Ask any virtual reality developer about what makes a game in VR immersive, and undoubtedly you’ll end up talking about locomotion. The very act of being able to move within a VR world instantly makes you connect with the environment being rendered by that high-end graphics card – it’s why Vive’s room-scale solution is so appealing for those who have the space. That said, because most people don’t have dedicated VR rooms at home, a lot of developers resort to the teleportation mechanic. It’s quick, easy and something anyone can get used to, but it sure isn’t gratifying. Survios, the studio behind one of the earlier success stories in VR (Raw Data), has been developing a brand-new locomotion system in an upcoming title called Sprint Vector, which may prove interesting for the entire VR ecosystem. I played the game, broke a sweat, and then sat down with core designer Andrew Abedian during GDC.
“It’s an entire system – it’s actually a two-part system,” he explains. “The first part being the entire arms driven [idea] – you’re moving your arms, holding down on the trigger, releasing to get going, basically shooting out impulses from your hands to get around. The other half is something people don’t see, which we call intended motion. Basically people run very differently in real life – some people have their hands straight, some people have them flat, some people zig-zag their hands. Well, if you do a zig-zag kind of motion you don’t get a straight line if you were doing one-to-one, so in Sprint Vector, in the fluid locomotion system we take all this information and we boil it down to what we think the player wants to be doing. And in Sprint Vector you really want to be running forward.”
“The locomotion system is actually very extendable, it’s very flexible – we foresee using it in the future… Going forward I could see different styles using this same system”
The demo that Survios showed at GDC was merely a prototype that the studio had worked on in R&D for some time. It ultimately evolved into a racing style game, where you use your arms to almost skate and jump around and over obstacles.
“When we got to a good point with Raw Data we said, ‘OK, let’s take a look at some of these prototypes.’ Sprint Vector was one of those – it was a completely different game at the time. It was nowhere near the speed and style that it is currently,” he says.
“When we came back to it we were like ‘OK what do we want out of this, and where do we want to take it?’ The main thing that came from that was, there was this huge question of locomotion in VR right now. We want to tackle it head-on, we want to take the references of athletic competitions, extreme sports, game shows, and a large variety of both mainstream and niche video games and combine it into this thing that is all of those and none of those.”
If the locomotion mechanic is successful on a bigger scale with the average VR player, Abedian definitely sees it being something that could be used in some form in numerous games.
“Sprint Vector kind of oddly evolved with its locomotion and because of it. The locomotion system was built specifically to answer those questions [around movement], then Sprint Vector adjusted to that and then we adjusted the locomotion to what we thought Sprint Vector should be. The locomotion system is actually very extendable, it’s very flexible – we foresee using it in the future, [but] obviously this is a very early version of it, very promising though. Going forward I could see different styles using this same system,” he continues.
Playing Sprint Vector was satisfying and showed that unique VR treadmills and other expensive accessories aren’t necessarily the answer to the locomotion problem. Survios’ early solution isn’t perfect, and it takes a lot of getting used to, but the foundation feels solid. The next crucial step for the studio is to refine the locomotion based on player feedback. That’s why it’s brought Sprint Vector to shows like GDC and PAX and why it’s hoping to launch into Early Access at some point. That’s a lesson that Abedian says is important for any VR developer in the nascent market now.
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Source: Games Industry