Handy Dandy Dev
Hand Interactions in Cosmonious High
This blog dives further into our Interaction is Everything design pillar, specifically our super-powered hand interactions.
More Solutions, More Problems
Early on in development, we switched from the playspace-bound traversal of our Simulator games to granular teleporting (that’s VR-talk for ‘point to wherever you want to go and go there’). As VR matures, more players are comfortable with that level of autonomy and control, and we felt we could loosen the reins here while still meeting our VR for Everyone pillar (which we’ll get into in future blogs!).
But where did the footsteps come from?
Players could teleport anywhere, but at first this actually made our world feel worse! It was exhausting to teleport right up to any item you wanted to grab. It didn’t feel powerful or alien, it just felt bad. We’d increased players’ power to traverse their environment, now we needed to increase their power to interact with it as well.
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
In the earliest days of Vacation Simulator, we experimented with interactions beyond the player’s immediate playspace. We created a hookshot where players could point at a far away object, grab it, and yoink it back towards them.
“We always try to ground our prototypes in relatable objects that players can inherently understand how to use. Building the hookshot was challenging, but we learned a lot from trying to address player expectations of how this believable object should work.”
-Graeme Borland, Gameplay Director
From the ancient archives of March 7th, 2017
The interaction itself felt fantastic. Unfortunately, it didn’t fit well with the conceit for Vacation Simulator. Why would you bring a hookshot on your chill vacation? As an alien, however, it was time to revisit the mechanic. The best part of game design is getting to try, try again.
In Cosmonious High, the hookshot mechanic was renamed Distance Grab, and became an inherent ability of your awesome alien self.
Come here, you!
With the addition of Distance Grab players could now teleport anywhere and grab anything. It felt like a monumental leap beyond the Simulator Verse, and we wanted more! It was time to get… hands on.
Give Yourself a Hand
The most critical part of hand interactions is, well, your hand! We wanted an alien player character, so one of our first initiatives was concepting and prototyping all different alien archetypes we could think of.
Tentacles, claws, energy beams–several concepts seemed fun, promising, and chaotic, but this was definitely a case where prototyping revealed all sorts of learnings we could never have anticipated on paper.
Tentacles, Claws, Goo, oh my!
“We wanted to use this opportunity to really explore what makes a hand feel like a hand. It turns out there's really no substitute for fingers and thumbs when it comes to immersion, but that still leaves a lot of space to explore!”
-Max Burgess, Sr. Gameplay Engineer
Our top takeaways were:
Hands must have some semblance of a palm, or at least directionality, so players can anticipate how to pick things up
Subtle animation–like the hand curling– to provide grab-range feedback is critical for game feel
Anything with a thumb and “fingers” is seamless for immersion, no matter what they look like
The way the hand looked drastically affected expectations for what the hand could do. Goo and tentacles both had too many affordances we didn’t want to deal with, so we settled on a hand with an unreal number of fingers, bright colors, and budding possibilities.
Fun throwback: you can also see this was before we’d landed on the Speech Tray idea for communication with NPCs, and were considering having the options in your palm.
When Designers Get Too Clever
We may have taken the idea of an ‘organic’ future a little too literally. For our next major iteration, we created a plant avatar, complete with petal-like hands and a bud on the back.
Look how hand-some!
With this hand prototype, we stumbled across the idea of attaching items inside that bud. It began as a micro-inventory, but seeded the idea that each item in game could give you a different power. What if you were an absorption alien, able to use the world around you to solve problems and create chaos!
Sooo….this proved a bit too chaotic: a power per item would require an enormous variety of unique effects and limit the fun throwaway joke items we could put in the game. Plus, it would require a robust inventory for players to keep track of items to use, and physically swapping items was time consuming. We still don’t consider ‘inventory’ to be a solved problem in VR.
“Prototypes that give you additional information are never wasted effort! Working with powers and items together helped us explore what types of effects would be fun and unique.”
- Graeme Borland, Gameplay Director
Moving forward, we decided we wanted permanent unlocks for powers, and to always have them available, even if it meant fewer powers.
Back-Handed Compliments
What we did keep was the idea of interactions on the back of your hand. Our next iteration, which you can see is closer to final, has a gem on the back of the hand for power display.
Even towards the end, we were using green color schemes and keeping the idea of plant-based aliens and absorbing powers, even if absorption now only happened from Key Items instead of Every Item.
Plant cuties
But we found out that just the gem changing on the back of your hand wasn’t enough feedback about what power you currently had. Half the time, our playtesters didn’t even realize they could do something new with their hand!
Interactions can’t be everything if no one knows anything.
Color Me Confused
To make power acquisition unmistakable, we added an entire slow-motion sequence when players got a new power, AND completely changed the texture of the hand itself.
The gems were so big and juicy most folks couldn’t help touch them, so it made perfect sense to have that interaction open the power menu.
Who needs mood rings when you have power rings?
At this point, the idea of ‘plant’ faded away completely. To harmonize all of these wild and vibrant colors, we needed something slightly more rainbow-tastic.
Prismi Powers
Over time, the player character became the Prismi, a light-based alien with the ability to adapt to any situation.
Prismatic effects matched well with our world design and provided a blanket mechanical explanation for any ability. We also added little effects to teleporting and distance grab to really consolidate the theming.
With all of our fundamental hand interactions and visual designs unified, we finally got to focus on the fun stuff: the powers themselves.
But that’s our next blog! See you in March!