Who: Shawn Patton, Principal Designer at Schell Games
Hello, I am Shawn Patton, the Design Director on I Expect You To Die (IEYTD) and a Principal Designer at Schell Games. In our 15 year history, Schell Games has developed everything from theme park attractions to educational experiences to mobile games.
Most recently, we have been exploring VR and AR. Personally, I’ve developed for the PSVR, Vive, Oculus, Microsoft MR headsets, Daydream, Gear, and the Virtuality system (but that was back in 2001). As a studio, we are very excited at the possibilities mainstream VR/AR has brought to our industry and we are exploring them in earnest.
IEYTD has been a great project to work on (and off of) over the last three+ years. Looking through my email history, I found that it grew from a prototype phase in 2014 to some pitch docs late in 2014 to my full-time involvement as Design Director in January 2015. We made the “car level” and put it on Oculus Share in June 2015 where it became the highest rated app until Oculus Share was taken down in May 2016. In October 2015, we started making three new levels, connective tissue, achievements, Touch and PSVR support and all the other things that make a game so we could release it in December 2016.
What: Making a New Level on a Budget
Players were super positive about how the game felt and played, but there were two distinct types of reviews we were getting:
“Amazing game, great VR, perfect to show new people – worth the cost!”
or
“Amazing game, great VR, perfect to show new people – not long enough to be worth the cost!”
Clearly we had something, but could we make more levels in a cost-effective way?
,
,
So we set about making another level. If we leveraged all the lessons learned (see the VRDC talk I gave with Jesse Schell for more info there), could we do it with a smaller team on a tighter timeline? The most expensive part of creating past levels was iteration time. Finding the puzzle difficulty balance while keeping things interesting for the player requires lots of testing and tweaking.
Massive spoilers for the vacation level “First Class” follow. No, really, our game is primarily a puzzle escape the room game, so if you ever want to play the new level, please stop reading now. If playing the level simply isn’t in the cards but you’d still like to read the article, may I suggest watching a playthrough video first. You’ve been warned, Agents.
,
Source: Gamasutra