VR Lessons Learned in the Level Design of 'Blood & Truth'

it's my talk vr lessons learned in a level design of blood and truth so the society to talk suggests we're going to be focusing entirely around VR and starting off I'm going to touch up on the topics of traversal nemetrix both of which are extremely important elements to VR is together they create a foundation of comfortable spatial awareness and movement next up gameplay mechanics which I like to refer to as the level designers palette as these are all the things that level designers should be taking krei of risks we have in attempt to make the best possible level and finally we'll break down a level beat by beat discussing all the call VR considerations along the way before we jump into all of that my name is Zahra shirazi and the lead level designer at Sony's London studio and these are some of the games that I've worked on over the past ten years as a level designer for the past five years however I've been working exclusively within VR and I think that as a team at London studio we probably make the most expensive VR

titles in a market so I wanted to share some lessons I've personally learned working in triple-a VR which I hope will shed light on what I consider to be some must-have considerations whenever they're making a VR game and for those of you who haven't played or seen any of Lutton truth is the launch trailer for a game what do I want your operation it's not gonna start an all-out war it's not big enough I'm gonna go and find out you're just gonna walk in there [Music]

we need to push back hard or wasting it [Music] for the players so from the trailer we can count a blood and roof as an action-adventure FPS it features some drama in the form of a revenge story gunplay these breaker puzzles and high action set-pieces okay so it's mentioned in the agenda we're going to quickly review what reversal means the blood and roof to embody one of the core pillars that again being the action hero means that the controls need to be as intuitive as possible and here's a clip of how it works in game the player is presented with a choice of waypoints when they choose one they press the move button to go they can strafe and cover but a player is always essentially making forward progress from one piece of cover to another think of it a bit

like an automated roadie running gears with the ability to shoot the whole way and we actually consulted with a former SAS soldier on how they move in combat situations in this concept of staying low and pushing forward towards danger actually fits in line with how the SAS operates so some comfort considerations to take note of you do a small amount of easing in and easing out when we start and stop moving and we also varied a speed depending on a distance that the player is moved so to shore the distance the slower the movement and this is because we found that moving short distances quickly was a comfort trigger we also deliberately split up chunks at a level to work with either standing or crouched reversal it's moving up and down repeatedly you can also be a comfort trigger too finally we limited backtracking purely to where all of our weapons are located and given the option to backtrack across the entire traversal graph really increase the cognitive load on the player which could easily lead to confusion with inside of firefights given our tagline for the game was be

the action hero we wanted to make sure our traversal method actually helped the player to fulfil this fantasy and here's what it all looks like under the hood internally refers to this kind of gizmo information as proxies so I'll be referring to proxy information throughout the rest of the talk and as you can see it's spline Network lots of forward and diagonal movements over time we have a rotate the player which during interactive traversal section so when a player uses their hands to climb or crawl we split the traversal graph into two separate modes the different colors on the spline represent pre or post combat and combat and this simply indicates where you can traverse - depending on if you're in combat or not there's also a little bit of extra information as blowing proxies indicate in the direction you travel so as a quick tip I found a traverse and for a white box in VR with just one material can bring with it some comfort and readability issues essentially the depth of in your level becomes much harder to

read but luckily this is easily alleviated by mapping a different color sort of work vertical aspects at your level it sounds like a really small thing it really does help to give that sense of depth in the art that can otherwise be lost next on your agenda metrics so good metrics are important in all games but for VR specifically they can normalize the base level of comfortable traversal within your game space if you're too close or too far away from something then you're genuinely going to feel this so this shows the cover metrics that we had in place on our way points and listens away from the cover was heavily attested to ensure the following criteria number one that a player could come through BC over to cover number two that they could duck their head and feel safe and cover and three there anything that we placed on top of the cover like ammo or weapons could easily be reached to ensure that these metrics were fixed we setup prevails with something that we called snap zones and these are the red

plains that you can see over to cover objects with the snap zones in place all we have to do is move away point towards an edge and it would just snap into position this took care of about 90 percent of the waypoints in the game and sometimes depending on the circumstances we disabled snapping on a waypoint and we tweaked the location by hand to get out of cover comfortably we baked out splines and curved them around the cover objects and whilst this was fine for the white box stage I wasn't particularly comfortable with the fact that these curves would always be an approximation and they had the potential to be implemented completely differently by a to the level designers so how is this gonna scale and we're Fr metrics had to change as a result of user test we'd have to go back and update auditory blasts blinds by hand and what if the next user test required us to change it again so the answer was to set up a metrics based system instead designers now had three different curves available to them which could be changed within an ini file and

this would update all the splines we've inside of the game and we still baked out the odd spline here and there especially during set pieces but just like the snap waypoints before this system took care of approximately 90% of the game so now that we have a rail-based reversal system metrically driven in tune for comfort let's talk about the meat in a game and explore the gameplay mechanics so blood and troops mechanics can be split into three different categories first we have a number of traversal based ones next we have some more combat focused mechanics and finally we have interactable z' each of which is entirely concentrated in the use of the are and motion controls so now we've established blunt roofs traversal metrics and game mechanics the rest is fairly classic level design so what I'm going to do now is quickly break down a level and point out the VR considerations involved in each scene and in certainly we call this level the

HQ it's around 3/4 it away through so but now two player has been introduced to all new mechanics of the game here's a quick summary omission you and your former SAS buddy Deacon have been tasked with breaking into a dubious shell cut up in your building and reporting back and on any of the information you may find your handler agent Carson has also provided you have a Trojan to upload to the bad guys systems okay let's step through it starts with a classic planning montage a filmic technique used in films like Mission Impossible where you plan and execute the mission at the same time and we don't have any bloody AI from the game but still wanted to explore how we could have you and an NPC work together across the mission so first things first you decide to recon the shell company building with the drone and as we fly over to building site we discovered a following we need to find a way to disable two generator powering your floodlights and we need a keycard to get into the

building and often one of the things that we find with new players to VR is that they can get stuck staring in one direction this elevated position here gives us a unique view of the building site and it's just can encourage the player to look around the scene a little bit more and as a quick win we literally just reuse that run for traversal mechanic for the dryin movie and then we added some post-processing and a little bit of audio and this gave us the impression that we're actually looking through the camera at the drone okay so once we've learned everything we need to be montage cut back to the safe house now we make a plan to get into the building site beacon will set off the fire alarms remotely whilst the player disguise themselves as an electrician if it is quick in between drama scenes we place different interactable surround the table beer bottles plans etc given a player a chance to role play along with the scene to me this is about as cutscene as it should ever get in VR remember that the player always has control over the camera so it's nice for them to have a little extra agency with inside the drama scenes

once again we montage cut exactly where we need to be in this case we gain access to the site wearing our electricians disguise and once we're in front of a generator we fix the alarms by planting some remote activated det cord with this type of interaction we affectionately refer to internally as a pod which stood for box of the lights I actually read an article online where a journalist had coined a term fuse breaker puzzles which I guess is a much better back in a books quote but I might refer to bots throughout the rest of the talk so we had three tiers of fidelity for these interaction puzzles this one's a tear-free due to its simplicity we unscrew a panel but on a det cord job done tier two is more of a puzzle and requires at least some thought and likely takes a few more steps to complete as well tier 1 is what we would call a hero asset this still uses all the same kit parts we used to create the rest of our BOTS things like the buttons

joysticks sliders but the main difference is the kit parts drive fairly bespoke actions like tracking an NPCs movements through CCTV the really important thing to take note of here is that we're never pressing X to play something we're always asking the player to use their hands to perform actions okay so generate has been fixed but at they're called next we need the Foreman's ID card so back at the safe house deikun it's a plan to distract the foreman dresses the maintenance man for his building so it looks like we have to climb up some scaffolding to break into the Foreman's apartment as mentioned earlier the player can your rotate during interactive traversal segments like this we can see this here as the player is physically pulling themselves along the scaffolding inputting rotation into the players hands like this is a huge comfort boost likely because the tiny naaa muscles responsible for balance or in motion as you perform as you perform the actions so once we're in

we give deacon a heads up over comments again we don't feature any kind of body AI in the game so deacons presence in the scene is entirely driven through vo and as we start rifling through some drawers we can hear them distracting the foreman downstairs eventually we find a locked drawer with the ID card inside so here's a screenshot of what our climbing implementation looks like in editor these are basically prefab curves that we know to be within comfortable limits the proxy or gizmo information shows the distance that we can pull ourselves around it and we also experiment with adding the simulated feeling of weights and a climbing interaction is without any of this although it's completely one-to-one it also felt like you were superhuman so we tuned to the balance of an action hero more like John McClane instead okay so for a game of blood in a title we've gone through the first ten minutes of a mission and we haven't even killed anyone yet so we're gonna fix that now drop off down on our planning

we've got the ID card and we plant the det cord it's time for a set-piece base jumping over to River Thames so as you can see here some basic functionality on the parachute allowing the player to bank from side to side you can also push up or pull down on the parachute ports to raise and lower yourself the editor proxy information here shows how far on the X&Y we can maneuver within the parachutes you can then see how we funneled us in sort of player lands exactly where we want them - it's pretty basic stuff really so Deacon sets off the det cord we planted earlier remotely taking down the lights and covering your entry into the building sites it looks like there's some hired goons patrolling in blood and truth is you basically keep making forward progress we keep the player from pushing too far forward and combat scenarios by splitting up scenes and sections and these sections open up when the player takes out enemies so this creates a pretty simple loop take out an

enemy open up a new chunk and this is what the traversal graph looks like within this building sites the level designers were responsible for the levels layout as well as all the traversal markup in this meant that every single cover point in the game has gone through some considerable testing and it we can guarantee the player is always going to have a fun route through a level so now that the building site is clear we can use the ID card that we checked earlier to get into the building now when you break in somewhere it makes sense that one of the first things you might be greeted with is a security camera and in blood and truth these essentially workers lock and key puzzles the player must now either hack the camera or start a fire fight to progress so let's take a take a look at the stealth for your approach it's a hack the camera we use one of the bots that we talked about earlier we've done a similar kind of thing to this and flat screen games for years now remember using the analog sticks to hack things we've inside of the Arkham games but

this is exactly the same kind of gameplay beat that we're looking for but because it's in VR you have that extra tactility at your disposal we should absolutely be factored into the design of the puzzle and we came up with the box of the delights in the middle of production which obviously the producers weren't extremely happy with but it felt like we didn't have enough in the level design palette to break up the gunplay so we formed the free person strike team and base designed in them implemented them all moving around ten weeks start to finish here's what the puzzle used to look like before we switched out the designer our and not that I want to give you the advice of if it doesn't feel right add more stuff during production but this is a perfect example of what can be accomplished in a short timeframe within a minimal minimal resources okay so whilst we're in this maintenance corridor thus take a look at the layout and why this makes sense for blood and treat this security room to the right in a normal fps it would make total sense

that the door was placed here instead it's a small thing but it gives the space an extra dimension right it might even feel a little bit more normal as it's very rare to enter a building and have order doors facing the exact same direction in blood and truth this was actually a level design challenge we got around this box extending the width or the level to accommodate doors being on the forward axis so looking at the top down we can see how the level is split into channels and this gives the player some options and fits in line of our traversal method which doesn't feature snap turning and when we did use your brace rotations we designed our level sections to curve at the same time that the player did creating a corridor like feeling and helping to relax the curve visually this featured most prominently with inside of the run gun sections of our game so here's an example from the casino level we can see it as a curve on the inside corner here we travel around it following the forward tangent of the spline a very relaxed pace and we also

found that the corners didn't need to be a hundred percent smooth curve so we can see with this next corner it's actually fairly faceted but it still helps to lead the eye which in turn helps the brain to process it spatially and here's what this looks like in editor another thing that really helped is the highly choreographed enemy placement around the scene this helps to not only push the action here a pillar of the game but also makes great use of VR as the gunplay is happening all around you so back to our level next we Jimmy open lift shaft and then we go subterranean by hanging on the underside of a lifts as it starts moving and then we enter the evil base proper so this is where you want to start putting it all together the players done all of that legwork deacon during the planning phase to get into the base so now we increase the intensity curve and start giving a player some options on this floor we've

got a number of different room setups which gives this base a labyrinth light feel you've got some patrolling guards for the classic evils evil based style uniforms on and a fuse breaker puzzle leading into a room full of loot the player can actually find an ID card for this room if they search for some nearby drawers or they can hack in but it's obviously increases the chance of setting off the alarms and alerting guards to your presence for this playthrough will carry on stealthily okay so let's review the top down in a space and look at the traversal Network so we have our familiar forward-facing openings and the spaces put up into channels leading to a pinch point at the end of the room as we progress further through the base we come across a variation on a fuse breaker puzzle that gets a little bit more complicated each of these fuse breaker prefabs had prefixed Waypoint destinations and to help us establish these positions we created some really super simple metric

guides to visualize the interaction range there isn't anything dynamic or fancy about this it's just all up in the lines of averaged economics in its next room we've also really large firefights this is purely to mix up the beats at a level by increasing the intensity in breaking up the staff so as a combat arena the space is wide and symmetrical the player can choose to progress RPV flank or down the center it's littered with cover points and enemies flood in from all directions and this cover setup gives the player a lot of freedom of movement and allows them to move laterally from one side on level to the other and we also decided to push the ceiling higher giving us more varied shooting angles and also making it easier for grenades to be for only longer distances so once the fire fight is over deikun and ryan update each other through vo and we head deeper into the base so we wanted to chunky in a section that made her feel like the bodies were still expanding a space and a screenshot can

show how the art and design teams work together to present new ideas adding this section and cutting another helped us to provide an area where a look and feel is totally different at arrested a level but continues to work on similar principles so along with the standard guards we also have a generator and using a kit part from one of our boards we can flip a switch to turn off some lights and if you do this so god will react and go off to investigate and this leaves you with one less enemy to take out if a fire fight breaks out they also want to show here what I like to call a legitimate hack so we integrated a stealth route on a left side on a level where you can crawl on the top of these boxes staying low and peeking through to make things easy for us we simply reskin to vent crawl prefab that way everything that stays with inside other metrics and all we're doing is swapping out some meshes so here's a side-by-side comparison

once we get through the tunnel we get to another body interaction if we found the code on a notepad in the previous section we can just type that in avoids we can hack it which again has a slightly more difficult setup earlier I talked about a fuse breaker puzzles embodying the same kind of beat as using a gadget in the Arkham games in this intensity graph shows us how far through the level we currently are studying it we can see that there are lots of evenly spaced that drops in intensity and although this is fairly typical in action-adventure missions it's important to look at it through the lens of VR if you just come out of an intense battle we're about to go into one giving the player arrest helps to avoid something we like to call the our fatigue carrying on with our mission deacon takes out a guard and updates us further on what he's seen in a base and this further builds on that feeling that was still on a mission with him in a positioning of these narrative

moments is something that we spend on a lot of time on a London studio this is all in an effort to make sure that a players get a great view of an actor's performance we're getting close to the end now so the intensity curve is trending higher in this room features a lot of lateral cover and gaps between creating channels for the player to move forward our cover metrics are ensuring all the ammo and grenades a place of in comfortable distance and a shelving here also creates a nice cover type that is completely unique to VR we've all the gaps between the boxes the player is to physically search for an opening to shoot enemies for you this could be even more effective in stealth sections giving the player that feeling of being a hunter in the last room at the level we plant the trojan triggering a violent shootout on a massive storage elevator in this combination of the epic scale of this room and the dynamic movement you get from the elevator gives us a fitting combat scenario for the end of our level to be embodies the power of VR

transporting the player into a location and situation that they're likely never to experience in a real life giving them a chance to roleplay as an action hero so there we have it in summary pay extra special attention to metric data the last and first thing you want to be worried about and making your game is comfort issues establish your game mechanics but think about what makes them only possible in VR it doesn't need to be some super expensive 360 dream sequence I mean those are cool but even something as simple as throwing and scrunched up paper ball into a bin can be quite magical in a VR review level often and keep asking yourself the question how can it be more VR and if I only play lots of VR games some awesome games out there now it'll serve as the inspiration for example if you haven't already played blood and truth why not go pick yourself up a copy so I hope this little run-through has helped anyone that's thinking about how to translate their work into VR and how

some of the more typical action-adventure principles can work within the field thank you very much listening you're more than welcome to melt me if you have any questions regarding the talk thanks again