Behind The Scenes

Craig: I guess we should discuss our process.

Local Wizard Magic Service: Hi! Yeah.

Craig: Haha, hi.

Local Wizard Magic Service: Hello, readers.

Craig: Right from the start, we wanted to create a third-person game in VR.

Local Wizard Magic Service: We’re having a chat on Discord instead of writing a post-mortem. Local Wizard Magic Service: So, why did you want to make a 3rd person game? My biggest concern was motion sickness, making a game that I can show to someone new to VR without them getting sick.

Craig: Yeah, I think it was important to maintain the core game controls that everyone has become familiar with over the past 20 years: analog to move and a button to jump.

Local Wizard Magic Service: Something I was thinking about was the difference between the Wii and the DS. They both had new interfaces, but the DS actually managed to create great games using the two screens and touch screen, while the Wii, in terms of input, was mostly not that great.

Local Wizard Magic Service: But I didn’t really think that until later. I’m getting ahead of everything. Do you want to go over our original idea?

Craig: I can’t remember it anymore, haha. Oh yeah, we did look at Metal Gear Solid 1 as a reference at one point. We thought a stealth game could work well, and the player’s VR perspective would be that of a security camera. It would eliminate the whole motion sickness issue and keep you grounded while you moved your character around the scene. I played Moss to see how third-person games could work in VR as well. Seeing the fluidity of the Moss controls was a huge confidence booster.

Local Wizard Magic Service: We had this idea about an animal wizard. Crocodile? Or alligator? And he dropped out of magic school.

Craig: Yes, haha.

Local Wizard Magic Service: Because you know, school is bad.

Craig: There was also a combat element. Local Wizard Magic Service: Yeah, so because you are an uneducated wizard, your spell would fail most of the time. In the prototype, I had it set up so it would only cast successfully 5% of the time, lol. The idea was that you sneak around, but if you get caught and are being chased, you have to spam the cast button and hope it works out.

Local Wizard Magic Service: And when it did work, it would be a one-hit kill to balance it out.

Craig: I loved how button mashing felt with the controls and thought that would be a cool gameplay mechanic. We should talk about the bat demo. Craig: Originally, the enemy was a bat that could fly around, negating many obstacles. We fully developed scripts and a system involving raycasting where the bat would patrol and then hone in on the player. But after some testing with the stealth and the running and spamming, it felt like it was too much.

Local Wizard Magic Service: Yeah, it was going to take too much time to create something that was tight, fluid, and balanced. It’s one of those things that, once we had a working prototype, you could tell it probably wouldn’t be that fun realistically. And for a 5-day jam, it wasn’t worth it.

Craig: I changed the bat to a rat, and you made him just run around colliding into walls, haha. It was now a rage-inducing platformer. Going back to the DS stuff, how did you think about the buttons?

Local Wizard Magic Service: Oh, yeah. So we decided to get rid of the bat, make rats scurry around, and instead of sneaking, you just have to dodge and get to the end of the room. Yeah, the buttons. The original idea didn’t really make use of the strengths of VR anyway. I forget whose idea the button was; let me look at that chat.

Craig: Checks chat.

Local Wizard Magic Service: Lol, I took a video of my screen and talked. Local Wizard Magic Service: But whatever was in the video inspired Craig to say this.

Craig: We’ll include this in the blog, lol.

Craig: Yeah, I think that’s where it clicked, where you could build traditionally fun games but then use the strongest parts of VR to add spice and fun to the overall experience.

Craig: Similar to the success of touch screens in Nintendo products.

Craig: The most fun part of Half-Life: Alyx to me is all the stuff you do with your hands, but the actual movement is quite exhausting.

Craig: In a longer game, we could have the croc guy pull levers and type in passcodes.

Local Wizard Magic Service: And be able to see things like signs and notes up close.

Local Wizard Magic Service: But pretty much, the next morning we made the game.

Craig: We had a boss idea where you jump on its head to stun it, and then when you run up to his head, it pops up, and you start punching it, lol. Local Wizard Magic Service: Yeah! I love that idea; the format allows for heaps of cool interactions.

Local Wizard Magic Service: So that was Tuesday night, and from then until Thursday at around 3:30, it was easy to build the game.

Local Wizard Magic Service: So at this point now, we are pretty close to being finished, we will spend the rest of the time polishing it up.

Local Wizard Magic Service: What did you learn from the jam, Craig? Craig: I really enjoyed the workflow developed for asset creation. I think I am really confident in everything, from modeling to UV unwrapping and then bringing into Substance Painter. The program doesn’t feel foreign to me anymore. Creating characters has always been intimidating, but I think I’ve got a good method now.

Craig: What did you learn, James?

Local Wizard Magic Service: I think it reinforced what I’ve always believed, which is don’t think too much, just do something. You can think later when there’s something to look at. And if you can’t do it fairly easily, it’s probably not worth the time to do it. We had this idea; it was cool in concept, but when you made it, it wasn’t that good. We cut away at it until it was fun, which then gave us room to add features that were actually fun.

Local Wizard Magic Service: So what did I learn? I don’t know what I learned; I knew me and Craig were going to make something good really easily because we work well together.

Local Wizard Magic Service: So, I learned nothing.