Hannah Gamiel is a Software Engineer at Cyan and will be at VRDC 2017 to present her talk ‘Obduction’, from 2D to VR: A Postmortem and Lessons Learned, and explore the triumphs and tribulations of the development of ‘Obduction’. Here, Gamiel gives us some information about herself and developing games for VR.
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My name is Hannah Gamiel, and I’m a programmer over at Cyan, Inc. (creators of Myst & Riven), based in Mead, WA. I’ve been working here at Cyan for 5 years and a lead on the Obduction team for the last two.
I’ve helped bring our Desktop (PC & Mac), Vive, Rift, and soon to be PS4, PSVR, and Mac VR versions of Obduction to life, mostly working on major systems programming and audio engineering.
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What was the hardest design challenge that you faced during production?
Personally, I think that the hardest design challenge we encountered during the production of Obduction was how we had to design (and market!) our game for two almost completely different audiences: one that has been playing our games since Myst came out, and another that is the emerging VR market.
We have learned over the last 30 years Cyan has been a company and over the past several years of VR research that these two different audiences, with some exceptions, have almost completely different expectations of what our game should look and feel like. We were essentially designing a game for two completely separate generations of people who have vastly different gaming experiences.
I’ll go into this more in my talk, but I think that the best and most satisfying part of this whole challenge was figuring out one of the most important similarities between the two audiences/play-styles that bridged the gap in our 2D & VR release(s) — navigation.
Who knew that our 30-year old point-and-click/node-mode style navigation system that so many of our original fans are greatly familiar with would be one of the most comfortable ways to move around in VR? It’s realizations like that that made this design problem very, very interesting to solve.
Source: Gamesutra