Other devs are great at finding things to break. If a collider is out of place, or a trigger can be made to fail, or a certain view causes the framerate to drop, these people will find it. I’ve also never met a dev who was at all shy about saying, “Wouldn’t it be cool if...?” and so often yes, it would be absolutely rad.

VR virgins are a bonus to morale (you suddenly become the coolest person they know because you make magic), but they are also a reminder of how you can’t depend on your audience being fluent in, say, The Lab.

For instance, we had designed our initial area to require an understanding of both shooting and teleporting—our central player actions—to proceed to more interesting areas. We noticed that many first-time metaversers had little trouble trying out the buttons, but because they weren’t used to teleportation as a method of travel, they would find themselves teleporting straight into a wall and staring confusedly into the gaping void. As entertaining as players’ reactions to this usually were, it was a problem: they weren’t making the connection between the line shooting out of their controller and the location they ended up. To solve this, we stuck some colliders around the edge of the room that would cause the teleport to fail unless they aimed closer to themselves. Giving them a little more time to comprehend the bezier curve of the teleport before they actually ended up somewhere else greatly improved their learning speed.

Hardcore gamers—not at all our target audience—challenged us to work on communicating the intent of our game more effectively. The playtester in Seattle who told us our peaceful, surreal exploration game “should be more like Call of Duty” is still basically a monster to us, but on our drive back down to Portland after we stopped raging about his insane philistinism we started work in earnest on our 20-second elevator pitch.

Poets, artists, psychologists, musicians, lawyers, etc., etc., each had unique personal reactions informed by their professional expertise. A friend who is a play therapist was responsible for crystallizing the game’s principle of “excitement without danger.” Poets were especially good at charting their engagement through the experience, often suggesting points of resonance we hadn’t noticed ourselves, and were very specific with their feedback.

Revision: Genre. The initial concept for the game was a skillshot game that required more spatial awareness than a professional pool-player has and more depth perception than an HMD with two screens an inch from your eyes can provide. But on paper it sounded totally achievable—”It’s like sniper-pachinko!”

Video game genres developed (and continue to) because they are what work well on a screen. What works well in VR is a different story, and I guarantee whole new genres will continue to spring up as the medium matures. Already there’s wave-shooters (Space Pirate Trainer, anyone?), busy-rooms (Job Simulator and Rick & Morty), rhythm-ninja (Audioshield), etc., and none of these games would be very compelling on a monitor, or with a gamepad. We eventually combined elements of walking simulators, shooting galleries, and scavenger hunts into an ultra-casual experience. Like any genre experiment, some players find Recreational Dreaming satisfying and some are left wanting more. But won’t it feel cool for the people who successfully break ground on a whole new VR tradition? And it’s not like you have much choice at this point in time but to try.

Revision: Shot variety and ammo. After picking our “shooting balls at stuff” mechanic, we wanted to see how far we could push it. We made the balls super-bouncy. We made them play by the rules of gravity, or not. We made them explode into other balls, fire out in bursts, go super fast or super slow. We made them huge and tiny, ethereally glowing and materially realistic. We made them translucent and put things inside them. We gave them a trail and then tried 30 different trails. We tried a dozen different noises for their bounce, and tried a dozen different effects on their deaths. Eventually we settled on six types of shot that stayed fun to use.

In trying to tackle how players would gain access to the different types of shots, we decided to complicate the game a little more by giving the player a limited amount of ammo and forcing them to find charging stations hidden throughout the levels to get more ammo. We thought this would reward thorough exploration and add some sense of consequence to each shot. And maybe it did, but I noticed that when we were demoing, the volunteer who’d often help us get people through the game had to remind a lot of players to recharge. They didn’t want to go hunting for ammo; they wanted to play around and look at the surreal environments.

I was loathe to cut the feature because we’d spent so much time on it (and the charging effect I had scripted was so cool!) but ultimately I decided that each level would feature one kind of shot. Players still get variety, but got to stop thinking about “the game” and keep focusing on the experience.

Revision: Starting room & tutorial. Reading instruction manuals is boring. Reading instruction manuals in pixelated VR-space is excruciating. Trying to remember controller diagrams when you find yourself in a strange new world in the middle of something gorgeous, and exciting, and scary, and weird, is impossible.

I mean, of course we tried the tool-tip thing. Then we tried to fit that into our metaphor and made the tooltips drift in and out with sometimes contradictory instructions. Then I scripted a sequence where both the button you needed to press to learn how to charge, shoot, or teleport, and the thing you needed to point at would glow the same noticeable color. But after we got rid of the charging stations and before I had gotten around to updating the controller tutorial script, players started figuring it out on their own. We had designed the starting room to require shooting the first target to create an exit, and to leave they need to teleport. With so few buttons on the Vive controller to choose from, and with the couple visual cues we’d included to point to the first target, all our playtesters discovered what to do using only their natural curiosity.

We had it pretty easy in this regard as Recreational Dreaming’s game mechanics are super simple. But the best-designed VR tutorials I’ve seen (The Lab, SUPERHOT VR, etc.) trust their players’ curiosity and willingness to just play around and see what happens, and give them a relatively safe space to experiment for themselves.

Revision: Every single visual element. Things really do look different in VR. We found that scale is extremely difficult to judge from the editor. Normal maps usually look best at less than half strength. Secondary normal maps really help import physicality into objects. Large billboard particles rotate unnaturally with your head. Colors are brighter in the headset. Trying to hand-draw skyboxes is insane and anyone who does it is a genius. People love lots of geometry and high-quality textures on the controllers. People don’t care about lots of geometry or quality textures on most anything more than ~10 meters away. The HDR camera is your friend. The Ambient Occlusion post-processing effect is not. Anti-aliasing is huge. Etc. etc. etc.

One of the biggest problems we had was figuring out the waves in the underwater level. I went through eleven different approaches to them—Unity’s “Water 4” prefab in the Standard Assets, linking up a matrix of transparent primitives with spring joints, making a huge cloth and animating its movement, all sorts of different particle systems—and none of them could get the look we wanted without killing performance. This was a side-project for over nine months. Finally, we started asking ourselves if the detail we wanted in the waves couldn’t be suggested somewhere else. The solution we ended up with highly abstracted waves—the simplest particle system we had tried—combined with a projector that coats the geometry in an animated series of caustic light refractions. Rather than forcing the player to look up to confirm they’re underwater, the evidence is on everything around them.

Don’t forget traditional depth cues. This is an easy lesson to overlook; I see a lot of games that have large open spaces that seem flatter than they should. One can’t totally trust the HMD to effectively represent the difference between something 100 meters away and something 150 meters away, at least until HMDs aren’t two screens an inch or so away from your eyes. It still takes some good ol’-fashioned trickery to communicate depth in VR, and while some of this can happen at the engine level (fog! Use fog to suggest the color-leaching qualities of atmosphere!), much of this can be designed into your levels.

Breaking up large spaces with obfuscations at different distances reinforces the sense of parallax. Putting full 3D elements (clouds, rainbows, airplanes, etc.) in front of your skybox does too. Avoid using differently scaled versions of the same model in places where both instances will be viewed at once. And two or more parallel planes across space helps the brain decipher the distance.

Contrast is king. Whether it’s moving from a dark space to a bright space, from small to large, from blue to red, from quiet to loud, from realistic to magical, from safe to dangerous, from geometric to natural, etc., etc., or vice versa, the times a player is most excited is when they are experiencing something different. Your spaces exist in context of each other, and the most exquisitely detailed rooms will start to seem boring if they are in a sequence of similar rooms. There are a lot of painless little hacks that can make a huge different to your players’ experience, so make sure you’re taking a look at each environment or instance of your play space and asking, “What can be a noticeable change here?”

People feel most comfortable and most present around “man-made” objects. Maybe it’s that so many man-made objects are designed with similar tools to 3D modeling software used in games, or maybe it’s that they exist in our minds at a level of abstraction that we don’t apply to the natural world, or maybe it’s something more spiritual than that. I don’t know. But the further we abstracted the controllers, the less players liked them, and the more we populated our levels with treehouses, bridges, and rowboats, the more immersion our playtesters reported.

It’s really easy for people to get turned around in VR. Our first two levels are almost embarrassingly linear. This wasn’t our original intention. We found that the more we complicated paths, the more players ended up backtracking to where they started. If you are asking the player to traverse any distance, especially if you’re using teleport locomotion, please: make your paths simple. Give your players a consistent visual reference point (a mountain, a totem, a skyscraper) that they can see from anywhere in your level. Zone your level to have points of contrast within it (different colors, shapes, lighting, sounds, whatever).

This, I think, is one of the hardest aspects to have perspective on as a designer or developer. For you, the whole level exists as it does in your game engine; you’ve got it internally mapped from a god’s-eye view and can’t get lost. Your players only have their limited human perspective, and us humans need all the help we can get.