Partly inspired by my previous experience woth the Oculus Rift, I decided to get the Development Kit to do more experiments with the system. I am still very excited about the hardware. I think it’s safe to say that this might be the singe most important gaming peripheral since the Wiimote. Before developing anything I went on a binge of demos and games with Oculus support in order to understand the capabilities of the device. One of my favorites so far turned out to be Lunar Flight.

Lunar Flight is the flight simulator of a lunar lander not unlike the Apollo-era LEM. However, instead of landing on the Moon from orbit you fly around on the Moon from location to location. The game features realistic physics and controls. For example, if you start turning your spacecraft, it will continue turning due to the lack of air resistance. You will have to stop any rotation by applying counter-thrust. I noticed the game some time ago on Scott Manley’s channel but I was somewhat put off by it due to it’s rough aesthetics. The game changed quite a bit since then and it was the Oculus Rift implementation that completely won me over eventually.

The game received a major overhaul to work with the Rift. Most of the menu system was re-mapped to an Oculus-friendly 3D menu. The 2D cockpit was replaced with a 3D model. The combination of the right kind of experience and a great deal polish resulted in what I think is a benchmark for Oculus Rift implementations.

Nausea-Free

One of the biggest stumbling blocks for the success of the Oculus Rift will be the nausea. Most current games induce a surprising amount of motion-sickness. When what your eyes see doesn’t match up with what your sense of balance is telling you, your brain starts suspecting you are drunk or poisoned and decides to evacuate the contents of your stomach just to be sure. This is exactly what happens when people get sea sick. Some people already reported having similar problems playing FPS games in 2D monitors. The Rift exacerbates this minority issue to a platform-defining criteria. Everybody gets sick on the Rift eventually. Game designers need to learn how to avoid it. Lunar Flight shows one solution. It lets you fly a rather slow-moving vehicle. There are no sudden accelerations. You can pitch and roll the lander, but you don’t have to. There are actually different strategies you can apply to fly it. You can decide for yourself how adventurous you want the flight to be. The result is a very smooth, nausea-free experience. With most games, I cannot play more than 20 minutes or so before feeling sick. Lunar Flight I was able to comfortably play for over 4 hours at a time – my longest continuous Rift experience so far. And I could have easily continued playing.

Taking Advantage of the Cockpit – Information

Straight-forward and natural: The map is right there.

The cockpit demonstrates a very effective interface design principle when using the Rift: Additional information can be placed in space around the player instead of hiding it in a menu. So for example, instead of having a map that you would bring up by pushing a button, you can just display a map on a virtual screen in the cockpit to the left. When you want to look at the map, you just turn his head to the left to look at the screen. You never leave the context of the game. More importantly, it feels straight-forward and natural. The map is right there. You don’t have to learn buttons or anything. A similar system was already employed in the game Far Cry 2. But it’s really the head-tracking of the Rift that knocks this out of the park.

Taking Advantage of the Cockpit – Interaction

PUSH ALL THE BUTTONS!

Another interesting feature of the cockpit in Lunar Flight the inteactivity. The cockpit features buttons you can actually press. You highlight them by looking at them. You press them by pushing a catch-all “interact” button on the gamepad. This is a good way of mapping a large amount of functions on a limited input device like a controller. The reason why this is important in the case of the Rift is because wearing the headset, you just can’t see a keyboard. It is therefore impractical to map all those functions on different keyboard keys like most simulators tend to. You could hide those functions in a menu structure, but this would pull players out of the context of the game. Using the cockpit as a “virtual controller” is a smart solution that ends up feeling as if you are actually in the cockpit PUSHING ALL THE BUTTONS. The concept does have some limitations, though. Turning your head to look straight at a tiny button takes a moment – a moment where you won’t be looking ahead. So this solution won’t work for very time-dependent functions. Using this to refuel your spacecraft or selecting the next mission while on the landing pad is perfect. Activating a scanning device while desperately trying to maintain a hovering position just a couple of meters over the surface can be a bit awkward.

Menu

It won’t win visual design awards, but at least it actually exists and it works.

Finally, it wanted to stress out the importance of a menu designed for use with the Rift. Most games I’ve seen have been retro-fitted for use with the Rift. They usually end up projecting their previous 2D menu on a plane in front of the player’s eyes. This hardly ever works. The menus have been often designed for much higher resolutions. Fonts are rarely legible. A workaround some developers use is to move the plane closer to the face of the player. This makes fonts more legible but players end up seeing just a part of the menu at a time – like operating a GUI trough a telescope. The developer of Lunar Lander actually went the extra mile and re-designed the most important menus to work with the resolution of the Rift. They are somewhat an eye-sore but they actually work.

One might think that it should be no problem just to take off the Rift for a second to click on a button from time to time. However, this is impractical for multiple reasons. Putting the Rift on takes a couple of seconds. The lenses have a sweet spot that you have to find. You need to pull on the straps for a short while until you’re all set. It is certainly more complicated that donning a pair of headphones. Additionally, I’m quite short-sighted and I’m using the Rift without glasses. After removing the Rift I still need to put on my glasses before I can see anything. Finally, a lot of games actually require you to use the Rift in “Extended Mode”. This means that the Rift works as an extension of the desktop rather than a copy of what you see on your monitor. So the menu won’t be even visible on the monitor while you are using the Rift.

The lack of a Rift-friendly menu ends up spoiling a surprising amount of games for me, including high-profile titles like Hawken or War Thunder. In this context, Lunar Flight sets yet another benchmark.

Overall, I thunk Lunar Flight is an obligatory experience for anybody interested in developing games for the Rift. It is by no means a perfect game. But it plays to the strengths of the peripheral while avoiding it’s most serious pitfalls. It shows though-provoking ideas that I hope will be explored further in upcoming Rift games. Finally, it also goes beyond a quick tech demo – it is also an engrossing and enjoyable. It’s a proof of concept not only for the technology but for the first time also for the complete experience.

Recently at GamesCom I was able to try the VR headset Occulus Rift for the first time. I was lucky enough to try the new HD Prototype. From what I understand, this is very close to the final product that should release in 2014. I played a couple of minutes of Hawken. Here are some of my impressions.

Occulus VR Booth at GamesCom

In some respects it was a sobering experience that de-mystified a lot of my preconceptions of Virtual Reality. In other ways I was still blown away by it. In any case, I think it is a fascinating and important device. So far, most of us have learned about Virtual Reality almost exclusively from Hollywood movies. The Occulus Rift represents a pallet cleanser and establishes a precedence to productively discuss the technology.

Does it feal like actually being there?

No. Which was the sobering part. There are multiple effects that will ensure that the user will never think that they are doing anything else than having a small LCD screen strapped to their face.

• Lack of optical focus – While the Rift does show the world in stereoscopic 3D, one of the things that we should be slowly learning from the recent hype for 3D movies is that depth perception seems to be a phenomenon that goes beyond mere stereoscopy. One important aspect of how humans judge scale and distance is by using the focus of their eyes. Put your finger close to your eye and focus on it. The everything further away will become blurry. Focus on something further away and the finger will become blurry. This is one of the reasons why we can usually judge very well how close things are in the immediate vicinity – close enough so we can touch it. The effect becomes less pronounced with distance. But in our everyday life we constantly re-focus on various things around us.

  The Rift lacks this. The image is projected by a special lens in a particular way so that all the light rays come in parallel as if they came from far away. Your eye focuses in the distance. So putting it on, instead of the 3D image wrapping snugly around you, to some extent it remains removed and not immersive at all. This is not a design error, it is just a natural limitation of the system.

• Low resolution and a screen door effect – I was shocked by how low the resolution is, even though this was the HD version. The problem here is that while the display is pretty highly resolved, it covers your entire field of view for both eyes. So you end up staring on just a tiny portion of the available resolution at a time. The result puts you back into old VGA times. If you have a realistically-sized speedometer in a car sim, you will probably not be able to read the numbers on it. Do add insult to injury, the LCD screen is optically magnified. So you end up seeing the gaps between the individual LCD pixels. The good news is that unlike the focus issue, this aspect will likely get better with future iterations of the hardware.

  

  The Screen Door effect

• Low dynamic range – Because you are looking at a standard RGB screen, you will only see light from a fairly low dynamic range of intensity. For example, if you look at the sun in the virtual world, it will not blind you. This seems like a petty issue but I think this lack of fidelity does put a huge damper on how real the image appears. Especially in a cockpit situation, you are usually sitting in a dark environment while looking on a very bright world outside of your windshield. The Rift dulls out this contrast and it ends up reminding you that you are actually just looking at a screen.

• Restricted field of view – Finally, the image doesn’t cover the entire field of view. There is a small but noticeable border. Supposedly, the coverage is pretty good compared to other systems and it is not a show stopper. However, it is one additional reminder that erodes the illusion.

The good news is that it is very easily to get lost in the image. After a few minutes you get used to the artifacts and get lost in the game. Then again, that’s kinda what happens with video games in general.

How immersive is it?

It is hard to say if the Rift feels more immersive than a regular screen simply because there is no way to measure immersiveness. However, there is one effect I and the two guys with me experienced which is certainly something a regular screen doesn’t produce. Walking around in Hawken didn’t feel exceptional. But then we engaged the jet pack. Holy smokes! Flying with the Rift is an incredible experience. It feels truly astonishing! There is a real feeling of actually lifting yourself into the sky, a real sense of height and depth. Even though there are no acceleration forces, some part of my brain was just completely fooled. So every time I turned off the jet pack and started falling, my stomach started to churn like in a roller coaster. I had serious inhibitions of letting myself fall all the way to the surface. I eventually did fall to the ground at a speed that would kill me in real life. It felt unsettling. Despite of all the technical imperfections, that feeling alone made all 3 of us walk away ecstatic.

How it feels like when using the Rift.

So what is it good for?

This is the question I found most intriguing. Most people seem to want to use it for 3D shooters. That will do in the short term. However, there is an important thing that I realized: in order to make the Rift REALLY shine the game must reward you for being able to look around. You see, a regular shooter couples your walking direction with your viewing direction. So you always walk and shoot in the direction you look. This is not practical for the Rift as you would have troubles turning around 180°. Besides, in real life, you head and your body can rotate independently. The obvious solution is to uncouple the looking direction and the walking/shooting direction. You use the controller (or mouse) to move the cross-hair as regular. But additionally, you can move the camera away from the cross hair by turning your head. This works but it causes other problems. In practice, it is just so much easier to flick the analogue stick to look around rather than turn your entire head. So playing and FPS you will just end up staring straight ahead and moving the field of view with the controller as you are used to. This renders the whole head tracking functionality of the Rift completely useless and lessens the immersion. You just don’t get the opportunity to experience how you head is embedded in the virtual world if you end up never moving it.

The Rift shines in games where the thing you control turns SLOWER than you can turn you head. These are basically any kinds of simulation games: flight simulators, spaceship simulators, racing games, truck simulators, etc. Any game, where you control some kind of vehicle that has some inertia to it. Hawken may be a Mech simulator, but it is just too fast for the Rift to be of use. You need something where there is an advantage in looking around.

The fact that simulation games often simulate an activity that is performed while sitting in a seat also helps reducing the dissonance. From our short experience with the Rift, games where you fly around have an additional advantage. I haven’t witnessed any high-speed movements yet. They may also be impressive.

All in all, this and what I wrote yesterday suggests a very bright future for simulation games. Will we all be trucking with our Rifts? I guess we find out next year.

I recently got into XCOM. I saw Day9 playing it and it made me catch the XCOM virus again. It was a good thing too. The game came out around when my dad passed away. I bought it when it on release, played a map or two and forgot about it. I was glad to re-discover it now. I attempted a Classic Ironman and recorded it. The result is a YouTube series. Here is the first episode:

I’m really enjoying the game. It is very different from the original and it misses out on a lot of things that made the original great. But its game design is also a lot tighter, the experience a lot more controlled and dramatic. It is a good attempt a remake. One that brings in its own flavor rather than just copying the original.

So for example, one thing that it constantly does is to put players in front of these very clearly defined decision. The very first thing you do is to select between multiple regions to put your base in. Each region comes with it’s own advantages. Throughout the game, you get those so-called abduction missions. Multiple cities are being attacked by aliens simultaneously. The game forces you to decide which city to help. Each city has a different difficulty level and different rewards. Also, helping a city will lower it’s panic level while the cities that you leave behind will freak out more. Compared to the original this feels forced and artificial. The original allowed you to maintain multiple teams, so you could be attempting multiple missions simultaneously. Cases like this used to be rare anyway. This new approach feels less natural. It is clearly a setup by the game’s designers to put players into this difficult choice. But it is also a clear execution of modern-day Firaxis philosophy: Games as a series of interesting choices. I have my problems with that philosophy. But I appreciate that they actually have one and stick to it.

One thing I really dislike so far is the way UFO/Alien lore is treated. The original drew upon a lot of real-life UFO folklore. The team seems to have thrown a lot of that out of the window by making some pretty peculiar artistic choices. The grey aliens scour on the ground and move on all fours like monkeys. They don’t look like the mystical, enigmatic beings we know form the X-Files. Equally troublesome are the obnoxious, cartoonish characters in the base. Dr. Vahlen doesn’t seem to be able to decide on which european accent she wants to speak. Audio transmissions are unskipable. The cut-scenes are generally ham-fisted and cringe-worthy. The game fails to convey the kind of atmosphere and setting the original was famous for.

On the other hand, it feels refreshing to have a modern game that will actually allow players to live out their mistakes. Playing on Ironman, the game might put you back to square one even if you are already 8 hours in. At least in this regard, it is an entertaining remake. I might write more about it soon. Stay tuned!

There is something interesting about Pacific Rim. It has spawned a lot of very divergent reactions among critics. Take this merciless takedown by The Jeff and Casey Show for example:

And then compare it to this commentary by Mythbuster Adam Savage

While Jeff and Casey call it the worst Blockbuster Movie ever (even worse than Transformers), Adam seems to have enjoyed it a great deal. I’ve seen a similar divide between me and the friends I’ve seen the movie with. Most of my friends thought it was rather forgettable while I had a blast.

The thing that I find perplexing in here is that I actually completely emphasize with all of Jeff and Casey’s arguments. The premise of this movie is incredibly stupid and threadbare. It is full of baroque details that represent gross misunderstandings of physics and technology. I would be usually arguing in a similar vein, picking apart the lack of realism and common sense. For example, I had a longer discussion with my podcast friends on how the world of Game of Thrones fails to reflect the dramatic changes of seasons. How come time is still measured in years if a season cycle can last multiple years? How did the people of Westeros arrive at the concept of what a year is in the first place?

How come there are bears in Westeros? How do they even hibernate if winters are arbitrary in length and last for years?

A convenient way out of this dissonance for me would be to argue to consider consistency. Pacific Rim is a modern re-imagining of the old Godzilla movies. A hokey story barely holding together to set up the gratuitous monster fights is par for the course. On the other hand, Game of Thrones is a hyper-realistic take on the Fantasy genre and the result of meticulous research and word-crafting. So oversights like these appear more substantial because they are uncharacteristic.

But on closer inspection this way out doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. I would probably use the same kinds of arguments to take down Transformers. Arguably, Transformers doesn’t take itself any more seriously than Pacific Rim. Yet the same kind of stupidity that I think is sinful in Transformers, appears as endearing in Pacific Rim.

There is a certain way in which we formulate criticism that I noticed at some point when doing user testing. As long as a certain works connects and speaks to us in some way or form, we are able to accept it’s flaws, even embrace them – the way we may love a cute kitten even if it constantly shits on our carpet. But if a work fails to establish this connection or if the flaws accumulate beyond a certain threshold, we tend to flip our way of thinking. What was previously glossed over or even embraced then becomes an aggravating factor. Once the initial glow wears off and the kitten grows up to be a big and fat cat, that spoiled bastard better learns to stay off the goddamn carpet.

Yes, this is an analogy to Pacific Rim.

This may be an explanation. But I think the reactions to Pacific Rim show that the rabbit hole is even deeper. Some people tout Mako, the female protagonist as a new benchmark for writing strong female characters. Jeff and Casey offer solid arguments why it’s blatantly sexist. Those vast differences in opinion even when looking at details of the film aren’t that well explainable by an infatuation with the film’s overall themes. It’s not like Mako is a sexist character and that sexism is just glossed over by people because they really enjoy old Godzilla movies. Rather, there is an ambivalence present at a molecular level as well.

There is one aspect of Pacific Rim that for me still trumps Transformers or other Blockbuster movies similar to it. The entire movie conveys a message of inter-cultural cooperation on multiple levels. Not only are the giant robots manufactured in different countries. The actual act of piloting them requires two humans to cooperate. The two protagonists originate from America and Japan respectively and it is their mutual cooperation that makes victory possible. In one of the sideline plots, two arguing scientists also lay down their quarrels to conduct a risky experiment that reveals a vital clue on how to overcome the impending doom. There are probably even more details that echo this theme. To me, this is still a quantum leap ahead of the militaristic machismo veiled with thin humanistic platitudes in Transformers.

I will be monitoring the response to this particular movie. So if you have any interesting analysis or just your own opinions, feel free to drop a line.

I wrote yesterday about some of my observations on the Myst Classic Game Postmortem. I wanted to follow-up today with the UFO Classic Game Postmortem.

Full disclosure: I never actually played that much of UFO. I played a couple of missions. But most of my UFO experience comes from the sequel X-Com: Terror from the Deep which I played for well over 100 hours over the course of my life. With the two games being almost identical, I tend to project what I know about TFTD to fill my knowledge gaps of UFO. Both had been a very influential game for me and so I the video was fascinating to me.

• Accidental UFO Theme – One of the major surprises of the presentation was the reveal that it wasn’t the developer Julian Gollop, who came up with the UFO setting. The publisher Microprose suggested it. Julian apparently only wanted to make a bigger version of his previous game Laser Squad, which seems to have been only the tactical combat part of what later became UFO. Microprose pushed him to add a global meta management layer and suggested the UFO theme to make it more recognizable. They made an attempt at making the game more similar to the Civilization series. This is also where the term “Ufopedia” came from.

  Of course, this was just a starting point. Julian Gollop then went on and actually made those suggestions a reality. The theme was inspired in particular by the British TV Series UFO which I had no clue about. He also drew upon UFO conspiracy folklore by UFO hoaxter Timothy Good. The latter was a particularly serendipitous move as the same UFO folklore became the basis for the TV show X-Files, which in turn became a major cultural touchstone of 90ies pop culture. And that’s something I always suspected: one of the reasons for the incredible success of UFO was X-Files. The game came out at EXACTLY the right time to ride the wave of UFO enthusiasm spawned by X-Files. With grey aliens and autopsies it delivered exactly the kind of supernatural fix the X-Philes were craving for.

• Dissonant Aesthetics – Which brings be to the point of aesthetics. One thing I personally never liked was the dissonance in aesthetics in the original UFO. The game features a loud, fast, action-packed, gun-toting comicbook intro. The actual game is about slowly creeping with your soldiers through silent, murky urban environments and taking out hidden aliens one by one with precision shots.

  The presentation revealed that this was apparently the result of the lack of a coherent aesthetic vision. The art was done by two artist from Microprose. One of them was simply a fan of Marvel comic books and designed the characters as well as the intro. Julian Gollop himself didn’t seem to have a firm opinion on this so he let them do what they suggested. One thing he often underlines in the presentation is that nobody really understood how the game is going to play. So the basically ended up with an “everything but the kitchen sink”-approach: UFO folklore, UFO TV series, Laser Squad and Marvel Comics.

  I suppose the reason why it did work is because X-Files prepared the audience to gloss over the awkwardness of it all. Perhaps the different contradicting directions created a Rorschach test where everybody saw something different: a comic book or an X-Files spin-off. Be it as it may, the lack of aesthetic direction seems to have became a huge stumbling block in creating follow-ups.

• Failed Sequels – I was fascinated to hear the story of the sequels to UFO. In particular, I was stunned to hear that Terror From the Deep was an in-house production by Microprose created entirely without Julian Gollop. I had no idea. It explains why Julian never built upon what TFTD done right. What I personally love about TFTD is that it’s the only sequel that managed to create a really coherent, effective aesthetic – an aesthetic Julian himself apparently never managed to conjure. TFTD drew on the Cthulhu mythology of H.P. Lovecraft and added some iconic B-Movie favourites like the Gill Man or floating brains. It dropped the comicbook cutscenes for more neutral CG ones. The aliens, the color palette, the sound, the overall atmosphere all suited the setting perfectly.

  Meanwhile, Julian worked on UFO: Apocalypse which became officially the game where UFO dropped the ball. It’s really heart-breaking Julian talk about it. During the Q&A he admits that it was one of the biggest mistakes of his career. It sounds like there is an amazing history behind it. Apparently, a lot of things went wrong with that game

  From what I can tell it seems like instead of consolidating what they had and creating a coherent aesthetic identity to center the UFO franchise around, the visuals were completely outsourced to Microprose again. Meanwhile the team around Julian just tried to just make a bigger, even more complex game. More destructible terrain. More sophisticated political simulations. With no guidance and no firm grasp of what the game was supposed to be, the art team made some really poor aesthetic choices. Both teams failed. The visuals didn’t work. The more complex game mechanics didn’t either.

• Late-game Pacing – And this is really an interesting way of looking at how many early strategy games were made. The game design of them was often just a matter of creating a complex enough system and letting players play around in it – something that struck me as I was re-playing Populous as well. This was both – a strength and and weakness. The strength was that those games were able to create incredibly interactive, dynamic and engrossing experiences. Julian himself appreciates in hindsight how they never had to design levels and missions for UFO. They just made a bunch of prefabricated elements, some AI and the game would automatically assemble and re-combine everything to keep creating new, fresh scenarios. The weakness was that this approach makes it difficult to control the experience. Julian admits that the late-game of UFO often felt mis-balanced. Advanced weapons like the Blaster Launchers and Psionics delivered some really erratic results. The game tended to get quite lengthy too.

  More importantly, this game design approach also made follow-ups very difficult because it doesn’t necessarily scale. Aftermath demonstrated that adding more complex systems didn’t lead to the superior game they were hoping for.

Overall, I think it is telling that Julian always outsourced art and narrative to separate teams while he focused on the mechanics. I think this demonstrates quite well how you can’t treat those two aspects of a game separably. Both need to serve an overriding design vision – an fundamental understanding of what the game is about. I suspect nobody ever had that vision with UFO. It was a stroke of chance. But they never saw the necessity of taking charge of what they discovered there. They just continued developing games like he used to – make a convoluted system and let the art team slap some art on it. Or at least so it seems.

I would be really interested in a postmortem of TFTD now. That team had it’s own share of difficulties as it seems. But I still think they ended up with a more consistent overall game design. More insight into Apocalypse would be interesting too. I would love to hear the art team’s perspective on this.

As always, I strongly suggest you to check out the video. Feel free to leave you own thoughts on this below.