfying to play that way [Music] also all the gadgets work as a complement to platforming so that sounds obvious you know it's a platform game but actually we have to remind ourselves that you know the gadget should be there to support the core of the gameplay which is jumping around so um here you can see how the shurikens are used um as a way to make a platform and here is

the water gadget yeah also used uh as a way to make platforms for astro so always as a complement to platforming and that's really interesting because it creates a kind of turn-based approach whereby you have this kind of first person interaction with the controllers and then you have some jumping jumping jumping around first-person interaction jumping jumping and this kind of tempo this choreography between your you know the first person and the third person actually ended up being a very important point of the way we were judging at the tempo of a level and so those gadgets to qualified well how do we actually go about them we brainstormed and then to qualify the gadget needs to have several use cases so we want the kind of multi-layered you know gameplay for example the water gadget had something like 10 use cases ranging from you know making platforms defeating enemies but also having this kind of toy-like usages as well so the gadget section that generally is scripted inside the level it's called a specific location however within those

predefined sections there is room for self-expression so example here the player is playing it safe you can pull all the platforms one by one but we made sure there's also some ways to kind of use the the gadget in a skillful way so here you can tug on on a rope to send can astral you know and equally this is a shuriken so you can play really safe you can make like a very very you know safe path with small germs or you can go for a kind of more risky approach so we also make sure the gadgets kind of have this kind of dual dual you know a couple levels of of um of skill really right earlier i mentioned the gadgets were all like you know remote guns but i've allied because one of them is actually based on 3d position and that's the way where you you plug the controller inside this door to activate you know like for example a door or a chest that's how you get a gadget you plug the controller inside the chest the chest opens and then you get the the gadget but even for that in order to help the

comfort we actually created we made the chest a floating object so that the chest is always at arm's length from you which is um 18 inches and away from you and 10 inches up um yeah 47 centimeters 26 centimeters so um when you move back the chest moves towards you when you move forward the chest moves away from you so that whether you're an adult or kids you know you can easily click your controller inside one to one so this is something we did uh in terms of just having the controller reacting to one one to one with the the input so you can see like the stick or the buttons and that feels really really good um so we um we can spend a little bit of time on the touch pad when you're using the shuriken here i'm sliding the shoe you can really slowly um and that feels really good as well to have this kind of one-to-one feedback it's a small thing but i think it matters buttons guide we change the layout of

the controller depending on the situation for example we show only circle and cross in the menu because they're the two buttons that you use to navigate once you enter the game the button is actually shut down and the new button active buttons come up so that in the game using square and cross which are your punch and jump buttons and that's really nice actually because it means that you can actually make do with you know you can get rid of tutorials in a way because you don't have to remind the player which buttons to use they're just the ones that he can see on the controller so all right so that was um controller and next are the war moments okay so one level one adventure that was a kind of uh idea for this and we ensured that every level introduced a unique theme to be remembered by so the beach giant in the sky high rise ninja castle graveyard and these were often inspired by pop culture for example like there is a level inside the whale and that's pinocchio there's a level inside the cave with

traps that's indiana jones so of course we we did reuse elements uh from level to level but we changed the colors the the lighting the vegetation so we never felt like the same location twice and well you know there is an expense to that of course making everything a little bit unique but in the end we thought it was better to have eight hours of fresh you know gameplay rather than 15 hours of you know recycling so each level has one big one moment in the middle so it could be as simple as um as a big jumbo jet flying over you usually it's something big right so a boss for example would come as a preview because you know we have those models so we might as well use them a big npc would come and help you you know make your uh to travel through the level here uh we have a vertical moment where you know you can fall down with astro to the cave and continue here we have a vertical moment where you use your gadget to uh create the rest of the level and then at some point you get eaten by a whale and then on the one and

then you're inside the whale you know playing on these uh on these waves you know with these kind of big waves being becoming like you know part of the terrain and then there's the jumbo jet recycled inside the storm so you're kind of stuck inside the storm like you know twister style so every level had this kind of big big one moment but also every level finished on a high with something with surprise and shimmer that kind of links back to the playfulness you know that we always want to inject so the the idea was to to to make it so that the goals would never be too predictable so when the goals appear you know it's always free and here you have uh that's the way level for example at the end you find the goal by the end you get ejected by the whale and you have the vertical moment as well so it's a way to really combine lots of things together yeah and then you have the end of the level okay and then of course the bosses so the bosses these are the big moments of the game and we wanted with bosses to be really huge there was no bosses in uh robot rescues that was the first time you know we could get it um and so often the designers would do a

test and you know we would go now bigger you know um so the size was really important that's not astral unless you the player astro is that little guy on the floor that you often don't see yeah that's shark boss and then that's the final boss so talking about scale so how big is it for a boss well if the vr player is at scale one astro is at scale 0.2 and the bosses are 200 oh sorry 20. so um 100 times the size of first row and more or less 20 times um the size of the vr player yeah so that was for the kind of wow moments that we wanted to have in and then something that is linked to that is the dual scale so let me explain that one so since both you and astro share this same space it is necessary to have um to create levels that work on both scales because astro is miniature but you are you know human size so when you look down you can see a level that feels like a miniature level with distances and spacing that is that is built for

platforming but when you look up uh you see a giant world that has been designed to be a vr ride for you the vr player and this two kind of approach was adopted for all stages and you kind of informed us the themes with pic some themes would really lend themselves to that some themes would only work you know for one or two scales so we would kind of you know not do it then there's also the enemy scale so they come in two sizes uh there's the small enemies that are designed for astral scales they are defeated by punching or jumping and there's a whole roster of kind of giant enemies that are there to attack you the vr player and these are normally defeated with physical actions like headbutting or using the gadgets for first first person gameplay but also the bosses had that dual scale design and you know for the wild purpose we we made some massive bosses but then the problem we have is that we have to create gameplay with them and the gameplay mostly come from astral you know punching around so we had to create some small parts or we had to think about the small parts that would work on astros level so here is the tooth

and so tooth is you know roughly speaking the size of astral so that's perfect and then you take over and have the kind of you know big scale kind of gameplay when we didn't have uh this uh luxury of uh we we used small enemies that are kind of baby versions of the bosses so they're kind of an extension of the boss so here you have like the s m spider and she's got these kind of little babies and stuff anyway we're gonna come back to to that lady later on actually right so then fun vr world just checking the time i think we're good yes so as a vr player you are inside the cartoon and so we wanted people to feel um you know regardless of the gameplay this is all about you being in a you know vr like magical world so we feel level with stories that are

happening all around you to immerse and you know amaze you and as much as possible we also met them kind of light-hearted and you know funny for example here there's like a vulture sticking you know stealing a cow and it kind of and these little guys that you rescue these 220 guys they proved to be a great way to make funny dioramas so as well as the pleasure of finding a character to save you know you get a satisfaction of a fun little story yeah for example that dude yeah but he didn't make it yeah so this is the kind of little thing we doted around you know it should be just fun to just walk through these levels but also we wanted a living well so this is something that exists in every game or should exist in every game but i think in vr it's that much more important and that's having a world that is completely like reactive so everything react to you and astral's presence and so every object in the game we added some of dynamic properties so that you could punch them um and they would react even platforms we kind of you know bob slightly when you jump on them and sometimes we link that to some more

kind of like full screen or kind of large-scale effect so astro here is triggering some fireflies and that's for your benefit as a vr player it's all around you and you get a kind of you know moment this is for you my friends a little hard right um the same thing with the gadgets so we have the same philosophy where the gadgets should be some should be toys so besides their functional use um for example like you shoot enemies they react if you shoot an electric enemy you electrify yourself even the guys you rescue you can you can be mean to them and even astro here you're on an elevator going to the boss and you can just you know be mean to astro and yeah yeah you can also beam into yourself you can splash yourself in the face and you can even shuriken your your own face yeah and you break the headset so it's kind of funny um yeah this is stuff we did at the end of a project we really reserve some time to really do all of these little things because they're the ones that come out in a review actually in the reviews people go oh i'll try that and i'll try that

he did this and that so yeah equally uh the bosses have like a fun finished treatment and it's usually tied to gadgets and a viennese so for example here you have the octopus you fill up the octopus with water he gets really buoy big and at the end you get a verticality moment and yeah yeah that's the spider so you finish off the spider and then you have to use the gadget to crack coarse it open yeah and if you look away as you're doing it you get a trophy for being a gentleman right so that's the kind of playfulness and humor side um next this is about platforming fundamentals so we are making a vr game with lots of vrness and lots of vr tricks but really like every good platformer we need some really solid controls and that's an area that we worked on from robo rescue and we kept refining it throughout astrobot so the character weight inertia acceleration the way every action can be changed together the way the animations and the

inputs are kind of like you know so blending all of these states like kind of work together in harmony and that was really important to create like a smooth game so even if you were to play on the tv you should feel the same way here but we've had to adapt the controls a little bit we've had to refine them so for example here if you look i'm pushing up on the left stick continuously but i'm looking left and right as i'm running along and so astro is adjusting its course actually um according to where i'm looking so of course a lot of games do that also with the right stick but here we're talking about um really a very very brutal camera movement for example here in this section i'm going to go down so all the controls are now mapped to be you know from that point of view then i go up and then the controls are kind of remapped in real time so it's like we've had to spend quite a lot of time actually uh um getting rid of all the the cases where you felt like you know you're trying to go in the straight line and basically you'd go into zigzags

because you know you're you're you're you you'd be your your angle of view would be a little bit strange and so in in the end you're able to control astral even looking away so um it's quite that took quite some time to um to implement but a big one actually is about being able to judge um your 3d position and so we use these lasers under astros boots to actually give you an extra hint of where um you are in relation to the ground and this is this became really really really useful especially in low visibility so for example here you're playing from underneath and all you have is a shadow of having the lasers to really judge where you're going to land on each platform plus the fact it's hovering so you have an extra time actually during those sections that's really really useful another thing we did uh something that many traditional games do but it was you know the first for us it was about the teetering so when a location is safe to drop from you can just drop down but when the location is unsafe

or it's going to have a big time penalty we've added a teetering and this is something the game designers can just add to a um a ledge and you can override the t terrain by jumping without it the game is really frustrating to play you fall down a lot so depending on the situation we uh we we added this uh teetering and of course everything else that has to do in the real game i really hate that term but it's like you know that he felt working on the vr game you know let's be a real game so enemies pickups collectibles a progression system based on collectibles challenge so that you know the very very skillful players have something like to get their teeth into a collection room and of course soundtrack you know that goes with a good action game um that's from kenny young you know who's not here anymore but yeah um no he's still alive he's just left the room he was there at the beginning yes um comfort so that's really important for

vr vr games um actually in astro board the levels are perfectly straight so the start point and the end point are perfectly aligned you go in a straight line but it's actually astral that goes you know left right up and down so the levels are built to be twisting around you and at the end of the level if you ask somebody you know where you know how did you feel that you went they will tell you i've gone up and down and left and right but in fact your body has gone has gone in a straight line apart from vertical level but even vertical level go in a straight line but you know just upwards and so that was really important to to to agree on this and to to stick to it also there is an invisible leash so this is how we kind of go around doing traversal and that was back in rubber rescue as well so there is a a invisible line if you like can you slowly curve outwards and if astro crosses that line you move with him right it feels strange at first because you know you have no uh reference point but over time in your brain you get this print of like exactly where the invisible line

is and when you start moving you know that you're moving and so therefore you become in control of the movement and therefore the thickness really kind of seems to go away now the important part is to really be consistent and so that distance and that speed were never changed we were not allowed to change the speed so it's 1.1 meters away from you in terms of distance and one meter per second in terms of speed and one meter per second so i've been talking to the gameplay programmer it's not a random thing that we just you just decided like that actually we went back and forth quite a lot and in the early in the one meter per second so it's easy to remember but uh yeah and that distance because it's always the same you know when you're going to be moving there is one time where we break that rule and we have something called the stopper so sometimes we don't want to fall astral we want to have some gap between astro and and the player so that you have a big space to play inside of so we've developed a system which is called stopper it's very simple you enter a zone which is a stop and there

is a zone which is a kind of unlock this goes on so for as long as you're outside inside that zone you're moving forward and as soon as astro passes that trigger point then you move together again right now the trick is to put the trigger point within the 1.1 meter that we talked about earlier so that when you move together again there isn't a need for catching up quickly and making you feel sick you know so um it's a simple thing but actually it means that you can create a big space and especially when you have gadget play and you want a lot of space for like a shooting for example you you have a stopper astro is far away from you you're kind of shooting around and then you make astral come back close to you and you move together again um next is the no going back so this is something we had in robot rescue and we removed from us robot we found that people were feeling sick when going backwards and so we made it impossible to go backwards um astral can go backwards obviously and so astro is able to go back all the way to the beginning of the

level when it gets really really really tiny but you don't move you know and in the end uh it's really not the best solution but what we thought is that we just created levels that minimize the motivation for going backwards you know so as much as possible we make it so that you know we could have made the level destroy behind you but that would have been a little bit sad you know every time you look around it's just like nothing so um in the end we just went for for this um and um yeah it's not perfect but it works okay so the controller often gets in a way and that's something that you know happens in in games you know with with camera and walls but basically we used a lot of transparency you know whenever astral was behind the controller or under your body yeah and that was really useful for vertical gameplay because sometimes you need to see uh yeah astro just under you and so during the times yeah that was really useful to have a transparency it's a classic thing in in games but um it was a first for us as well

the respawn to deal with death and response transition we went with very simple quick fade to black so you will see here oops okay i've got so yeah i should have told you but yeah one one spat presentation i crashed so here you go uh once again so this is the respawn uh fade so you're gonna see here i'm gonna die okay and it's just a quick black screen i mean so we tried lots of kind of really intricate effects with the screen shattering and then some kind of respawning in first person but especially when you have something like that like the minecart level where you're going at high speed the last thing you want to do at that point is to bring a lot of effects and things like that so we we did that and it didn't do anything good really it just made people more uncomfortable so we just went for you know fade to black yeah okay two more sections first one is level building um so this is about how we got around to editing our levels so this is a level

editor in maya and it's hooked up to the game in real time and along this team means that you have to put the headset on regularly but the great thing about it is that it's real time so when you make a change in maya you know it's reflected in a game you know within a fraction of a second and it's really good for working as a pair so one person is controlling maya one person is in is in vr just you know giving feedback and orders and then uh yeah you can build a level together like that with a friend um we didn't always do that of course because you know it means having two people kind of working together but um but here for example yeah stretching up that's done hey they say hello to all of you by the way yeah okay also we made the levels from building blocks so these are really basic shapes that the designers can use and they can change the scales to some extent but they can't really mess around with them too much you know because the idea is to keep the base proportions so the artists then come in and replace those blocks you

know with art versions and then add topicals and things like that and of course there are special pieces which are special props and these ones are kind of made you know custom made but in general for the large majority of the base of the level you know we're using this system and not only we only did a principle we only really used that properly near the end of the project it took us some time to really kind of you know um break some old habits um but now we're kind of you know in the mindset of working with building blocks and also it means that sections of levels can be repurposed so for example here we had a canyon level but it was too long um just too long so we chopped up the last part and we brought it to the fire stage and we kind of re-purpose the assets or kind of you know change the textures and etc and you know and that was the first section of another level so it was a really efficient way of working um and kind of shifting stuff around and now near the end of the project we were really still shifting big parts of level now to achieve variety we had the checklist uh of how the levels were distributed

and also we updated that checklist with all of the you know the sections i've been talking about today vrnes physical play gadget you know stuff like that and then we just populate it and the idea wasn't to just fill the entire table because that would have been overstimulating for the player but the idea is to just get a good idea of whether we kind of you know balanced as an experience really and then the last thing is gameplay first so going back to the beginning of the presentation you know we prototype a lot and that means actually every single piece of gameplay we always do it first with the gameplay programmer on his own and then we bring the artist and we never break that rule and when we break that rule it's always a mess we end up with just like you know in difficult situations so here's the dandelion that's the program's version art version programmer version or version so that's a water gadget first prototype and that's also true of uh yeah

transitions like you know this is a game designer's whale and then the big one that's the boss from the the gorilla boss he used to be a dragon but see the gameplay is actually identical you know and i ended up being you know the glory levels this one is even more striking it's really really respected so the timings the size the gameplay everything you know we it's really kind of you know checked first and what's nice about this is that it means that you're really kind of creating gameplay with a really small set of people as well so that you know in terms of reviewing it tweaking it making sure that we are okay gameplay wise it's done between you know like half you know half a dozen people that's it and then after that meanwhile the artists are busy researching how to make things but they don't work on the game on those prototypes directly once it's proven then we open the doors and then you know it becomes a more classic kind of production relationship and then finally visuals so um to be honest it could have been a talk an entire talk i'm just going to touch

on three topics that seem important to me as visuals um we we created uh you know we have a lot of organic levels but we wanted to retain the sci-fi dna of the play room and those robots so we put a lot of printed circuit boards on organic stuff also the levels we don't want to have to worry about like making so much art because you know when you look down the level you can see to infinity in vr so we didn't want to have to worry about that so we made floating island we decided at the beginning of the project and then we created a nice cloud shader so the cloud shader is actually animated we put quite a bit of effort into it but it could you know save 20 levels you know or you know yeah something like that so that was a good investment for the return that we got the characters so the way we go about it is that the kind of cute mechanical designs and you know you can get really close to them in vr and it's really important to have that kind of endearing feeling but also we pay attention to the details so that you know you can see all the cogs and all the parts and if we wanted to make toys out of them we could easily do it uh it's it's that's why they have this kind of

tangible feeling um and the same thing goes for the um the gadgets they they have the same kind of degree of fantasy about them but they're all inspired from real life tours as well so like water gun shuriken slingshot machine guns lights they're all kind of real real objects and so we're able to kind of really ground them and the parts are designed as if they were real products so that you can look at them closely in vr and you can see all the little parts yeah okay so that was a visual nazi for us but no because we have a special section i think that's going to be the one that you guys have most fun about right this is all the fails on the project so the game was multiplayer to begin with actually so he started as multiplayer and he was one video player and three players on the tv so that was a continuation of what we did on playroom vr and it was really fun he was so much fun you know playing four players but the tv cameras range being limited the level designer could not exploit the vr properly

right so what you had was a lot of stuff like that corridors you know and when he wasn't corridors he was a little bit more open but it was still corridor right and so many levels felt like that bosses however they worked really well because they were single screen you know so you can do that on the tv and you could learn vr and you know as long as your camera angle on the tv can show that big boss then you're good so that was in a four player version of the bosses and so in the end we also tried to do some mini games separated from the main game because we didn't want to have to throw that stuff away i mean it's really good to have people having a love and really every morning we were having a blast playing the game together and it was so fun right um but then clearly we were making the wrong game because you know we were focusing on multiplayer at the expense of vr so all the stuff i talked about today the vrnes the verticality or that we couldn't do it because the camera on the tv would not allow us to to follow the action so we decided to uh to separate both of them to rebalance the game and in fact

you know he was effectively a cancellation of multiplayer it happened halfway through the the game so nine months into the 18 months and that meant that you know to be honest the levels we had after nine months were not that good so from that nine months onwards then the designers were able to focus on vr properly and then we started seeing some real good vr levels coming through and after that level design really took off so um yeah and then other kind of quick selection of components that we prototyped and cut and then often because they were not fun really hard to fit in the game or they were like not in line with the ip i don't know maybe you can guess which one that was um but uh yeah gadgets and stuff like that so you know we we cut quite a bit of content as well and also we did an up direction reboot that happened that happened about the same time as the um the multiplayer uh the style was too too kitty took you know it was colorful but it was the kind of wrong wrong kind of colorful and so at that time we had the same kind of review and we thought okay let's take

it down a route of you know it's playful but it should remain kind of sophisticated cool you know psvr owners are gamers and you know their reference points are you know very high so um yeah we went down for a more slightly more mature look but we kept all the playfulness still okay that's it so there's a few final thoughts for me and i think for time yeah we're good so um first of all um so the game became quite popular we had some really good nice reviews um and um i'm apparently thinking that perhaps it is because it's a nice mix of nostalgia and and high technology you know it is a game that you know and i'm not going to make any any you know any lies about it it's it's it's taking into 30 years of platform game history it is pop culture we all grew up with those games you know 2d 3d and so i think the fact that it's it's tapping into this this nostalgia plus the addition of the

coolness of vr i think it is perhaps why made it you know uh stand out as a you know like a kid's dream perhaps it is the kind of game that we used to visualize in our kids heads when playing like you know 2d 8-bit games you know the other thing and that's probably the biggest revelation that's more of a personal thing but um you know we started the projects and was telling you that uh he was all about i remember being a gdc in fact you know being talked to by a vr purist expert saying that he had to be first person and virtual hands or he wasn't vr but if you look at last year you know we had moss we had um tetris effect you had astrobot before that it was res i think these are really really great examples of classic games that have been reinvented for vr and so the point is to not copy and paste it's not about taking those games and slapping them into vr i think we need to be able to deconstruct what was fun about these games in the 80s 90s 2000s and then reconstruct using you know our

own words and our own you know technology you know and that's this very important point we often talk about that with a team it's not a copy and paste it's it's an analysis and a reconstruction and on vr versions a lot of people come to us and say hey why don't you just make a non-vr version well i think for the reasons i mentioned today it's like actually it was built for vr and so you know even if you played the game actually in on the flight screen you probably fell at a lot of the gems because he was built for that 3d nurse he was built for vr so if he was a non-vr game maybe a different game and that's it so i just want to take a chance also to celebrate the team uh you know astrobot was put together in 18 months with almost no other time which is you know very very rare in japan um and in a fun mood and i think we could get a good platformer out against the odds and it gives me a lot of hope for vr because you know many classic genres can can be reinvented you know adventure racing fighting if we apply the same approach i think you know um it's it's totally doable so if you're thinking about it

you know really go for it you know just ask yourself the right questions and i think i want to see like an adventure game i want to see like a metrovania kind of game in vr you know that would be really cool all right so that was all from me thank you for listening today have a great time at gdc