Making of 'ASTRO BOT Rescue Mission': Reinventing Platformers for VR

Making of 'ASTRO BOT Rescue Mission': Reinventing Platformers for VR

Creative Pillars

1. Magical
1. The Wow Factor
2. 360 Worlds
3. BIG VR Moments (Scale)
4. Surprises (Controller is a live)
5. Believable Characters
2. Innovative
1. New & Unique
2. Intuitive use of Hardware
3. Reinvented Classics
4. Totally new ideas
3. Playful
1. Like a Fun Toy
2. Lots of Humour
3. Toy Gameplay
4. Physical Comedy
5. Cute Characters
4. Inclusive
1. VR for Everyone
2. Built for Multiplayer
3. Easy to play
4. Universal Themes (Relatable)

Goal: Not a copy and paste; an analysis and reconstruction. Fun first.

18 Months
24 People

Very Light Game Design Doc
Mostly Visual, Minimal text

Gameplay Programmers are the core of your team.
2 Week Prototypes, core mechanics tested.

GDC 2015 Talk?
A metrovania game in VR? (Mentioned at the end)

Gameplay Demo Had no textures, only animation and lighting
Controller + Character relationship was formed (Bot jumps out of controller)
VR-ness of Character was established, (Looking at the player)
Only jumping was created (combat is low priority)

10 Major Topics That Took Robot Rescue into a full game

1. "VR Ness"
2. Astro & You
3. Gadgets
4. Wow Moments
5. Dual Scale Designs
6. Fun VR Worlds
7. Platforming Fundamentals
8. Comfort
9. Level Building
10. Tangible Visuals

1. VR-Ness - You are the only camera

Perspective Play

 - See behind an object (ex. leaning forward)

Vertical Play

- Large drops (looking way down, also using jump pads / bumper to send your character way up to the top quickly is exciting). This is a good constant for when designing wow factors.

Technical assistance (Platforms high in the air needs to have a way to show you where the character is (ie. The leaves are simi-transparent and show Astro's shadow).

In enemy design, enemies fly upwards for a "firework moment" or are really tall themselves.

360 Play

- Looking all around you
- Only one stayed in the game due to being physically demanding
(In the game it's where the vines are all around you and you are platforming across them spiraling upwards).

Near Play

- Playing with distances between you and the character
- Nose to Nose momments are key to empathy

Far Play

- Playing with distances between you and the character
- Not great .

Technical assistance, Invisible wall at the back to prevent falling (pushes the character into a saver 2D nagivation mode.)

VRNess - Overview

The Neck Check; Watch a play tester's neck or design for it specially. If it's too rigid you are not using VRNess enough, if it's too stressed you need to dial it back.

2. Astro & You

• You are a giant robot
• Seeing your body
• You have a shadow 
• TV Screens come up to show yourself
• Create a fun moment of self performance
• Costumes / Event showcases
• It's remembered and unique so comes up every 3 - 4 levels
• Eye contact, character and player
• Waves, Vocal emotes
• Even in action he will look towards you when he can, (ie. Platforming, Jump boosting)
• Validates your role as a protector
• Eye contact with the world
• Big flower looks and emotes when you make eye contact
• Big flower will even mimic your head movement for nearness effect (both lean in)
• Focus was on being startling / surprising (Magical Pillar)
• Headbutting
• Small input, high output
• Turned into a mini soccer game
• Dodging
• Something to do.
• Combined into headbutting as a defensive offensive combat sequence
• Penalty is vision obstruction 
• Blowing
• Never required for progression
• Blows bubbles underwater
• Blows flower's pedals off
• Listening (3D Audio)
• Used to hide secrets (bots to save hidden in corners of vision)
• Core mechanic for easter eggs

3. Gadgets

• Simple controls on purpose, because the richness of the game should come from the VR side. 
• Inflated the size of the controller to 1.3 from 1:1, it ended up just feeling better. 
• All Gadgets are "Guns" (projectile based) to keep it comfortable for users sitting on a couch.
• Very loose targeting

• Gadgets are used as Platforming Aid due to platforming being the core of the game, it's was easy for them to loose sight of that in development.
• (Water and Shuriken creates platforms, Flash light reveals)
• Important on judging the tempo of the level
• Gadgets are designed to be multi functional (visually)

• Plugging in controllers to unlock doors and chests
• Needed to have a focus on comfort

• One to one input
• The analog stick in game moves 1:1 to real life one
• Same with button presses
• Button visuals reflect if the button is enabled or disabled (mapped/unmapped)
• Touch pad interaction would scrub an animation in the case of shurikens

4. Wow Moments

• 1 Level = 1 Adventure - Arcade Style
• Inspired by pop culture, Makes it expensive
• 1 level = 1 Big Moment
• Giant Airplane flying over
• Large boss as a preview (monkey arms)
• Big npc (big astro)
• Large falling moment into the caves
• Use water gadget to grow the giant stock that is the rest of the level
• Giant whale eats you
• Jumbo jet enters the storm
• 1 Level = 1 Climax 
• Water spout shoots out final level marker
• Giant NPC holds up final level marker
• Unique way to show finally level ending marker
• Huge Bosses
• Boss is 100x Astro's size

5. Dual Scale

• Platforms are small and good for platforming and gameplay
• But you look up and see insane "VR Ride" scale for the player
• You and Astro share the same space so it should be designed for both's perspective
• Also comes in handy during boss design, spider boss has small minions for Astro to fight

6. Fun VR Worlds

• You are in a cartoon
• Dolphins swimming around you
• Vulture stealing a cow
• Funny dioramas around collectible characters 
• Environment should just be fun to walk around in (no combat test)
• Living world
• A completely reactive world, flowers move when you get near them
• Butterflys fly if you move too quickly
• Mushroom lights were little platforms with no value outside of being cute and bouncy
• Fire flies within grass
• Sand leaves foot prints, booster leaves lines
• Gadgets are toys
• Big test scene where you can see how each enemy reacts
• You can be mean to astro or yourself
• Funny endings to bosses
• Achievements around these moments can be funny.

7. Platforming Fundamentals

• Good controls
• Weight, Animations, everything that comes with 3D platformers
• Relative to where you look 
• Can be really tricky
• At the end you can control astro while looking away is a good test
• Jumping Aid
• Lasers under astro's boots helps to judge distance and to better judge where you are in relation to the ground very useful
• Teetering Aid
• When a location is save to fall down to it's protected by a teetering trigger
• Can be overriden by jumping as the player
• Everything else that has to go into a platformer

8. Comfort 

• Levels are completely straight for the player but are twisting for the character
• Stopper
• The trick is to put the go in the 1.1 meter zone so there is no catch up the player has to do.
• No going backward
• Not the best, but helps with sickness
• Transparency
• When the character overlaps the player the player's piece if made transparent so character is always 
• Respawn Fade
• Fade to black works well

9. Level building 

• Real time editing
• They actually have a live link between Maya and the game
• Building blocks
• Designers can change the scale, but the goal is to not touch the proportions

• Swappable Sections
• Make reusing and re-purposing designs a lot easier. 
• ie. One level was too long and it was easy to move it over to be the start of another
• Achieving Variety
• Checklist for how levels were distributed and balanced
• This is a internal rating like system to ensure it was different each time

• Gameplay First. Always
• Never break this rule
• Artist is always after the fact
• Even transitions, boss fights, etc.

10. Visuals

Wanted to retain the Sci-Fi look

To avoid too much art they used floating islands

 20 Levels of use for the animated cut out shader, Good investment

 Characters were all believable, because they could actually be made into Toys if they wanted to do that. Attention to detail was key.

Add caption Gadgets are all inspired by real life toys and are designed as if they were real.

 The art originally wasn't sophisticated enough. 

3rd person can work great in VR.

Taming Technologies Behind 'ASTRO BOT Rescue Mission

Technical Goals

• 60 fps at all times (120 fps reprojection)
• Comfortable and convincing visual
• Smooth game flow

Rendering Optimization

• Compact Scenes & Render Specs
• Dynamic Resolution
• Resubmit Command Buffers

Compact Scenes

Renderer Specs

Dynamic Resolution

If, TotalGPUTime > 16.6 [ms] then decrease scale. To scale up GPU Time needs to be < 16.6 [ms] for 30 frames. 16.6 [ms] is used because 60 fps is target framerate

It's believed the popping can be fixed by creating more step than just 4

Problems in Heavy Scenes and QA

• FPS is an important part of QA process for platforms, but no one is looking for resolution.
• Make sure there are good dev tools that can give you data on how long you are sitting in low resolution and at what locations. 

Smooth Game Flow

Delayed Texture loading

World Select and Pause Menu are never unloaded (Resident)
While Level Texutres, and everything else in a level are loaded  & unloaded separately

Players on perceive 5 seconds of loading

Revealing Effect is a radial reveal of the geo - being wire frame view before

::Editor Notes::

Mobile RTS Inspirations

• Royal Revolt
• Tiny Guardians
• Nonstop 2
• Brawlstars

Platformer Inspirtations

• Astrobot
• Megaman Battlenetwork
• I-Ninja
• Lucky's Tale

Review Categories

• Categories
• Visuals
• Audio
• Gameplay
• Narrative
• Themes
• Multiplayer
• Online Play
• Accessibility
• Challenge
• Replayability
• Uniqueness

Talks

Lucky's Tale - The Unexpected Delight of Third-Person VR

The Secrets of Astro Bot's Development With Creative Director