The Passing Lane of Art & Design

The Passing Lane of Art & Design 

by Devin Good

One of the interesting challenges encountered in our design process has been the heavy emphasis on a theme. The theme of course influenced our art and design. With myself as a designer and artist this has lead to a trapeze wire of how to navigate decision making on mechanics. I'll be focusing specifically on the design and art of our environment today.

Environment: 

The environmental design has changed dramatically in Batteries Included. We began as a simple cube. Nothing more and nothing less. The design of our room at this point was being strongly influenced by a simplicity based idea. If we put everything in the room within walking distance

then the player would not require any sort of locomotion system beyond walking within the boundaries of the level. For those who are unfamiliar with VR game development, locomotion is a problem that not many have been able to solve yet. Teleporting around is common but can make some people sick. Floating in the X and Z direction is common as well but has an even greater chance of VR sickness. With this simple cube approach we could swerve around the issue with less design work. Now if you can picture yourself in a square room with a locked door and one window, you may come to the conclusion it took us a month to find. It felt like a prison cell. So we began laying it out again but this time systematically with objects that were not important tucked away in a nook and the primary focus of player still within a rectangle shape. The rest of the room was stretched and pinched to give it much more life. The ceiling was vaulted, the windows "bayed", and the closet pushed back into a wall. 

From playtesting data, this room layout tested much better. Players felt like they were in a cozy bedroom and no longer a prison cell. Now as with the theme of this post, you can guess this lead to a design problem. Now we had to come up with a way for the player to get around a larger room but not make it a central focus of the game. In order to gather more data, we implemented three different locomotion systems that could be quickly swapped during gameplay sessions. 1- Teleportation by pointing to a spot and pressing the touchpad. 2- Floating and clicking with the touchpad. This involved the left hand being used to move in the X/Z axis and the right touchpad being used to turn the head different direction in set clicks. 3- "Iron Man Hands" was what we called them. A brilliant invention by Hunter that allowed the player to emit a jet from their hands and fly like Iron Man. They proved to be a little difficult to control inside of a small environment but could be mastered. Our final conclusion from playtesting was to change how our game began entirely. The player would start in a new room called the "Locomotion Exploration Room". Here, there were no other distractions, just a flat plane and 3 items that would change the player's locomotion system. The player gets to try each one and find the one they want before going into the full game. This also acted as VR teaching room for those that had never played VR before. The reason behind assigning each locomotion system to an item was the difficulty in explaining how and when to press a button in VR. That is in short, how we came to where we are now! If you have any more questions, feel free to reach out to our team!

-Devin Good, Lead Designer