How The Creators of Monument Valley Are Writing The Rules of Virtual Reality
Land’s End is a puzzle game—much like Myst—in which you hop spot to spot to interact with new, staged brainteasers. It’s built to be gorgeous and meditative, to allow the player to almost window shop their way through the game, never thinking about controlling it. What the Land’s End team is trying to accomplish—instead of outright commercial success—is a creative long con: Can they use this game to create some of the fundamental ways that people can interact with a VR world?
...there’s one interaction that all VR headsets will share: Your gaze. And so Land’s End is a game you can control purely by turning your head to look at things.
"[Gaze control] is the one thing that took us the longest to figure out," Pashley says. "We’ve been working on this game from this time last year. And the majority of that time has been iterating on level design, and the best way of letting the player interact with this world...you don't want people to feel like they’re using their head as a joystick."
The team’s first breakthrough was to eliminate the crosshair.
ustwo also built levels with classic attention grabbing techniques, like leading lines and placing things in silhouette, to pull your attention to the right spot. This means that while Land’s End lets you turn in your chair to appreciate the 360-degree view, as you absorb the horizon, you’ll naturally be drawn to the next stage of your journey. A glowing beacon—which you look at to walk to—just serves as confirmation and reinforcement of this core design.
Solving the actual puzzles—which require you to connect constellations across rocks—requires two main gaze techniques, pioneered by ustwo. The first is what the company calls Starlines. You point your head at a notch in the rock, look to another, and the two are connected by a laser-like trail. Meanwhile, all sorts of little bits of visual flourishes reinforce the behavior, from slowly building sparks when you’re in the right spot, to a crescendoing electronic sound track as your gaze ignites the pixels. It’s satisfying and reassuring; It all just feels so good.
The second breakthrough was telekinesis. By holding your gaze on a giant rock (marked with a certain symbol), it lifts into the air. Moving your head drags it through the air, as if your neck is not a joystick, but a crane.
See the full story here: http://www.fastcodesign.com/3051273/how-the-creators-of-monument-valley-are-writing-the-rules-of-virtual-reality?curator=MediaREDEF