To succeed in VR game development, developers must adopt a "cowboy mentality" according to Paul van der Meer. He is a developer at Vertigo Games, a veteran studio with titles like Arizona Sunshine and After the Fall under its belt, and the studio is currently working on a VR remake of The 7th Guest.
As one could guess, "VR Remake" is an interesting, strange, and challenging approach. However, that excites van der Meer and others at Vertigo Games. Game ZXC recently spoke with van der Meer regarding the development of The 7th Guest VR.
VR Is the Wild West of Modern Game Development
When asked for the reason behind his VR studio’s success, Paul emphasized that to succeed in such a young industry, developers need to have what he called a ‘cowboy mentality,’ which he described as,
“The mentality of just trying something that you’re not sure will work, and the willingness to potentially spend resources that won’t give direct returns in the pursuit of new and exciting ways to play. Game design is an iterative process, and you don’t want to be too rigid and risk-averse because that’s how you grow and push what’s possible, especially in a young field like virtual reality.”
For instance, van der Meer talked about their implementation of volumetric video for The 7th Guest, which is a kind of motion capture/animation technology that hasn’t really been used at this scale. “it wasn’t the obvious thing to do for 7th Guest, and we weren’t sure it would work…The safe bet would be to say no, we’re not going to do that. But to our CEO’s credit, he gave us the go-ahead to try it out, and here we are.”
It Takes Passion and Dedication to Succeed As a VR Developer
Willingness to experiment and take risks may be the difference between a good studio and a great one, but it’s certainly not the only trait needed to succeed as a developer. Overall, van der Meer had a lot of praise for his team’s work ethic and dedication, which is reflected in their success today.
“There are so many talented people here who just want to make something really, really good. The willingness to iron out every gritty detail, like object interaction, reloading weapons, individual animations, and how they all interact…There are a lot of people here willing to go that extra mile, do the difficult thing, to serve the player experience and make everything feel as good as it can be.”
He also explained that a great touchstone in game design is the phrase, “Why my game?" People can play any game - why should they choose this one? That sentiment applies to VR as well. “We always try to ask ourselves why would you play this in VR? If the experience can translate to a flat screen, then we didn’t do our job right.”
The 7th Guest VR is in development for PC (Steam), Quest 2, and Quest 3.