- I absolutely adore Quill and love what I played in the Moss VR demo. And I have to quickly mention one of my favorite moments, when I didn't realize I had to spin the central tower in the final puzzle, Moss, with squeaks and hand gestures, explained to me what I needed to do. I was dying! So so so good!
Question: With so many creative options for developers making VR games, and many opting for first-person experiences, what made you decide on the direction you did with Moss and what we're some of the gameplay options you considered before picking the final direction?
To answer your question: We started prototype development in VR by first trying to outline what we felt the basic principles of a good VR game would be. We wanted to make sure we would build a game that was good for VR natively. Another way to say it would be that we aimed to build a game that could really only meet its full potential in VR.
Specifically this means we decided on three things:
1) The game and mechanics needed to require real tactile physical interaction. That is not something you can do with a traditional flatscreen game.
2) The player should be a character in the game, not a camera. This means that other characters in the game and the environment need to react to you.
3) The game should be very comfortable for as many people as possible. With this in mind we wanted to make sure we were not flying the camera around and otherwise making people feel bad.
The combination of these things is how we ended up with Moss. We wanted a game where the gameplay occurred in a space you could reach with your arms. We didn't want to move the camera around to make that happen, which meant the world should be small. And finally, we wanted a character in that space to acknowledge you and play the game with you, which meant that character also needed to be small. This is how we ended up with Quill in the game Moss!DerrickDover likes this.11-16-2017 11:39 AMLike 1 - [QUOTE=PolyarcGames;66693]Is Quill modeled after a specific mouse species?
Chris Alderson - Art Director: Not just one! I looked to a few different types of mice, but landed on only a couple to drive Quill’s final aesthetic. Your standard field mouse, because I love how adorable and small they are, as well as a few others that influenced her colors and markings. The first Quill sketch referenced the Jerboa. Fun fact: Quill was actually a thief and a grumpy old man in her first incarnation.DerrickDover likes this.11-16-2017 11:40 AMLike 1 - [QUOTE=PolyarcGames;66695]Is Quill a special mouse or are all of her kind able to walk, craft weapons, communicate, etc?
Chris Alderson, Art Director: Quill’s world is full of rodents, just like her, all with different stories and personalities. And not all of them are mice! Gerbils, hamsters, rats, guinea pigs, and many more all reside in the world of Moss. On top of that, we introduce a few mystical creatures along the way...DerrickDover likes this.11-16-2017 11:43 AMLike 1 -
The biggest challenge that comes to mind is that we have had to develop a new set of skills that hasn't been quite as important to game developers in the past. A lot of what we do now could potentially be considered industrial design. We need to design the physical objects in our game in a way that communicates to the player how they need to interact with them inherently, above and beyond prompts and text from more traditional UI. This means we've built new systems for managing these interactions.
The next biggest challenge is to rethink everything in terms of reachable space. A lot of what typically happens in a game happens pretty far away from the player. In Moss, almost everything that happens needs to happen close enough to reach out and touch it directly. There are always exceptions, but this means the volume we have to work in is a constraint.
We prefer to think about constraints as forcing functions for creativity, and working on Moss has been a wonderful opportunity to learn and grow.Cale Hunt likes this.11-16-2017 11:48 AMLike 1 - Tam Armstrong, Studio Director: In general, our experience with VR before Moss was minimal. A few of us got some experience by doing work at Oculus very early on. That was a great time, but it was for a relatively short duration (6 weeks and change). The exception is one of our engineers, Brendan Walker, had some deep AR experience from his time at the HITLab. There he worked on, among other things, virtual user interfaces. He started out working on Moss already familiar with many of the technologies we depend on.
The biggest challenge that comes to mind is that we have had to develop a new set of skills that hasn't been quite as important to game developers in the past. A lot of what we do now could potentially be considered industrial design. We need to design the physical objects in our game in a way that communicates to the player how they need to interact with them inherently, above and beyond prompts and text from more traditional UI. This means we've built new systems for managing these interactions.
The next biggest challenge is to rethink everything in terms of reachable space. A lot of what typically happens in a game happens pretty far away from the player. In Moss, almost everything that happens needs to happen close enough to reach out and touch it directly. There are always exceptions, but this means the volume we have to work in is a constraint.
We prefer to think about constraints as forcing functions for creativity, and working on Moss has been a wonderful opportunity to learn and grow.PolyarcGames likes this.11-16-2017 11:50 AMLike 1 - Hello Polyarc! Thank you for doing this AMA.
I'm really interested in the development challenges and time costs for VR games. What unexpected challenges did you run into during development? Also, were there any tools existent to manage things like camera control with the PSVR in place when Moss development began or did you have to build everything from scratch?
PS: Will those Quill figured be available for sale later?Gidorick and PolyarcGames like this.11-16-2017 11:50 AMLike 2 -
Regarding spatial audio, the challenge is to find a balance between how sound works in nature and the evoking of more abstract feelings. For example, the feeling you get when you enter forest during the dawn chorus isn't always captured by recording that forest with a microphone. So really, the challenge is to know when to push sound into the realm of feeling, how far, and when to rely on more realistic sound reproduction.
Luckily Sony has devoted a lot of hardware power to recreating the physical model of how sound passes over your head, referred to as a HRTF (link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-r...nsfer_function). This makes it much easier to create sounds that behave realistically in real time.Gidorick and DerrickDover like this.11-16-2017 11:51 AMLike 2 - Danny Bulla, Design Director: One of the core goals when designing Moss was to make it as comfortable as possible for players, and one way to achieve that was looking at camera placement. To ensure players didn't get sick when playing Moss, we found a fixed camera position worked best for our style of gameplay.James Bricknell and DerrickDover like this.11-16-2017 11:52 AMLike 2
- Hi Polyarc!
My girlfriend and I both got a chance to play the Moss demo at PAX West a few months ago (and we were lucky enough to find one of Quill figurines.) We pre-ordered a couple weeks ago and can't wait for it to come out!
What's your favorite part of designing a game for VR as opposed to a normal game? How has the design of the game changed over development?11-16-2017 12:00 PMLike 0 - With the explosion of VR over the last year or so, we've seen some pretty impressive "first person" games emerge, like Batman, Driveclub, RE7, etc. Moss takes it a step further by adding another element, while seemingly keeping the first-person aspect intact. What inspired Polyarc to that end, and do you anticipate future VR games from other developers to follow suit?11-16-2017 12:00 PMLike 0
- Was there anything that inspired Moss and Quill's final incarnation in particular? When I first saw the game, my first thought was Redwall and Mossflower Woods. There's also the MouseGuard series. Were there any fictional works or other games that influenced and inspired the team while creating Quill, her world, and her adventure?11-16-2017 12:06 PMLike 0
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Next, I take the model to a simple “block model” stage (A block model is where you create a mesh for every bone in your character that you simply parent or connect each model to each bone. This is a quick and easy way to get the proportions you like by testing out a few poses.) Richard Lico, our Lead Animator and I have worked together for 13 years across 3 different studios, so we have built a great workflow and report. Once he takes a look, Richard might either move the mesh and skeleton himself or gives me detailed notes on things we can fix. Afterwards, we take the model to “grey model” stage where it’s much of the same process, except now the mesh is intact, and we have done a skin weighting pass where the mesh is bound smoothly to the skeleton. Now I pass it back over to Richard and he does another look over of the mesh. He might even do a quick animation test to make sure the character is performing dynamically. Here we can truly evaluate if the character is reaching our goals.
Is Quill meeting her potential? Here we made another pass on the concept. And this is around the time when everyone in the studio was feeling the direction she was headed in.
I personally like to keep characters in the grey model stage for as long as possible, so that we can truly evaluate them within the game with real animations and performing real actions. Once you sculpt the final hi polygon model (via sculpting programs such as ZBrush), bake your maps (copy the detail lighting from your hi poly model onto a lower poly in-game model to create a normal map, specular/roughness or “shininess” map, etc.) and create your final textures, it can be much more difficult to make changes. When that’s all done, then Voila! You have a new character! Hope that helps give a little insight into what goes into creating these characters!
Last edited by PolyarcGames; 11-16-2017 at 12:30 PM.
11-16-2017 12:07 PMLike 4 - It was the very last Quill hidden before the show ended - it was nearby the Moss booth on a shelf by the Playlink games! I was standing in line for Detroit when I spotted it, and my girlfriend got there just in time to snag it before someone else. We were hunting them the whole day so it was easily our favorite moment of the whole show.SwiftNinjaFox and Gidorick like this.11-16-2017 12:10 PMLike 2
- To add onto this, I thought of the board game Mice & Mystics. Quill's design reminded me of Collin in that game.11-16-2017 12:11 PMLike 0
- Hi Polyarc!
My girlfriend and I both got a chance to play the Moss demo at PAX West a few months ago (and we were lucky enough to find one of Quill figurines.) We pre-ordered a couple weeks ago and can't wait for it to come out!
What's your favorite part of designing a game for VR as opposed to a normal game? How has the design of the game changed over development?11-16-2017 12:12 PMLike 0 - Did the unique way PlayStation VR lets other people watch what the player is doing on a larger display influence the game design at all? Is this something friends will enjoy sitting and watching, or is this connection you're building really focused on the experience in the headset?11-16-2017 12:15 PMLike 0
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- "One of the many things we learned as we've built Moss is that it is enjoyable when Quill understands more about what is going on in the game than you do as the player. This situation really reinforces that you are playing the game together, as equals, with complementary abilities."
- This concept is what made my experience with the demo so incredible. I was talking with my friend, who doesn't have PSVR, trying to explain my experience. One of the things I said was that it actually felt like a co-op experience. Like I was actually playing with Quill. Such an incredible feeling and really helped me to bond with Quill.
"...The player should be a character in the game, not a camera. This means that other characters in the game and the environment need to react to you."
- I thought this was a brilliant move. Like a hybrid of 3rd and 1st person. Both being the player AND interacting with Quill made the whole experience so immersive.
"The game should be very comfortable for as many people as possible. With this in mind we wanted to make sure we were not flying the camera around and otherwise making people feel bad."
- I really appreciated this aspect. There are other games that I really liked, like Star Child, but some of those games left me a little uncomfortable due to the motion. There was never a moment in Moss where I I felt any discomfort playing.
I absolutely can't wait to play with Quill some more. Best of luck to your whole team!Gidorick and PolyarcGames like this.11-16-2017 12:22 PMLike 2 - Polyarc Games, what's in a name? How did you come up with the name of your company? Does it stand for anything? Is there a funny story behind it? Or did you guys just pull a name out of a hat? lol11-16-2017 12:37 PMLike 0
- One of my favorite things is exploration. I love all the little details in the game's environment. Can we expect any type of collectibles or Easter eggs along the way in Moss?DerrickDover and pkcable like this.11-16-2017 12:38 PMLike 2
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We’re continuing to find new ways to connect Quill with the player, which you’ll get a chance to experience in the full game. I don’t want to spoil the surprise, but we hope you’ll enjoy interacting with her.
Here are a few examples:
Quill Air Attack:
https://forums.vrheads.com/e?link=ht...token=-foewkDU
A Hoist, Matey!:
https://forums.vrheads.com/e?link=ht...token=8Caiqu-p
What's in the bag?:
https://forums.vrheads.com/e?link=ht...token=p7EzvuMJ
Quill Idle Itch:
https://forums.vrheads.com/e?link=ht...token=qDSRZn7q11-16-2017 12:40 PMLike 5 - I think I spent more time in the first area of the Moss demo petting and playing with Quill than the rest of the demo. The relationship that is being built between the player and Quill is enchanting. I expect other VR games to take inspiration from your design decisions.11-16-2017 12:45 PMLike 0
- I love how adorable Quill is, and I've been in love with her since seeing the first trailer. Are there other adorable characters we'll meet while adventuring with her?
What about enemies? I'm so fascinated by anthropomorphized characters in games, and Quill has such an expressive face that I hope she isn't the only one I'll be plahying with.11-16-2017 12:48 PMLike 0
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