tl;dr: We don’t take them. Thanks, but no. Best of luck making your game.

Why is a little more complicated. Even when I was still actively looking at our own development projects, our problem was never really a lack of ideas, it was a lack of time for the ideas we had. It’s naive to think that just the idea is enough, that the idea just starts good, or that it is already so good that it ‘just needs made.’ Ideas are cheap. We have them all the time. Working in games, playing games, watching what others are doing, ideas come all the time. Some better than others, some already made by other teams. But realising that idea takes time, and by extension, money. A lot of it. Even the best ideas are worth very little until they are implemented. Not even fully implemented, just getting the idea to a state where it can be pitched to a financier for funding takes a non-trivial amount of effort. It’s important to realise that whenever you have an idea you are trying to progress, what you are doing is investing in that idea. How much you’re investing depends on how valuable your time is (both to you and others), but you should always be aware that it is costing you to make this idea a reality, and that if you want it to succeed, it needs to realistically be able to pay you back more than you put into it.

Amateur developers often misjudge that equation. Their time spent on the idea is cheap, because it is enjoyable time, time they might want to spend anyway. Their assessment of the merits of their idea is often inflated because they are passionate about it. I think it helps to consider: “what if I had fifty ideas?” Then, time spent on one idea is time you can’t spend on one of the others. It forces you to think critically about the value of your time and on which idea really merits the investment you put into it.

That awareness that you are investing should also temper your desire to get other people involved. Because you are, effectively, asking them to invest into your idea. It is no different from going to friends or family and asking for a loan to start a business. There are some fundamental questions to ask, even before you get to the idea itself. “Yes, we want to help you. But what do we get out of it? What are you putting into this? What are we putting into this? Who gets what when it does well? What if we disagree on how this business should be run?” For these reasons it’s often easier to go it alone, at least to start with, or to only throw in your lot with people you know and trust. Because you don’t have to persuade those others of the merits of your idea. If you put the effort in, if you progress the idea to something that by itself can demonstrate that your idea has legs, then you start the relationship with your collaborators on a much better footing. “This is what I’ve done, this is what I think it’s worth, I could use a hand getting it finished, and if you agree with me on its merits we can come to some agreement on how to work together.”

This may be the jaded viewpoint of a professional developer, someone for whom new ideas and projects have to be traded off against lost income from other work, but I think all developers, amateur or not, should be thinking about their work not just in terms of potential but of cost. Because while this idea you have might be good, the next one might be great, and if you sink all of the investment you had to spare in the first idea and it doesn’t pay off, we’ll never get to see the great idea come to light. The ideas can only be realised when the development is sustainable, and to be sustainable requires the ideas to, on average, pay for themselves. Some amount of up-front investment is fine, but at some point one of those ideas needs to pay enough back to cover all of the ideas which didn’t.

So, despite my best efforts, my spare time available for experimenting with the Rift SDK has been fairly limited. I’m more convinced than ever though that there is lots of amazing potential there. There’s a lot of cynicism, and rightly so. Many of the same problems that were there in previous iterations of VR are still present. There are a lot of good posts out there covering the most apparent (the motion-sickness / nausea generated by lag, the resolution). I’m not so concerned about those. We used to have to hit 60Hz refresh rates on the dot, and with a lot less rendering power than we have now. Hitting 90Hz is achievable with discipline. The screen resolution is I’m sure going to be addressed by future iterations of the devices. These are known quantity problems.

The unknowns to be addressed come from the parts of the tech that are new. Control, user interaction, is going to be the key. My concern here is that the old systems we used are just not ideal in a VR environment. Traditionally, we’ve been controlling avatars in a virtual world. We’ve had mostly free movement around that world, but there’s always been a clear disconnection – you’re controlling something other than yourself, and the screen shows you the view from their position. We’ve refined the control mechanisms so that feels natural, and trained ourselves to the point where it feels a lot less like we’re rotating an avatar, and more like it’s us. “Look right” becomes a quick flick of the mouse, even though our head doesn’t actually move. The avatar becomes an extension of ourself. That ability to make the control mechanism effectively disappear is key. In the same way it’s easier to drive when gear changing is instinctive and done without thinking; it allows you to focus on the higher level functions.

If you’ve ever watched someone new to games playing a first person or third person game, you’ll know the effect. When someone has to look down at the controller to remind themselves of which joystick to use. You say “look right”, and they have to stop moving their character before they change camera angle. So many of our games are designed to take advantage of the affordances already learned by gamers. It doesn’t matter that they haven’t played your game before, if they’ve played another game in a similar style. More crucially, when designers get it wrong, that failure permeates the whole game. When someone complains that moving your character around feels like driving a tank, that niggle interferes with everything they do in your game. For all of the great things about GTA 4, I struggled with Nico’s movement. I’d miss a door by just a fraction, and then he had a minimum turning circle that meant that I’d end up bashing into the other side of the door frame instead. You get used to it and learn to compensate, sure, but it’s a problem that needs to be overcome.

Bringing it back to VR, the change in viewpoint brings the control issues into sharp relief. The immediate and all-encompassing nature of the viewpoint makes it *you* that’s in the game. You’re not controlling what you see on that screen ‘over there’, you are controlling you. So when the controls feel unintuitive, it’s *you* that feels sluggish and unresponsive. So it’s important to get it right, and I’ve seen a variety of problems with the Rift demos so far.

Assuming that you’re using a joystick or keyboard controls, you effectively have a 2-axis input controlling movement. That we always had with first person games. But in the past there was a fundamental restriction in place. ‘Forward’ was always ‘the direction you’re facing’. There was no option to look to the right while still running forward, unless you were playing a mech or tank game which often mapped view direction to an extra input axis. But the natural mouse/keyboard or joypad controls we’re used insisted that you always look rigidly forward, the same direction your gun was facing. That extra axis (where the body of your avatar/vehicle was pointing in a different direction to the view direction) was discouraged, because people struggled to manage their awareness of the two directions (look and move). Skilled players learned to compensate naturally for this. While running forward, to look right you’d turn and simultaneously start strafing left. But you knew exactly where you were looking and moving at all times, because the restrictions were clear.

In VR, that restriction no longer makes sense. Instead we have different restrictions. Even if standing, the cable to the headset restricts your turning. If sitting, then there is an obvious ‘forward’, which is the direction your torso is pointing. You move your head to the left and right, but forward doesn’t change. However, the real problem is that the Rift headsets at least aren’t really anchored to that ‘forward’ direction. The headset knows what direction it’s facing, but it doesn’t know at what point the headset was facing ‘forward’ as far as the user is concerned.

Instead, all of the demos I’ve seen try to replicate the same restriction as traditional FPS controls have. ‘Forward’ is ‘where you are looking’. Walk forward on your directional axis, and look to the right, and you’ll move to the right. Which seems sensible, until you consider the need for complete freedom around the world. You have a limited head movement circle, so how do you turn completely around so that forward is south instead of north? You’re not going to twist your head 180 degrees round and press forward. So the demos map another axis on top of your head movement. So if you start facing forward and north in the world, turning your head 90 degrees right means that ‘forward’ motion moves you east. Use the rotation control to turn your character 90 degrees right, and you’re moving south. Return your head to centre though, and you’re moving east again. So even though ‘forward’ always moves in a predictable direction, you’re still having to manage awareness of that extra rotation. Your head orientation is being added on top of a base avatar orientation. That input-controlled axis is constantly fighting against the headset rotational axis. You can be turning your avatar right and rotating your head left to keep the view pointed in the same direction.

Having experimented, I think trying to cling onto that old input style is a mistake. It feels horrible when you’re craning your head around to the right because you’ve been using the head orientation as the primary means to choose your direction, only to find that you actually need to turn more than 90 degrees in either direction, at which point you need to fall back on the directional turn controls. Worse, when you’re running forward at speed, you have to keep your viewpoint locked directly ahead, because if you try and glance left or right you’ll start running in that direction. You’ve lost one of the big plus points of VR, freedom of motion in your viewpoint.

Keeping it so that you always have complete freedom of moving your viewpoint is I think key to making the user comfortable. We used to be able to make the controls avatar-centric, but now we need to be aware of the range of motion the user has, and allow them a natural way of expressing a complete range of motion without discomfort.

Instead of assuming that forward is where you’re looking, you need to build in some awareness of the user’s torso. The only natural way I can think of to do that is to add a quick and simple calibration point. Ask the user to look directly forward, and then press a button. From then on, that direction is the reference centre, and should align with the direction of motion of the avatar. Forward means moving in that direction, regardless of where the headset is pointing. Same for strafing right and left. Ideally, like the mech and tank games that have to do this naturally, you’d have an in-view indication of where forward is relative to your viewpoint. That might be your avatar visible from your viewpoint (e.g. a gun or arms), or a HUD indication.

This one came up during the drive home from a long weekend up north, while listening to one of those ‘Greatest Movie Songs Ever’ type of albums. They all seem to have Love Is All Around on them; great for singing along to, as long as you haven’t heard it recently. I mentioned to my travelling companions just how quickly it brought up memories of Four Weddings and a Funeral – within a few bars of the opening you could close your eyes and  imagine Hugh Grant’s face in front of you, itching to be slapped.

My fiancée took this to the next level though, as we’d been playing Rayman over the weekend, and one of it’s mini-games involves slapping choir-boysrabbits singing out of tune. The Wii-mote’s got such a nice motion for slapping, including a little noise/rumble when you connect. And so “Celebrity Slap – Wii” was born. All of the most annoying celebrities in popular culture today, moving around the screen. You wouldn’t need ultra-realistic models, just inflated mug-shots on wobbly-headed avatars – it’s the face you want to slap really.

You could have all different sorts of scoring modes: “Slap the Talent/Popularity Stars” – where you have to only slap celebrities who’ve been on X-Factor or Strictly Come Superstar; “Slap the Slappers” – where you have to only slap celebrities famous for their ridiculous love-lives. The possibilities are endless. You’d have to localise it of course, every country has it’s own set slappable figures; you could have a nostalgia version where you get to slap Timmy Mallet and Noel Edmonds and the like, or a music version with Britney Spears, et al.

Sadly though, the copyright and libel issues on this one put me off actually making it, so I’m giving this idea away free to the world. All I ask is that I get a free copy, so that if it does appear, I can have an enjoyable half hour slapping the Gallagher brothers.

One of the good things about my new, doctor ordered, walk to the office in the morning is that it gives me 20 minutes or so of un-interrupted thinking time. I can’t do anything, no-one is asking me anything, so my mind is free to wander. This last week we’ve been brain-storming development ideas for our own games, finally. Engine and tools work is all very nice and satisfying, but without a clear end-goal, it’s not so productive.

So Pete and I had a proper idea generating session last week, and settled on a plan for making a small game as a first step. Well, second step really – as an intermediate step we’re making Pong, on the grounds that if the engine can do Pong, then it has all the components necessary to prototype game-play for our real first title.

The walk to work this morning though was about coming up with the concept for the real game though – we had some good game-play ideas, but nothing to tie them together into a game. I’m very much in favour of the few-short-paragraphs-of-exposition-then-into-the-game approach (think Super Mario Brothers), but we still need that exposition to give us something to focus the game style around. And a name for our protagonist always helps to coalesce ideas around as well.