Making 'Tetris Effect'-ive

[Music] thank you and welcome everybody um to our talk about the making of tetris effect um as you hopefully know tetris effect the new take on the classic puzzle game for ps4 psvr if you don't know what tetris effect is if you know what tetris is and you see this talk you're going to get the idea i think pretty quick um so the format for the talk is going to be uh roughly in the chronological order uh that we took through development um and then we're going to summarize at the end with some uh key takeaways uh that we each kind of felt like we learned from the project so but this is really uh isha harassan's talk um the director of the project um but we're gonna be playing musical chairs a bit and switching back and forth to the podium so um yeah we wanted to just all introduce ourselves at the top here i'll start my

name is mark mcdonald my title is vp biz dev and production at enhance but we're a really small shop so we all do lots of other jobs i do some pr marketing i'm gonna talk a lot about focus groups um that we ran for uh for tetris effect that sort of stuff um my background is is in the the media um i i started off on video game magazines so that's you can kind of get a rough idea how old i am electronic gaming monthly official playstation magazine i switched to online ran the video side of a site called oneup.com and then moved to japan about 10 years ago and to the dev side of the industry um where i worked with some friends at a company called uh called 8-4 which is a terrible company filled with garbage people stay away but one of them is up here on stage with us that's uh graham howard uh thank you very much graham is going to be doing uh

interpretation for isha harassan um so yeah anyway uh 8-4 i was lucky enough to work on big titles for nintendo capcom imagine makeup artist that sort of thing um and that's where i first started working with ms guccison consulting on what would become res infinite that was about three years ago um and eventually when i left 84 i ended up at enhance and have been there ever since so uh with that you shot her son i'll hand it over in the past i've worked as concept artist and art director on games that fuse music and visuals such as child of eden luminous and res infinite

concrete and for tetris effect i acted as director it's nice to meet you all hello um i'm taziya mizuguchi i'm a founder of enhanced and i've been in this industry for long years pretty long years since 1990 so i jumped to sega in 1990 and i produced uh sega rally and arcade games racing games and the reds special 95 children luminous and so on and uh this title tetris effect this is my 20th uh produced title so um yeah thank you for coming today so let me talk about the

tetris effect so the beginning [Music] of the story i met hank rogers long long years ago who is the ceo and chairman of the tetris company and he's living in a big island uh hawaii in united states and so i met him a few times in the big island and we watched the stars and uh you know what the fires and uh the huge you know the big nature he's living in a big huge ranch and uh so you know the mini hose horses and sheep and when you have a compound they have a nice little compound yeah it's an amazing crazy place and uh so we had a discussion like uh hey gucci so he called me gooch something

so some people call me miz and some people call me gucci and whatever you can call me any so he said hey gucci why don't you make a tetris with the music so he played uh res and the luminous and uh so he asked me you know that kind of things so and yeah yeah but that is uh luminesce you know so he said yeah i know but uh you know the tetris is you know it's very special mechanism you know it has like he's talking about dawn experience of tetris you know have you played tetris yeah i think it's the most famous game you know in the world and uh so you know about the zoning experience you know you concentrate you play you don't think you know just feel

and then you can play without thinking so this is a very strong experience and the very special unique the point of the tetris so and we had a discussion you know the mixing the music sounds and the visual and new type of storytelling you know we may make the new type of game and also you know with the new technology like vr so maybe you know we can make a totally new thing so this is just beginning you know the kind of you know story we have then i came back oh yeah this is the you know i got the keywords from hank like tetris music feel good and a few zen and a few in the zone that means you know flow so that kind of inspiration is getting bigger in my mind and then coming back to tokyo

and i met ishihara so yeah and i asked him okay preach give me some design and drawing start to draw some inspirations and he gave me some very key great art like this this is very special the first the one with the art so you know you can see the sounds and the visual the mixing you elase disappear the line and then you get the sound effects and some smoke fire coming and the moving with the music and if you know you can see this in with the vr you know you can imagine you know what's kind of happening and he gave me uh that kind of art it's very unique and

you know to feel some story and emotional and like this you know feel the music the feel the atmosphere and this is really trippy cycle leak but the moving with the music and sounds and watching the 3d so this is the spacey galaxy and then um so we usually we have a pretty long pre-production before we make the game just only you know the play in my mind your mind you know the play and the play and the play and the play and you losing the sound of sound sound and music and the music react with the visual particles and moving yeah this is the uh you know we need the imagination but uh we have that kind of a period

with by small people like me and the ishihara and sometimes the sound designer but we have this pretty long pre-production i think that we had needed almost yeah almost two years pre-production just before you know we made a demo you know i mean before interactive demo so i think this is a very unique style for enhance and uh after all um if you want to move you know if we want to move you know okay let's make the movie first so this is the first movie we made and uh so we had the concept like this okay so this is a okay let's call the project uh zen tetris so um this is a code name but uh zen tetris and this is kind of an image so the mark made this image

so so i asked yeah ishihara-san to to make this image um and this and kind of the movie i think helped a lot getting everybody on the same page it also helped when we were pitching it to partners and stuff like that but to mr sun's point you know we would not have had that if we hadn't spent two years if they hadn't spent two years i came on in the middle of it in pre-production and so that's one of the things that enhance we really believe in and our studio structure allows us to do that where where we can have just a couple people noodling on something for a couple years getting the art really uh right and so this was yeah we were going to kind of go this direction for marketing the name of the game we thought was going to be zen tetris we'll talk about that later but um one thing just to add before we now go to uh the isharasan was that the the movie was was great and everything that the miz was talking about i was fully on board with but the one thing that you know you didn't see in that movie was was any new kind of gameplay right it was all very stock standard tetris which

maybe that's okay it certainly looked really cool especially in vr maybe that would be enough but from very early on there was this question of well is it okay to not have some new kind of gameplay thing um and uh anyway that's that's kind of foreshadowing so uh with that we're gonna switch over to isharasang okay so um then um okay i talked with him uh with ishiharakun so and uh me and mark um so we had a discussion okay let's ask to ishihara as director this is his first director project so yeah i want to introduce him a little bit so he was high school student use high school kids when i was made a reds

first grade 2001 and after graduating the school uh he chased me to sega and about the i quit sega and i moved to the queue entertainment and but he worked in sega maybe two three years it was right after he got to sega mr gerson promptly left sega and the whole reason that he came to sega was to work with music yeah but in japan you can't just pick up and leave especially in japan after you start working somewhere so he was stuck there for at least yeah yeah i hope he's not stalker [Laughter] but so he did a really good job uh in a project you know child of eden so he drove the 3 000 art that was amazing and he also did the uh resident infinite art director and then okay it's very good time now so you should have a go you know

so okay um i want to introduce ishar kuhn so after that i went about preparing for development to start all by myself a little bit at a time and what we have here is a fairly simple design document but it contains all the layout information necessary for structuring spaces in vr the face you see here is the player and you can see a representation of two manta rays that are swinging before the player's eyes and you also have bubbles rising up from below and so here we have some representations

of tetramino what i had in mind was that beautiful water particles would fly out whenever you cleared some tetraminos and here we have a design document for the dolphin stage this is the stage where you have windmills floating in the sky i had been imagining an experience where you could fly through the sky in vr and eventually i had designed documents for all of the 30 odd stages in the game at this time things were quite busy at enhance due to the ongoing planning and

development of res infinite so pre-production of tetris continued behind the scenes for almost two whole years the kangaroo when thinking about the game's design i was also considering how best to present sound as well if you don't have an idea of how visuals and sound will come together in presentation at this point in time said presentation will ultimately lack depth and it prevents a gameplay experience that truly feels great and so as development of res infinite came to a close at the end of 2016 so began the development of tetris effect

our starting point was a prototype that allowed the player to enjoy tetris in a deep-sea environment which we made within three months of starting the project we have a video of just that so let's take a look since the game is being created for vr we made absolutely everything in 3d from the blocks to the background the space is filled with schools of fish manta rays and whales all of which swim around the environs we also made use of large amounts of

particles and 3d sound as well making it a very rich production overall however we encountered two very big problems our first problem was that the game simply didn't feel good which is something we had enhanced value above all else in our creative process it was actually worse than just not feeling good it actively induced feelings of drowsiness fatigue and caused people to have difficulty concentrating there were often times where when sitting down for a test play after lunch time i would wake up to find out i had passed out with the vr helmet

the game lacked the presentation and expressiveness necessary to inspire something that feels great in the player and i believe the answer was to improve our synesthesia engine engine what is the synaesthesia engine by the way is a proprietary system of ours that we use for creating sound and particles and we used it for res infinite as well our second problem was the player's mental energy was largely dedicated to manipulating the tetramino blocks to the point where the player was when you get down to it basically not taking in any of the visuals or sound at all

and i'm honestly not exaggerating here there were many people who could not recall that there were fish and manta ray swimming around or that there was even music playing at all we had created was essentially regular old tetris so yeah and just just to add to that so what he was saying was absolutely true about we had that happen in user testing where it was you know what did you think of the of the space whale stage and people were like what there was a space whale i didn't i i totally didn't see the space whale um so people were not getting it at all unless and sometimes it's kind of problem maybe 2.5 that we had which is if the manta ray people wouldn't notice the manta rays at all but if the manta ray dared to even for like a split second cross over

the playfield the matrix it was the first thing when people took off the headset was like get that manta ray out of this game i think it's driving me crazy it's terrible i want it out destroy them all um so yeah so there were there were a few problems right at the start of the two problems that we had on our plate i felt like the second one was what needed to be addressed first and foremost so that's where i started i figured this phenomenon must be a result of how when wearing a vr helmet the human brain is diluted into believing that the vr space it sees is the real world today

it it seemed to me that the player would discard all information they believed to be of no use to them instead concentrating entirely on one single point manipulating tetraminos i had experimented with ideas like making the presentation more over the top or drastically changing the angle at which the game is played but we ended up going back and forth between prioritizing presentation which would get in the way of actually playing tetris and prioritizing tetris gameplay which would cause the presentation to suffer unable to completely swing either way i had quite the dilemma on my hands

i thought on this problem for the next few months awake or asleep i had tetraminos floating around in my head nonstop after much soul searching i decided to take another look at how tetris plays from the very beginning i did this because i felt like at that point i may have had this idea in my head that i already understood tetris so i start the game and a single tetramino appears in the matrix i played through the process from start to finish multiple times rotating moving placing

so while doing this i focused on one particular thing the emotions of the player and how they change as the game goes on uh in doing so i came across a certain something that served as a hint in solving my dilemma that certain something was the existence of moments when the player in the midst of doing something that requires intense concentration is given a moment where they can breathe it seemed to me like this play sensation was something similar to how people are when they're driving when driving you typically focus on a single point directly ahead of you but there is also a sensation of relief

every time you find your way out of bad traffic or after completing a turn and at those times the driver's nerves loosen for an instant and they unconsciously take a moment to take in the surrounding scenery talk to the person in the passenger seat or fiddle with the radio are they still obeying the rules of the road of course safety first i decided to go over how everything is presented in the game this time imagining what kind of experience a person has when they go out for a leisurely sunday drive [Music] i took the elements that we use in the game's presentation light color sound

and movement and condense them into those moments where the player's emotional state is such that they have room to breathe also we took most of the in-game objects and re-thought their placement moving them close to the play area so that the the player would immediately be able to register what they're there to convey the idea is that they would be placed such that you the driver in our metaphor could effortlessly take it all in just by shifting your gaze in doing so we were able to create a sensation that allowed players to both engage with the gameplay of tetris while still unconsciously internalizing the surrounding objects and effects

i think it's safe to say that this was made possible by grasping the exact point where the player's emotions are in kind of a state of flux uh one thing too just to add uh to that from the the user tests we had an early sign that ishi harassan was on to something here with his his kind of driving model that if stuff was in your immediate kind of peripheral vision you could still take it in certain levels we had from the start where you were flying sort of into the screen um in the final game there's like a dolphin level the the windmill level da vinci those levels uh from very early on those were the levels where users were registering what was going on in the stage and and also they really liked them so those were some of the the highest rating games and some of the ones users talked about afterwards when we talked to them about which ones were their favorites so it was like an encouraging early sign that that he was on to something

focused with the focus issue solved we then had a definitive link between the visuals and the design so we then got to work on focusing on the other problem we had which was one of creating something that feels good so uh what am i getting at when i'm talking about something feeling great infinity and it's something that we put a lot of emphasis on when creating res infinite as well which is one of uh you know enhances representative works what is we place a great deal of importance on the linking of three elements gameplay

visuals and sound and when balancing these elements we strive to achieve a perfect ratio of one to one to one son or king so for that reason we try to make it so that no one aspect sticks out we're conscious of these three things as one larger whole and we aim to create games that bring out a sense of strong exhilaration that can be gained when they are functioning as one concurrently for tetris effect the gameplay part was something that stood out as particularly overwhelming which made it necessary to raise the level of presence and expressiveness of the visuals and sound to match physics

so what i did was we had the synesthesia engine expanded to include two new functions physics and morphing physics particularly first by expanding our physics functionality we were able to give both particle and object movement a tempo that attributed a sense of strength and that added the element of reality to our toolbox of expressions this made it easier to internalize things such as atmosphere temperature how sound expands and feels and this made it easier for each and every effect to exude that feel-good sensation that we want today and next is morphing and by expanding

morphing functionality we were then able to create a sense of progression that emerges when a particle turns into a fish and then transforms into a manta ray or a whale story this allowed for emotions to be turned into stories and when these pleasant emotions start to pile up and bundle together it transforms into what we hope is a very moving experience you know this is a like a chemistry you know um the the physics makes you feel like uh very emotional you know the impact like oh ooh and uh you know the move moving uh it's a making like narrative you know it's like a storytelling so we tried to mix both

and next uh we added some new elements that would not have an impact on tetris core game design and first we put some work into the level design in regular tetris it's normal for the speed to gradually get quicker as you progress but for tetris effect we made it such that it could for example speed up slow down and then speed up again now and this is done for a reason similar to what i mentioned previously uh we slow things down when we want the player to be conscious of the presentation and we speed things up so the player can focus on the game when there isn't really as much going on on the presentation side of things

and this is of course something that the level designer and i discussed at great length so that we could strike a balance that both makes the game play engaging and serves the presentation and yeah just to add to that i think this is something that um seems simple but actually took a long time really right up until the end of the game to to really keep polishing and working on what felt right and what felt uh unfair and what felt too crazy back and forth along with it too there are a lot of questions of you know in a in a tetris game that has a like a quote-unquote story mode what does failure look like like what are the what are you risking um by having to continue or can you continue and we'd had it for a really long time we did not want to make it something that we really wanted to keep it something that everybody could enjoy so we had it where you could just

continue and your score would reset but the amount of lines you cleared stayed the same and it just felt like there were no consequences at all in fact sometimes people would just get to a new stage and just go game over so they could kind of start fresh because they just didn't care about the score and so that was one of the things that that came on at the end is this and also the next slide is how do we divide up the game how do we balance the difficulty to make it where you know this is not going to be a 40-hour game whatever we do but um how do we make it where it's a it's a satisfying you know uh journey kind of uh so to speak and you care when you get the game over screen and you also care when you're able to clear it without having to continue and so lastly a tetris effect is a game that takes a few hours to finish

but to again return things to my driving analogy we implemented this concept of the game being split into seven areas along the lines of how you'll find rest stops along a highway this lets the player step back and take a break from the game whenever they feel tired doing this got rid of the problems we had encountered with players getting fatigued or drowsy stopped and so all of that is how we fuse tetris and a vr presentation into this one cohesive whole leading to the creation of what we hope you'll agree uh is a great feeling tetris experience that is the first of its kind so yeah so the uh the game was taking shape we were starting to feel pretty good about it uh overall we'd ask people playing the game they were starting to feel pretty good about it overall

um we were working really closely with our licensor with the tetris company they had good feedback they were helping us refine a lot of the particulars um a lot of uh you know feedback in terms of this color on that color is hard to see when this happens and and that sort of thing they were really good about that sort of stuff but also the very particular bits of the controls you would think tetris is just tetris you don't need to to work at really fine-tuning those controls but actually you do that's something that took the whole length of the project but um but yeah overall they were also really happy with how the game was shaping up so things were going great but um there was still that concern from earlier on um so it wasn't a new concern it was you know i had that that little inner voice saying that uh the game still needed some kind of original gameplay hook so

here we were reinventing how tetris looked how it sounded most of all how it felt but what about how it plays can't we do something to innovate in terms of gameplay uh you know something that could add or even multiply all everything else that were that we're doing i just really felt the the gameplay third of that graphic sound gameplay was was uh lacking a little bit and uh it wasn't just me when that when i would talk to other people about the game explain the game they were they were into it you could tell they were interested and excited especially when they would play it but they were also kind of leaning in a little bit kind of it seemed like waiting for one more thing it's like yeah okay yeah and and then there was there was not that one other thing um so we would talk about this every so often throughout the whole project it would kind of come up uh to the point it became kind of a running thing which is like and what about that gameplay thing like what are we doing for that

and um miz and and ishan assange were both uh they did both generally agree that yeah it would be really awesome to have some kind of new gameplay feature that fit the game and did everything we were hoping for but also it was kind of tempered with some concerns that maybe it wasn't strictly necessary you know maybe that could be left to some of the other modes maybe this game the the main mode stays this more pure tetris experience because you know it could in fact become a bad thing if we didn't hit it just right uh it could get in the way it could screw up what people what we know people already love about tetris and um you know i think isharosan had a really good point which was there have been so many tetris games over the years you know hundreds and you know how many new gameplay mechanics can you think of in that time that have

stood the test of time you know that that you can even remember uh besides a few quality of life things like uh you know the preview piece and uh and the um next window and and some of those kind of peripheral things but real gameplay features and and to be honest none of us could think of of any really um that didn't come off as like gimmicky or kind of interesting but ultimately very forgettable and you know maybe we wouldn't come up with anything but i did feel really strongly that we had to at least try it out at the beginning we had tried implementing systems that were essentially getting to jail free cards

you could do things like slow down the speed at which tetraminos fall turn back time or erase all the tetraminos in the matrix but they didn't match well with the game design for one crucial reason they reduced the sense of nervous tension that is necessary to make tetris fun and as that was going on the main programmer on the team came to us with an idea he said wouldn't it be neat if the tetraminos didn't disappear in his idea was if you had a fixed period of time during which tetraminos would accumulate instead of disappearing when they form a line it would be possible to jump right past the four line clears that tetris players have known up to this point allowing for players to clear eight or even sixteen lines at once

there and this main programmer had been in charge of the actual tetris gameplay part uh of the game for all two years of its development and he's absolutely incredible at his craft so we decided that if this is something that he thought would work then we should just go ahead and give it a shot and this here is what he made let's take a look and it fit extremely well with the game design of tetris and it created a wonderful sense of cohesion and the sensation it created was something that did a truly amazing job of expressing what it means to be in the

zone we called it the zone system and it became an experience that is symbolic of the title as a whole [Music] uh great so awesome we all agreed we were all fully on board with the zone system um it was basically it had everything we were looking for it was significant but at the same time it didn't get in the way of the more pure tetris gameplay it had benefits for beginner players and for experienced players it looked cool it fit the vibe of the game everything so it was awesome we were feeling pretty awesome but but again there was something else nagging uh the little voice again was talking was talking about the online multiplayer mode that we had planned so from the very start of the game

we'd been thinking okay uh we have to have some kind of uh online it's a tetris game we have to have some kind of online multiplayer probably battle mode right so um we didn't have a great idea for it as the project started though so we thought okay well let's get into the project and it will kind of naturally come out of making the game but about a year in we still didn't really have that idea and we put out a call to the team like okay we really now have to start working on that so let's get all the ideas that you guys have ideally something that breaks the mold um you know we wanted something different but also that still fit the the mood of the game which is not a really easy task when the game is still called zen tetris and you're trying to come up with a battle mode um so all that really came back after asking was a pretty uh straightforward a fairly standard one-on-one battle mode

so the team just really didn't seem into it like they just weren't inspired and we didn't have you know like a tetris 99 grade awesome idea which i think is is brilliant for multiplayer and so it felt like it really started feeling like we were going to make this online battle mode because we had to make an online battle mode but what if we didn't have to make an online battle mode so um something occurred to me while i was explaining all this uh to a friend you know and saying well and we have to make an we have an online battle mode because we have to have an online battle mode after saying that a bunch of times you know one time it finally was like wait a second um maybe we don't and i know some people probably hear saying like yes yes you do you really should you should have you guys are idiots but um that became my pitch to to ms andy hassan what if instead of doing that thing that

other games have done that you can get online and do for free right now in a pretty good robust official version uh of with like tetris friends and uh and that sort of thing what if we took those that money and time and resources and instead double down on what was cool and unique and special about about our game specifically you know what would that look like so around this time um i was using a meditation app called headspace um it's it's pretty popular some of you might have heard of it um if you haven't how that app is laid out is it's app for meditating and they basically divide up and tailor these guided audio meditations to how you're feeling or how you want to feel so if you can't sleep or you want to sleep if you're anxious if you want to get energized etc there's there's separate places to go for meditations that'll address each one of those and with tetris effect we were already getting this feedback from people uh who were playing it that they were

responding basically the way that we were after kind of emotionally you know oh it's soothing or oh it was really intense or certain levels just make them smile and laugh um so again what if we took our battle mode resources instead and put them in a new modes designed to provoke more of those kind of feelings and so that's where we came up with what's now effect modes these are different categories for a bunch of different game modes that you could choose for when you wanted to relax or you wanted to really have a challenge or if you want to just play some old school classic tetris um there's a place to go for that so um it wouldn't be a proper uh gdc speech without showing you some stuff that i think got left on the cutting room floors so uh when we set about to design those new modes we had certain ones that we knew would go in marathon kind of the the the mainstay standby tetris modes but as far as the new modes again we threw it out to the team everybody come up with your

your best craziest coolest most fun ideas that fit the theme and let's talk about them and if it sounds good let's prototype it and if it's fun let's make it so other stuff that we uh ended up not going with so um we always wanted a kind of cooperative online content we wanted people to still feel connected uh to each other in with the theme of the game and and not in a one-on-one kind of battle scenario but hey we're all kind of in this together working towards some kind of communal goal so what we ended up going with was a weekly ritual which is where players mass points in designated modes towards a communal goal and if they reach that goal they get a reward i'm kind of speeding up now because we do want to get a couple questions in for qa so i'll kind of speed through the rest of this um but our original idea was that those communal cleared tetris pieces were all going to gather into like a sculpture and if you completed the sculpture then

it would animate in some weird hopefully fun surprising way the problem with this was we were going to run this weekly and we just couldn't think of like 52 good things that made sense in the game it's kind of like wait what what's going on again now what are what game are we making um but it was kind of funny and sadly though we had to kill our our dancing astronaut um sorry answering astronaut um game name okay this part i'm gonna really speed through the game was called zen tetris uh since forever we liked it it was different from other tetris games here's some of the logos but as you see once we started making the logo it was like wait a second uh zen does mean relaxation but it also means kind of simple and austere to a lot of people and our game is uh giant space whales made out of particles exploding literally in the rainbows on the beat like is this the logo to that game uh i don't think so so um

yeah other logo treatments uh it wasn't good and in japanese zen uh while it would have worked is kind of has this old feeling to it as well which was what we were going for this at least we did stumble on while we were doing this kind of things we ended up using this for the the subtitle um which was perfect for tetris effect but uh the the the point of this part is that um for a different conversation in the marketing conversation that i was having with um with another guy at enhance yamada-san about the marketing of the game we kept going back to this tetris effect so the marketing for zen tetris was going to use the tetris effect because it was a very positive thing that the game had you know the tetris effect if you don't know tetris gets in your brain and you can't you can't get rid of it and it actually has all these health benefits that have been scientifically proven uh severe it can lessen the severity of ptsd even one of the most recent studies but distract from cravings increase the size

of parts of the brain et cetera we kept coming back to that tetris effect let's make a documentary about the tetris effect let's have an ad where it's like ask your doctor if the tetris effect is right for you like that kind of thing um and yamatosan is just like wait why why aren't we calling the game tetris effect we keep talking about tetris effect and it was kind of like now it's like duh yeah of course but we had been thinking of it for so long as zen tetris also we thought there might be legal reasons why we couldn't do that but miz got it he immediately he loved it loved it tetris company was fully behind it so we changed that at the very last second and got a logo that was much closer to kind of what we were going for so oh boy real quick final thoughts um so my final thoughts are basically listen to your inner voice by giving an outer voice so talk things over with the team if you're hearing something there's two voices in my experience in your voices one is this intuitive really smart positive thing that knows better what's going on than you do the other is

you know just doubt and fear and doubting everything and so my method of separating those two things is to talk it out with other people and sometimes like i gave the example of the name they'll have better ideas other times just in explaining it to somebody you end up uh thinking of something and so definitely listen to that inner voice but to kind of separate it try talking it over with uh with somebody else and ishasan to close things out on the vr side of things creating a fusion of tetris and vr required a great deal of work on the development side to fine-tune the presentation and a whole lot of compromise as well the whole thing was quite the ordeal

this time however you know having finished making it i feel like those difficulties were not minuses but pluses i believe that even existing games built on 2d foundations have the potential to be transformed into appealing vr content so long as you can find something that can be used to connect it with a vr presentation or placed into vr space or if you have no entry point that seems to exist already you can create one from scratch vr is capable of inspiring a whole new dimension of emotions that can't be experienced in 2d games and at the moment i feel like the game industry is still sorely lacking in vr titles

it would be great if some of what i've shared today turned out to be a little bit of good know-how for all of you out there thank you very much yeah thank you very much um this is a pretty long journey um for us and uh yeah so we had to do many things you know we started from kind of a zen field feel good game but we decided to mix the new elements and uh yeah this is all the time you know the game production is like that isn't it yeah so and we learned a lot um you know we tried to mix i think there's two elements i'm talking about a dawn you know uh so we wanted to make a very relaxing figure game and uh the other hand you know it's kind of like excitement you know we needed to combine both

and uh so i learned about the zone mechanism so zone mechanism you know you were in the zone when you were in a zone so you are kind of the between relax and excitement so it's very small tiny zone but yeah we learn a lot you know about that oh wow so we can make that kind of feel the using the power of the visual and sounds and also you know tattoos game mechanism so um yeah i can say um to you you know we can um have much more space to explore um you know using the technology you know even if thinking about the vr lmr you know xl technology you know this is 3d experience experiential we can create so this is a new era so but

you know we have a bunch of space this is a white snow and this is uh the big journey and explore so but uh we need to go there you know to make the new kind of experience the game has a 50 years history and the movie has a 130 years history but the first people you know try to make a new something so we are facing to the next era i mean experiential era so yeah it's really exciting thing and uh also um i want to thank uh to my team uh monsters and the resonator so there was a really good team you know yeah um yeah we had the long history um you know we made a resident infinite and that kind of experience we can go we could go to the next step and of course we want to go to the next step that's right the future from here

yeah and uh yes i want to thank to uh tetris company yeah so we want to prove you know even if the the old famous ip like tetris it's like a complete game nothing ad but is it true you know we wanted to prove that you know if we can yeah is it true that you can't add anything to it's already perfect there's nothing more that can really be done with it and i think hopefully us and also now tetris 99 have proved yeah like yeah it's it's just a matter of imagination that's totally new experience you know we are making the new experience right we are experienced designer isn't it yeah thank you very much