BigBox VR
BigBox VR has some serious talent behind the scenes, and Smashbox Arena, the company’s first game, shows how quickly gifted designers can make something interesting happen in virtual reality.
The game is an oddball mixture of Counter-Strike, in that two opposing teams eliminate each other player by player, and the Mario Kart series, due to the six pickups that spawn on each of the maps and can rapidly change the course of the game. It’s also a title that was built for the ground up for virtual reality, and is out for the HTC Vive today. You can already play with a Rift headset and Touch controllers, and official Oculus support is coming in the future.
I’ve had a chance to play two sessions with the development team and learn about the game’s creation for this article, and holy shit. They’re onto something special.
HOW THIS ALL HAPPENED
BigBox VR was founded in April of this year by Chia Chin Lee, who originally joined Valve in 2000 to work on Half-Life 2 before joining Zipper Interactive as the company’s COO in 2004, two years before the Sony acquisition. In 2008 he founded Offbeat Creations, which was acquired by Playdom/Disney in 2010. Co-founder Gabe Brown, oddly enough, was the studio head at Offbeat Creations after Chia Chin Lee left Disney, and later left to join Chia Chin Lee to create a company that focused on virtual reality.
“We actually started out looking at VR because it was the best way to make people feel like they were somewhere, to make them feel like they’re together in the same space online,” Chia Chin Lee explained. “Honestly, that’s the thing that blew our minds.”
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It’s a three-on-three game, so they would bring in six new people and ask them to play through the game and offer feedback. The final question was how likely it would be that players recommend the game to their friends, and the first scores were high sevens.
“We were really frustrated,” Chia Chin Lee said. “So we looked through every single person’s feedback, we would adjust [the game], and do another play test, and another, until we were at mid-nines.”
The game is filled with many great details, despite the rather short production schedule. You can see the teleportation pad which player has to throw before they move around the level, which makes it possible to aim for where they’re going to be. The aimed teleportation mechanic allows you to reach higher levels in the map, and control of the game’s power ups is a huge aspect of each team’s strategy.
Everything is balanced to a bright shine; the sniper scope power up adds a physical object to your gun which you then have to bring to your face to aim through it. The sniper round is much faster than the standard balls that litter the stage, but slow enough that a skilled player can still dodge it if they seem it coming and have quick reflexes.
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You can shoot confetti in the air when you win a round. | BigBox Vr
There’s even a fun spectating feature built-in; you can look into each level from above and spin the level or zoom in to watch the action if you’re eliminated early in a round. You feel like a giant, and it’s a great way to watch the rest of the action.
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Source: Polygon