Drop Dead VR
Genre: VR Shooter
Platform: GearVR (2016), Oculus Rift (2017)
Level Design
I was a level designer on Drop Dead which initially released on Gear VR, then the following year on Oculus Rift. I built the majority of the gamplay levels which included gameplay scripting, enemy AI scripting, prototyping enemy archetypes, designing and developing bosses, and building in-level cutscenes with characters and dialogue.
VR presented a number of challenges - most of the techniques used in level / game design in a non-VR game didn't hold up.
Movement in VR was tricky as it normally causes players to feel nauseous. Drop Dead was built on the back of a previous mobile game called Gunfinger which was released from Pixel Toys before I joined. A lot of old tech was re-used and one thing which stood out was the player movement being driven by animating the player through levels (this was due to the previous game being just a camera that moves elegantly through areas with moments of climbing over geometry). I wrote a tool in Unity3D which would create an Animation Clip based on the distance to travel with a constant player speed variable to interpolate linearly between the points. This avoided any accelerated movement and kept the player moving at a constant rate no matter the distance so players would become comfortable and familiar with movement.
I learned a lot when designing the combat interactions in VR. One of the challenges was creating difficult and rewarding gameplay with very few zombies, due to the heavy performance considerations.
The solution was to tweak the balance of the game and make killing zombies harder. We broke the zombies up into parts and designed a damage system around it. A zombie could take many bullets in the body for instance, but a couple in the head and it was a goner. We made the body weaker if the player shot limbs off and created stagger chances based on the dismemberment of limbs. It was easier to stagger a zombie by shooting off a limb, rather than firing multiple bullets rapidly into the body.
In gameifying the shooting of zombies it made the engagements much more interesting. We combined this with interesting enemy archetypes by giving unique roles to the zombies behaviours. We had faster yet weak zombies, slow yet strong, ranged only, flying ranged only, middle-man average zombie, average zombie with weapon (longer melee range, more damage), and shielded brutes.
Boss Design
I was heavily involved in the boss designs. I used Mike Stout's Boss Battle Design Structure as principles to create interesting and engaging enemies that weren't just bullet sponges.
These bosses were incredibly challenging to get into the game during development. I worked very closely with a coder to get the more ambitious bosses into the game, such as Titus; a massive giant zombie that you fight while flying in a helicopter. The only way to defeat Titus was to shoot self-healing pustules on his body to stun him and preventing him from killing you, until you can finally take him down.
Thanks for reading!
Working on a VR game was incredibly fun and challenging. I especially loved the idea of throwing everything I had learned away that didn't work in VR to find solutions to problems that were needing solved, all within the scope of the games' development.
