Reinventing Psychonauts for VR

welcome everyone to my talk and uh VDC I'm Chad Dawson I'm a Project Lead at Double find Productions uh the title of my talk is Reinventing Psychonauts for virtual reality I'm currently working on a Psychonauts game at Double find Psychonauts in the rhombus aruin it's for Sony's Playstation VR it's upcoming title coming out in the next few months first I'll give an overview what we're talking about today why Psychonauts and VR we'll start with some inspiration on kind of how we got the idea to take Psychonauts to VR and why we pick that title to work on then we'll start talking about adaptation changes we made to gameplay Locomotion controls iteration how we iterated on the controls and targeting went through a number of different prototypes eventually settled on the the control configuration that we came up with and then finally Innovation how we overcame design challenges with any project you run into hurdles you run into things

that don't work right and things that do we'll give a few examples of what worked for us and might work for you as well it all started uh just over a year ago summer of 2015 uh we were all excited as most of you are about the new vrtech coming out I'd done some uh research back in grad school in the 90s with the old lawn mow manstyle giant helmets um some prototypes back then number of our team had backed the Oculus Rift we're playing around with the dk2s as a studio double find has always kind of Taken on new technology we we made games for the Microsoft Connect happy action theater connect party and we also did some for the uh for the leap controller uh one called autonomous we had a lot of ideas but we weren't really sure which one would be best we were kind of all over the place but double fine had something else in the work something our fans had been asking for for a long time Psychonauts 2 we'd planned on crowdfunding uh Psychonauts 2 later that same year and we hit on an idea as Tim was starting to write the story for these there was a missing part and we thought what if we

made a psychonaut VR game it could tell the story between Psychonauts one and Psychonauts 2 and it would be in VR it'd come out earlier than Psychonauts 2 and accelerate our art and engine pipeline we wanted to get together some assets and stuff for starting the crowdfunding for it but we didn't have much look development done yet but how would Psychonauts work in VR released in 2005 Psychonauts was an action platformer how many of you are familiar with the original game chill hands okay most of you good it's an action platformer using third person follow cam as you can see here your main character Raz he's an acrobat it features double jumps High-Speed Rail slides wild gravity flips Dynamic motion combat we quickly learned that following this type of motion with a camera in VR can be very disorienting and make players physically uncomfortable and sick if you try to dis latch a camera to it we started experimenting with fixed and rail cams that try to reduce the camera otion a little bit we were trying

stuff out but it pulled us too far away from our characters and was still making us a bit nauseous but Psychonauts had more going on than just Dynamic third person action looking past the camera mechanics of the game it also received critical Acclaim for its unique visual style stylized look Story characters and the humor a significant part of the game was told through cinematic cut scenes in vignettes like this one featuring camera pans close-ups and handcrafted animation when you ask many people about the game I think this is kind of what they remember getting to know the characters as much as they do the third person action but cinematic camera movements like this are a bit jarring in VR it's hard to pan the camera in and do a closeup without the play player feeling feeling uncomfortable and other techniques like letter boxing to tell the player that you're in cinematic mode none of your controls will work didn't make much sense our artists were starting on the visual development we were bringing our characters up to more modern rendering technique and we're using the unreal 4

engine you can see that the characters look a lot different than they did 10 years ago they did an amazing job getting the characters in lighting and we really wanted to show off that expressiveness we didn't want to put you in a camera just behind the character where you couldn't see the Expressions on their face or have them be far away where you couldn't tell what they were doing so for inspiration we looked at story and development in the original title in Psychonauts Raz as shown here in this video had the ability to travel into other characters mind minds but you never really got to see what it was like in raz's mind you never really got to see things from his perspective we started to explore a first-person camera to see what would it look like to be looking out the eyes and the famous goggles of Raz himself this is some footage of our new game rusa ruin um in this case we show the first person mode this perspective feels more immersive it finally feels like you're actually in the world of Psychonauts and not just seeing it from above running behind a character this s of scale felt more personal The Familiar

characters from the game took on new life there's more of a connection of a character like Lily here as she fails to meet your gaze looks down or draws your attention by looking over your shoulder the adult character here has to lean down to talk to you and that's something you really didn't see in the first game that sense of scale that you're a kid you're a 12-year-old boy and you know you're with adults they lean down to talk to you that sense of them being condescending to you or or nice to you you get a you get a better feel for it as soon as you get in first person this perspective worked well as we started to look at the psychic abilities in the first game Raz was at uh psychic summer camp and he learned how to do all psychic powers one of our favorite was pyrokinesis lighting stuff on fire with your mind is always kind of fun side blast is also fun there's nothing like shooting a bolt of lightning out of your head this was particularly neat in VR as it kind of felt like it was coming from your mind use it to blow stuff up and uh open

doors you can even use it to uh to hit different things in the level it's particularly fun but we wanted something uh missed a slide there here we go something a little bit more subtle uh we added a psychic poke it's sort of our bread and butter interaction players to touch the world a little less destructively you don't always want to blow stuff up this goes to a little bit to point and- click adventure style where you're just interacting with something or just annoying your friends my favorite adaptation was telekinesis moving an object around with your mind it worked surprisingly well in our game as you could pick objects up move them around by moving your head it worked well with our characters too we added eye and head tracking characters would follow what you're doing they'd SWAT it away if it got too close this added a sense of immersion to our characters that we didn't really have with them just sitting there doing idle animation Loops it made the characters feel more responsive More Alive many players were surprised once they figured out that they could do this and the would react to it they would spend the

whole rest of the demo just trying to stack pillows and hit the other characters in the face um the more you can add to your game to do character interaction to have them respond to things and look at it the more players will connect with your characters we now had a pretty compelling experience From raza's perspective just sitting there and looking around but how would the player move through the world we know we wanted our levels to be bigger than just one room where you're sitting in one spot our next challenge was locomotion two of our guarding design principles in making this game were accessibility and comfort the original game was accessible to a lot of people a wide range of audience and a wide range of player Styles some people went to the game just for the story others went for it for the fun mechanics we wanted to include all of them we recognize that for many players this could be their first VR experience we didn't want them ticking off the headset after the first few minutes and not coming back the game itself is a little bit longer than a a few demos that are only a few minutes we're looking at around a 2 to three hour experience that we're hoping the player

some players might play start to finish from the beginning to end but we divide it up into smaller chunks we wanted to preserve a comfortable seated experience we wanted to avoid VR NAA of running around that jumping players through the world that some people get with more action-based games again we turn to the original Psychonauts for inspiration in the original game the player could walk up to another character and use the psychic power of Clairvoyance to briefly see things through the another character's point of view and this you see him going up to characters and they see Raz a little bit differently sometimes their perspective on the world can be a little bit different one of them sees him as a hockey player another sees them as a I think that's a hockey player one there um it all depends on their personality it really lets you sort of develop the characters out so we thought rather than Clare vo just giving the player a temporary Viewpoint what if we use that as our Locomotion what if we use that to be a persistent point of view the player could Target another character across the room and then jump into their

mind now they'd see things from that character's perspective the player could stay in that point of view as long as they wanted looking around using their abilities they could even Clairvoyance into yet another character look around and use their abilities from there with this method of teleportation we could move the player around from character to character in different points of the room you can change Clairvoyance from one character to another going back to characters you've been before and move between a number of points in the world your main character rat the character Ur in stays in one place using his psychic ability this was also working with our storyline is we wanted the characters to be captured we wanted them to figure out a way to escape we were shifting more from the platforming stuff in the original game to more of a puzzle-based experience using your psychic abilities to solve puzzles let's see here

can you guys here should have a little audio see if I can turn it up are you getting any audio on the audio out let me try that again well this video we're showing here not audio but I can talk you through it a little bit um it shows an example example of using all your gameplay abilities here the player must use Clairvoyance to go into a rat in an overhead compartment they must use poke to open up cabinets they see a character over the right sticking his hand out of the bathroom door they use telekinesis to grab some toilet paper and hand it to him he shouts back at them that it's not enough um he needs something a little bit more what else can you do um so in this case the player realizes they can use their telekinesis ability and their pyro ability together to give the coach in the background a little

surprise it's a different type of gaml but it's something we were shifting to more with puzzles but an important consideration was also our controller scheme we wanted to keep it simple and accessible all the different controllers coming out we didn't want to limit our audience to ones that just had hand controllers we wanted it to be able to work with the game pad as well initially we considered looking at a popup menu to selectability like the original game did in the original game you could select from your different abilities and map that to one of your buttons and have a couple of them going but we really wanted to focus on you combining your abilities and we wanted to limit the amount of UI having a UI pop up all the time you wanted to use an ability in our game which you use pretty often would be a little bit uh annoying to see it come up in your face and tricky as your world environment could obscure the UI we ended up doing a controller mapping that mapped the abilities to the different buttons that way the player

could use multiple abilities at the same time this had a number of challenges Using a Gamepad controller the first was unfamiliarity when you're in a VR headset most players can't look down and see what their controller is doing if they don't know the controller very well they're not going to know what different buttons are no matter how much you tell them so to solve that we showed the full contr controller diagram rather than just swing a symbol of a button to press which someone might not remember a triangle or an L2 button or an X show a picture of the whole controller with the button highlighted this technique worked particularly well as players can fumble around with the controller and try to get their thumb or finger in the right position as long as you're forgiving with the controls they they'll find the button but too much familiarity can also cause an issue people coming from using Gamepad uh controllers with other games typically like to use the sticks initially we let the right stick move the camera we quickly found that that was not a good thing to do uh having people move the camera with

their head and then also right stick can really make you sick fast but you shouldn't discount players using the controllers completely by watching people's hands when they're play testing we're able to figure out which buttons they felt were intuitive some of the combinations like holding down telekinesis and Pyro some players had an intuition on kind of which which trigger finger might be the might be used for telekinesis and which ones would be easier to com combine with others we also explored a motion track Gamepad controller on the PlayStation some of you may know the uh dual shot controller has a sensor in the front and sensors inside which let the camera which tracks your head also track the position of the controller for telekinesis we combined letting you move it around with your head mov it around with the controller and moving it around with the sticks we tried all combinations of those to see what people found would work well we actually found that moving around your head was worked well with our game because it gave you more of a feeling that you were psychic once you started

moving it around with your hands using a controller it started to feel like it was something in your hand that you were reaching out but to give you that sense of presence that you were psychically moving it moving your head worked we also had a wide variation of what players would do when they would hold the controller many players would just like to hold it in their lap not many would intuitively lift it up and try to move it from a seated experience in addition to using it for telekinesis we had it work with rotation where players could flip objects around but flipping the controller over 180 puts it in a weird configuration for people to hold and try to hit the other buttons eventually with our design we backed away from rotating objects we left it as an option on the right stick but it's more for players to just inspect something and we didn't use it for any uh critical gameplay our targeting we use the headset rather than using a hand controller to point at things we look at stuff with your head and as I was saying we found this head an unexpected but pretty desirable effect of the player

feeling more like a psychic we found that if you were using your mind to control something if you were trying to look at it with your head and move it rather than a than a tract controller or wand in your hand it felt less like a magic wand less like a laser pointer less like a tool on your hand you felt more like a psychonaut in the game than a wizard or an artist or a mechanic but it ran into a set of issues as well with head track targeting players are less precise it's rare for someone to hold their head and look at something with a fixed gaze and hold it in the exact spot for very long to combat that we did generous and sticky Target selection when you look at something in our game it would highlight and we had a number of different objects and players would try to look at them but as we started building up the worlds the density got pretty big we tried to reduce that and reduce the number of things you could Target but still players had trouble figuring out what they were targeting and if they were targeting it correctly sometimes they would see something and try to turn their head to look at it but would have

a hard time getting it under a cursor or getting it under their view to do that we were we opened up our selection and made it more generous and sticky generous meaning you didn't have to look exactly at something you just had to look near it and it would find the closest one and sticky meaning when you looked away it would still keep your selection on it for a while we also didn't require accuracy initially we our puzzles had to play are being very accurate with stuff you had to pick up a bomb move it through a hallway without it touching the walls or it would explode load or S insert a key into a lock and turn it all of these were tricky to do and we had some players on the team who were pretty good at it but for most players it was hard to do particularly if you started to get neck fatigue moving your head around a Target and particularly moving stuff around is one of the primary inputs people's necks can get tired to combat that we tried to limit the required movement range we didn't want to have the players have to move something from the far left side of their Vision to the far right are up and down we didn't want you have to do

repeated movements over and over we also removed time pressure as I said initially we had a a ticking time bomb that you had to get down the hallway without hitting the wall people would try to do that really fast and one of the tricks you could do to it was to kind of Sling your neck really fast to throw the object down the hall and players would do that some would do it quite quite violently and almost shake the headset off because they were running out of time uh so in our game design we started removing anything that gave the player time pressure and tweaking the puzzles to be more uh more solution finding on what to move and where to put it as opposed to how to do it in a quick amount of time dialogue was also a challenge for us double find games have always had Charming dialogue and quite a lot of it but sometimes you need to give feedback on what the player is doing particularly if they're doing something wrong initially we had some generic dialogue responses things like oop or bummer or nope if you tried to do something and the player wasn't

succeeding but as we started play testing it players got got confused we were watching them play and hearing the sounds and knowing what they were doing wrong but the players weren't getting the feedback we started changing the statements to be a little bit more specific rather than just a generic thing be more particular and state the verb and object in what you're saying say I can't burn that book or that crate is too heavy to lift often when players are looking around they'll hit a button hit the wrong button think they're doing pyro pyrokinesis on something to burn it but they're actually trying to pick it up they're looking at an object just to the right of the object they were trying to pick up so getting a specific response back really helps keep them on the right track and make sure they don't get confused or misdirected it's something that with a pointand click adventure game and a lot of our other game styles people tend to leave their cursor on the object they're interacting with they take their focus on it but if you're doing head-based tracking players will look at something and then look away so reminding them what they were doing

and what they were looking at can often be helpful we love the Clairvoyance mechanic of traveling through our levels from one character's mind to another but it also gave us a few problems when you teleport to a character we would use the way that character is facing to give you a hint at where you're going to be looking once you go into them in this picture on the left you can see the character Mia kind of staring at the Monitor and if you go into her perspective that's what you're going to see that worked out great we put characters close to things she could watch a whole cartoon show on that monitor switch the channels solve a puzzle with it but then what would you do because she was close to it and facing a wall she didn't have any other characters in her field of view in order to move to another character using our Locomotion system a charact player would have to look over their shoulder or turn around 180 in their chair or get up and that's something we wanted to try to avoid this is a top view of the level we were looking at in the jet the roof's cut away and you can kind of see the shape of it um Raz your main character shown in the center and I've highlighted

his field of targeting in yellow and I use the phrase field of targeting instead of field of view field of view can often be pretty wide in fact you can look all around you 360 but your field of targeting is more limited field of targeting is kind of what you're going to turn your head to look at as you use head-based targeting we found that a range of around 90 to 120° Arc would work sometimes we had to open it up a little bit more but that's what most players felt uh felt comfortable with vertical up down head movement a pit Arc of looking up and down to find another character is definitely less but most of our levels featured more of a horizontal layout design than a vertical one in this level we showed you going up into the squirrel and overhead bin that's about the level we we'd go in vertical here you can see overlapping fields of other characters targeting each other those are also shown in yellow if you look in the center you can see the center three characters have overlapping field of view all of them have another character within their Arc but none none of them have a good view of the character in the upper right he's

a hard character to get to unless we rotate one of the character seats and that sort of became our tuning game in the levels of going through and saying can you see somebody else from this position or not you might also notice that we don't have very good coverage in the back of the plane seen on the leftand side we had to come up with a creative solution so the player could easily get back there and find the toilet paper to hand the coach hanging out in the bathroom so as soon on the left here we added a squirrel and overhead bin who had a good point of view of that area some level layouts work out better than others and this is something we discovered probably about halfway 3/4 way through the project I wish we would have known earlier long rectangular levels don't work pretty good or don't work too well for this motion uh this type of locomotion you have to kind of have characters facing the front and then also ones facing the back so you can move from one end to the other it turns out with no small coincidence that our second level was a circle and a lot of our other levels after that ended up being this way this is an example of our Outpost

level um might be a little hard to see cuz of the yellow light in the center but we positioned a bunch of guards around the outside in making a circular level and I've seen a few other games do this where they do an arena kind of style with a bunch of characters in the outside facing in you always have a clear point of view of where you're going to go and where you're going to go to it also helps with the player's sense of sense of spatiality where am I in the level sometimes we found when you would go to a character and they were facing a way you had seen players would lose their sense of direction they wouldn't quite know where they were or how to get back circular level design worked pretty good because you can position them on the outside and they can always see in with multiple targets to choose from so to wrap things up a little bit and to conclude what we're talking about just don't add VR to your title it's just because your game can be played on a headset doesn't mean it's a right title for VR or that it's the right the right platform for

it adapt your gameplay and controls to the strength of your medium and your title and looking at the original psychon game we found a number of features that we felt would work well the psychic abilities we extended some features like the Clairvoyance to not just give you a different view but to let you get around the world and see characters from a different different perspective try to find the things in your game particularly if you're adapting one that that map well to VR but then also work look at what in VR works well for your game it might be a first- person perspective works better for you it might be you want to keep a third person perspective it's great to be seeing all the things that people are doing out there and that kind of brings me to the next point is that it's still a new and fertile ground you'll hear people in some of their talks and and some things say that they they've solved Locomotion or they've solved targeting or they solved shooting but the more I've seen on the different titles The more I've seen people doing it different ways and different ways that work right for their for their game for what they're trying to do so feel free to explore just cuz someone else is doing something a certain way don't feel like you don't have to to test it again

yourself you might find that what didn't work for them what didn't work for us even with the hand controllers and rotating objects might be perfect for your game depending on the context but also realize you're going to have unexpected challenges like I showed at the end the character facing we thought our Locomotion system was great but then we realized you couldn't get around many of the levels we had to reposition characters add new characters that can come if that comes too late it might be hard for you to correct that give yourself time to explore them give yourself a chance to get your new ideas in iterate on them and and get them to a point where you game can really shine that wraps things up you guys have any questions I've got one sure go ahead how did you deal with the micophone oh go ahead to go ahead to the mic thank you yeah if you could state your name in the question I'll repeat it back for [Music]

everybody hi Caitlyn um how do you deal with when you have Clairvoyance to teleport into another character's um presence or mind how do you deal with the fact that you're suddenly occupying another character's body um like if you're moving your hand controllers do you see the avatars the Avatar the the other like NPC's hand moving okay sure let me let me restate it Caitlyn was asking when you go on another character how do you deal with the player accepting that other character's body that's one thing I didn't mention in the talk but that we looked at and many games look at is when you're you know in a character do you draw the character's body or not because we weren't using hand controllers and we weren't mapping your arm movements it felt kind of weird for your character to be sitting there not really mapping you so when we go into a character we don't draw their body at all we turn off props and accessories they have like a pencil or notebook so you don't see your character we found that most players found that uh more acceptable we do do certain things

like change your eye distance to make you feel smaller or bigger and limited amount of scales if you go into a small character and we do in certain characters not shown they see the world differently they might see a sunny day instead of a rainy day our characters a little bit differently to try to give their personality but in general we don't draw the body that's the choice we made go ahead hi my name is y um it seems like all the abilities you have in the game fit very nicely with the original Psychonauts game uh was there any anything you guys wanted to do in the game that you couldn't make fit with the original game and you scrapped or just couldn't explain away right we looked at uh so to ask this question he was uh Rose was it was was asking were there any abilities in the original game that didn't work um a lot of the original game was combat Focus so blowing stuff up and like I said we shifted to a little bit more puzzle solving we added that one ability just to give something a light poke a little bit more of a pointand click interaction but there were abilities in the original game that I thought would be cool to put in that we didn't such as invisibility

we tried to figure out a way to do it but since we weren't drawing your character you kind of already invisible um we thought we might tweak it to make other stuff invisible but that's something we might look at at DLC or an add-on there's always more to add um hopefully that that answers your question thanks go ahead I a question you brought up something very interesting with level design specifically I was wondering if uh you found that painting points of interest vertically things that were above the player if you had a challenge getting their attention that way so his question was with level design did we look at the challenges of moving vertically we did a little bit uh some of our initial puzzles you were in a prison that was very vertical based with a lot of prison cells and different levels that you would go up we do a few things we have a uh particular sort of boss battle in the game with a giant character that's that's bigger than you that you look up and you have to fight one thing we found is that we didn't really want to keep the player looking up a lot particularly our game where you're moving stuff around if your neck is craned at an angle and you're having

to move stuff with your neck craned people got fatigued a lot sooner for simple navigation or drawing someone attention I think it works pretty well it's nice to hear a sound up there or see something and look up that really gives you a sense of scale and perspective particularly on levels with open Skies and bigger spaces but uh we didn't really use it for navigation too much thank you anybody else one coming from the back so did you ever so I'm assuming you didn't ever try to like twist their head around basically right like you let them move and look at things but did you ever try experimenting with maybe gently moving their head we did a little up or down and how did that go one thing that we kind of wanted to focus on was that you were going into a player's point of view and you were in that view uh I've seen some some games I think the recent Batman Arkham one has where you can press a button and your view suddenly switches 180 uh we try to Tech like that but it felt like you were more of a ghost

hovering over their head it kind of lost that connection with you being in the character as I said if you see a the way a character is facing that gave you a clue at what you might see you might see that character kind of peeking around a wall and you go into him and see around that wall that connection of kind of being in that character's head was something we wanted to preserve but sometimes we do cheat it we have a eye locator on every character which is where your eye is going to be when you go into him sometimes we cheated up a little bit and you'll be a foot over their head or a foot in front or left not too far usually between like a foot to 3 ft distance from a character and we found that since we don't draw the player's body most players don't notice you can move it down a little bit or up a little bit and that works pretty well cool thank you anyone else all right well thanks for coming to my talk again I'm [Music] [Applause]