Originally posted on: www.roadtovr.com
The secret to Half-Life: Alyx’s near-universal acclaim is… well, not as secret as you might think. Yes, the game surely had a budget much larger than any other VR game to date, but it’s far more than money that makes a great game.
In an interview with Half-Life: Alyx game designer Robin Walker, I got a glimpse of Valve’s game design process which felt intriguingly different from much of what I’ve seen elsewhere in VR game development. As Walker put it, creating Half-Life: Alyx was truly approached ‘one room at a time’.
So rather than approaching the game’s structure from the top-down, starting with high-level gameplay concepts, as many seem to do, Valve really honed in on the gameplay of each room in the game, almost like creating a string of mini-games that were each designed to be interesting and fun.
Crucially, this allowed the studio to regularly playtest discrete sections of the game—and then remix, rearrange, or even cut them as needed.
Putting playtesters through each room regularly also allowed the developers to anticipate and react to what future players would do in instances where they found that many playtesters behaved the same; walker explains how watching playtesters helped Valve decide where to focus its development efforts in each room.
Among other things, many of the game’s contextual voice-lines were added only after seeing that many players would do (or even say) similar things as they played. Seeing that common behavior helped the developers decide where to spend their finite resources.
Walker said that this process—of testing, iterating, and testing again—created a feedback loop which explains why Valve decided to focus so much on extremely detailed environmental art.
Had Valve not observed that players responded positively as they enhanced the artwork, the studio would have spent far less time on that aspect.
For Valve, constantly running playtesters through the game was so critical to the game’s development process that the developers built tools to aggregate player data so that it could be reviewed to answer key questions about the game, like how much of the game’s useful objects (ammo, resin, health, etc) were players actually finding as they progressed.
The deceptively simple part about building a game one room at a time is the seeming inelegance and constant playtesting throughout the design process. It’s the opposite of building high-level systems—like procedural planets, weapon archetypes, or dynamic daily objectives—and hoping for interesting gameplay to emerge.
It’s the brute force approach to creating fun. Build a room. Test it. Is it fun? No? Fix it. Is it fun yet? No? Keeping testing and keep working on it until it is. And if it isn’t? Throw it out. Finally made a fun room? Time to make the next one.
The results of this process are clear. Half-Life: Alyx is demonstrably the most acclaimed VR game and even Half-Life game to date.
What is 360 VR Video?
360 video is a video that is recorded in all directions at the same time with multiple cameras. The videos are stitched together either internally in the camera or externally using special software.
It then forms one spherical video that is controlled by the viewer, enabling them to look up, down, right or left at their discretion.
Is 360 Video Virtual Reality?
I want you to be the judge.
Recommended MicroSD Card for use with the Fusion 360 camera
How are you watching your 360 VR Video?
Are you watching on your PC?
Is it Facebook? YouTube? Veer.TV ?
Or better still, are you using your Samsung Galaxy Smartphone with your Samsung Gear VR Headset?
Or are you using another smartphone with a Google Cardboard? Google Daydream?
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