Inside VR Design

These Details Make ‘Half-Life: Alyx’ Unlike Any Other VR Game – Inside XR Design

AR Design, Design & Development, Feature, half-life: alyx, Inside VR Design, VR Design, xr design / Ryan Harris / November 29, 2023

In Inside XR Design we examine specific examples of great VR design. Today we’re looking at the details of Half-Life: Alyx and how they add an immersive layer to the game rarely found elsewhere.

You can find the complete video below, or continue reading for an adapted text version.

Intro

Now listen, I know you’ve almost certainly heard of Half-Life: Alyx (2020), it’s one of the best VR games made to date. And there’s tons of reasons why it’s so well regarded. It’s got great graphics, fun puzzles, memorable set-pieces, an interesting story… and on and on. We all know this already.

But the scope of Alyx allows the game to go above and beyond what we usually see in VR with some awesome immersive details that really make it shine. Today I want to examine a bunch of those little details—and even if you’re an absolute master of the game, I hope you’ll find at least one thing you didn’t already know about.

Inertia Physics

First is the really smart way that Alyx handles inertia physics. Lots of VR games use inertia to give players the feeling that objects have different weights. This makes moving a small and light object feel totally different than a large and heavy object, but it usually comes with a sacrifice which is making larger objects much more challenging to throw because the player has to account for the inertia sway as they throw the object.

Alyx makes a tiny little tweak to this formula by ignoring the inertia sway only in its throwing calculation. That means if you’re trying to accurately throw a large object, you can just swing your arm and release in a way that feels natural and you’ll get an accurate throw even if you didn’t consider the object’s inertia.

This gives the game the best of both worlds—an inertia system to convey weight but without sacrificing the usability of throwing.

I love this kind of attention to detail because it makes the experience better without players realizing anything is happening.

Sound Design

Note: Make sure to unmute clips in this section

When it comes to sound design, Alyx is really up there not just in terms of quality, but in detail too. One of my absolute favorite details in this game is that almost every object has a completely unique sound when being shaken. And this reads especially well because it’s spatial audio, so you’ll hear it most from the ear that’s closest to the shaken object:

This is something that no flatscreen game needs because only in VR do players have the ability to pick up practically anything in the game.

I can just imagine the sound design team looking at the game’s extensive list of props and realizing they need to come up with what a VHS tape or a… TV sounds like when shaken.

That’s a ton of work for this little detail that most people won’t notice, but it really helps keep players immersed when they pick up, say, a box of matches and hear the exact sound they would expect to hear if they shook it in real life.

Gravity Gloves In-depth

Ok so everyone knows the Gravity Gloves in Alyx are a diegetic way to give players a force pull capability so it’s easier to grab objects at a distance. And practically everyone I’ve talked to agrees they work exceptionally well. They’re not only helpful, but fun and satisfying to use.

But what exactly makes the gravity gloves perhaps the single best force-pull implementation seen in VR to date? Let’s break it down.

In most VR games, force-pull mechanics have two stages:

The first, which we’ll call ‘selection’, is pointing at an object and seeing it highlighted.
The second, which we’ll call ‘confirmation’, is pressing the grab button which pulls the object to your hand.

Half-Life: Alyx adds a third stage to this formula which is the key to why it works so well:

First is ‘selection’, where the object glows so you know what is being targeted.
The second—let’s call it lock-on’—involves pulling the trigger to confirm your selection. Once you do, the selection is locked-on; even if you move your hand now the selection won’t change to any other object.
The final stage, ‘confirmation’, requires not a button press but a pulling gesture to finally initiate the force pull.

Adding that extra lock-on stage to the process significantly improves reliability because it ensures that both the player and the game are on the same page before the object is pulled.

And it should be noted that each of these stages has distinct sounds which make it even clearer to the player what’s being selected so they know that everything is going according to their intentions.

The use of a pulling gesture makes the whole thing more immersive by making it feel like the game world is responding to your physical actions, rather than the press of a button.

There’s also a little bit of magic to the exact speed and trajectory the objects follow, like how the trajectory can shift in real-time to reach the player’s hand. Those parameters are carefully tuned to feel satisfying without feeling like the object just automatically attaches to your hand every time.

This strikes me as something that an animator may even have weighed in on to say, “how do we get that to feel just right?”

Working Wearables

It’s natural for players in VR to try to put a hat on their head when they find one, but did you know that wearing a hat protects you from barnacles? And yes, that’s the official name for those horrible creatures that stick to the ceiling.

But it’s not just hats you can wear. The game is surprisingly good about letting players wear anything that’s even vaguely hat-shaped. Like cones or even pots.

I figure this is something that Valve added after watching more than a few playtesters attempt to wear those objects on their head during development.

Speaking of wearing props, you can also wear gas masks. And the game takes this one step further… the gas masks actually work. One part of the game requires you to hold your hand up to cover you mouth to avoid breathing spores which make you cough and give away your position.

If you wear a gas mask you are equally protected, but you also get the use of both hands which gives the gas mask an advantage over covering your mouth with your hand.

The game never explicitly tells you that the gas mask will also protect you from the spores, it just lets players figure it out on their own—sort of like a functional easter egg.

Spectator View

Next up is a feature that’s easy to forget about unless you’ve spent a lot of time watching other people play Half-Life: Alyx… the game has an optional spectator interface which shows up only on the computer monitor. The interface gives viewers the exact same information that the actual player has while in the game: like, which weapons they have unlocked or equipped and how much health and resin they have. The interface even shows what items are stowed in the player’s ‘hand-pockets’.

And Valve went further than just adding an interface for spectators, they also added built-in camera smoothing, zoom levels, and even a selector to pick which eye the camera will look through.

The last one might seem like a minor detail, but because people are either left or right-eye dominant, being able to choose your dominant eye means the spectator will correctly see what you’re aiming at when you’re aiming down the scope of a gun.

Multi-modal Menu

While we’re looking at the menus here, it’s also worth noting that the game menu is primarily designed for laser pointer interaction, but it also works like a touchscreen.

While this seems maybe trivial today, let’s remember that Alyx was released almost four years ago(!). The foresight to offer both modalities means that no matter if the player’s first instinct is to touch the menu or use the laser, both choices are equally correct.

Guiding Your Eye

All key items in Alyx have subtle lights on them to draw your attention. This is basic game design stuff, but I have to say that Alyx’s approach is much less immersion breaking than many VR games where key objects are highlighted in a glaringly obvious yellow mesh.

For the pistol magazine, the game makes it clear even at a distance how many bullets are in the magazine… in fact, it does this in two different ways.

First, every bullet has a small light on it which lets you see from the side of the magazine roughly how full it is.

And then on the bottom of the magazine there’s a radial indicator that depletes as the ammo runs down.

Because this is all done with light, if the magazine is half full, it will be half as bright—making it easy for players to tell just how ‘valuable’ the magazine is with just a glance, even at a distance. Completely empty magazines emit no light so you don’t mistake them for something useful. Many players learn this affordance quickly, even without thinking much about it.

The takeaway here is that a game’s most commonly used items—the things players will interact with the most—should be the things that are most thoughtfully designed. Players will collect and reload literally hundreds of magazines throughout the game, so spending time to add these subtle details meaningfully improves the entire experience.

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These Clever Tools Make VR Way More Immersive – Inside XR Design

Design & Development, Feature, Inside VR Design, News, red matter 2, VR Design, xr design / Ryan Harris / November 5, 2023

In Inside XR Design we examine specific examples of great VR design. Today we’re looking at the clever design of Red Matter 2’s ‘grabber tools’ and the many ways that they contribute to immersion.

You can find the complete video below, or continue reading for an adapted text version.

Intro

Today we’re going to talk about Red Matter 2 (2022), an adventure puzzle game set in a retro-future sci-fi world. The game is full of great VR design, but those paying close attention will know that some of its innovations were actually pioneered all the way back in 2018 with the release of the original Red Matter. But hey, that’s why we’re making this video series—there’s incredible VR design out there that everyone can learn from.

We’re going to look at Red Matter 2’s ingenious grabber tools, and the surprising number of ways they contribute to immersion.

What You See is What You Get

At first glance, the grabber tools in Red Matter 2 might just look like sci-fi set-dressing, but they are so much more than that.

At a basic level, the grabber tools take on the shape of the user’s controller. If you’re playing on Quest, Index, or PSVR 2, you’ll see a custom grabber tool that matches the shape of your specific controller.

First and foremost, this means that players’ in-game hand pose matches their actual hand pose and the feeling of holding something in their hands. The shape you see in-game even matches the center of gravity as you feel it in your real hand.

Compare that to most VR games which show an open hand pose and nothing in your hand by default… that creates a disconnect between what you see in VR and what you actually feel in your hand.

And of course because you’re holding a tool that looks just like your controller, you can look down to see all the buttons and what they do.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been using VR for years now, and I still couldn’t reliably tell you off the top of my head which button is the Y button on a VR controller. Is it on the left or right controller? Top or bottom button? Take your own guess in the comments and then let us know if you got it right!

Being able to look down and reference the buttons—and which ones your finger is touching at any given moment—means players can always get an instant reminder of the controls without breaking immersion by opening a game menu or peeking out of their headset to see which button is where.

This is what’s called a diegetic interface—that’s an interface that’s contextualized within the game world, instead of some kind of floating text box that isn’t actually supposed to exist as part of the game’s narrative.

In fact, you’ll notice that there’s absolutely no on-screen interface in the footage you see from Red Matter 2. And that’s not because I had access to some special debug mode for filming. It’s by design.

When I spoke with Red Matter 2 Game Director Norman Schaar, he told me, “I personally detest UI—quite passionately, in fact! In my mind, the best UI is no UI at all.”

Schaar also told me that a goal of Red Matter 2’s design is to keep the player immersed at all times.

So it’s not surprising that we also see that the grabber tools used as a literal interface within the game, allowing you to physically connect to terminals to gather information. To the player this feels like a believable way that someone would interact with the game’s world—under the surface we’re actually just looking at a clever and immersive way of replacing the ‘press X to interact’ mechanics that are common in flat games.

The game’s grabber tools do even more for immersion than just replicating the feel of a controller in your hand or acting as a diegetic interface in the game. Crucially, they also replicate the limited interaction fidelity that players actually have in VR.

Coarse Hand Input

So let me break this down. In most VR games when you look at your hands you see… a human hand. That hand of course is supposed to represent your hand. But, there’s a big disconnect between what your real hands are capable of and what the virtual hands can do. Your real hands each have five fingers and can dexterously manipulate objects in ways that even today’s most advanced robots have trouble replicating.

So while your real hand has five fingers to grab and manipulate objects, your virtual hand essentially only has one point of input—a single point with which to grab objects.

If you think about it, the grabber tool in Red Matter 2 exactly represents this single point of input to the player. Diegetically, it’s obvious upon looking at the tool that you can’t manipulate the fingers, so your only option is to ‘grab’ at a one point.

That’s a long way of saying that the grabber tools in Red Matter 2 reflect the coarse hand input that’s actually available to us in VR, instead of showing us a virtual hand with lots of fingers that we can’t actually use.

So, In Red Matter 2, the grabber tools contextualize the inability to use our fingers. The result is that instead of feeling silly that we have to rotate and manipulate objects in somewhat strange ways, you actually feel like you’re learning how to deftly operate these futuristic tools.

Immersion Insulation Gap

And believe it or not, there’s still more to talk about why Red Matter 2’s grabber tools are so freaking smart.

Physics interactions are a huge part of the game, and the grabber tools again work to maintain immersion when handling objects. Like many VR games, Red Matter 2 uses an inertia-like system to imply the weight of an object in your hand. Small objects move quickly and easily, while large objects are sluggish and their inertia fights against your movement.

Rather than imagining the force our hands would feel when moving these virtual objects, the grabber tools create a sort of immersion insulation gap by providing a mechanical pivot point between the tool and the object.

This visually ‘explains’ why we can’t feel the forces of the object against our fingers, especially when the object is very heavy. The disconnect between the object and our hand—with the grabber tool as the insulator in the middle—alleviates some of the expectation of the forces that we’d normally feel in real life, thereby preserving immersion just a little bit more.

Unassuming Inventory

And if it wasn’t clear already, the grabber tools are actually… your inventory. Not only do they store all of your tools—like the flashlight, hacking tool, and your gun—you can even use them to temporarily stow objects. Handling inventory this way means that players can never accidentally drop or lose their tools, which is an issue we see in lots of other VR games, even those which use ‘holsters’ to hold things.

Inhuman Hands

And last but not least…the grabber tools can actually do some interesting things that our hands can’t. For example, the rotating grabber actually makes the motion of turning wheels like this one easier than doing it with two normal hands.

It’s no coincidence that the design of the grabber tools in Red Matter 2 is so smartly thought through… after all, the game is all about interacting with the virtual world around you… so it makes sense that the main way in which players interact with the world would be carefully considered.

To take full advantage of the grabbers, the developers built a wide variety of detailed objects for the game which are consistently interactive. You can pick up pretty much anything that looks like you should be able to.

And here’s a great little detail that I love to see: in cases where things aren’t interactive, all you have to do is not imply that they are! Here in Red Matter 2 the developers simply removed handles from this cabinet… a clear but non-intrusive way to tell players it can’t be opened.

Somewhat uniquely to VR, just seeing cool stuff up close like it’s right in front of you can be a rewarding experience all on its own. To that end, Red Matter 2 makes a conscious effort to sprinkle in handful of visually interesting objects, whether it’s this resin eyeball, papers with reactive physics, or this incredible scene where you watch your weapon form from hundreds of little balls right in your hand.

– – — – –

Red Matter 2’s grabber tool design is so beneficial to the game’s overall immersion that, frankly, I’m surprised we haven’t seen this sort of thing become more common in VR games.

If you want to check all of this out for yourself, you can find Red Matter 2 on Quest, PSVR 2, and PC VR. Enjoyed this breakdown? Check out the rest of our Inside XR Design series and our Insights & Artwork series.

And if you’re still reading, how about dropping a comment to let us know which game or app we should cover next?

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‘Horizon Call of the Mountain’ Behind-the-scenes – Insights & Artwork from Guerrilla & Firesprite

Feature, horizon call of the mountain, horizon call of the mountain behind the scenes, horizon call of the mountain bts, horizon call of the mountain design, horizon call of the mountain development, horizon call of the mountain vr, Inside VR Design, News, psvr 2, VR Design / Ryan Harris / June 30, 2023

It’s a rare treat when we get a VR game with the scope and scale of Horizon Call of the Mountain, let alone to see a much-loved IP reimagined specifically for the medium. Made exclusively for PSVR 2, the game was built collaboratively between studios Guerrilla Games and Firesprite, both part of PlayStation Studios. We sat down to speak with Alex Barnes, Game Director at Firesprite, to learn more about how Horizon Call of the Mountain came to be and how it turned out to be one of our best-rated VR games in recent memory.

Editor’s Note: The exclusive artwork peppered throughout this article is best viewed on a desktop browser with a large screen or in landscape orientation on your phone. All images courtesy Guerrilla Games & Firesprite.

Gameplay clips may not appear with cookies disabled, click ‘View clip’ to see them in a separate window.

Moving a Mountain

Horizon Call of the Mountain is, of course, a Horizon game. With that, comes the expectation that it will look, feel, and sound like the other two titles in Guerrilla’s lauded franchise. That meant the two studios had to work in close collaboration to deliver on the vision.

“Call of the Mountain was an incredibly collaborative project, with both Firesprite and Guerrilla working really closely to develop the game, Barnes explains. “The bulk of the content creation and gameplay teams were over with Firesprite, with Guerrilla holding the original vision for the game and helping direct elements, such as the narrative and art, to create a game that was genuinely grounded in the world of Horizon. We had folks from both teams hands-on at different times and were in constant communication with each other throughout development.”

Even though the game would need to be built as a VR native title, the studios wanted to ensure that it represented elements of a Horizon game, without being too attached to every Horizon gameplay trope regardless of whether or not they fit within VR.

“The core of the gameplay was pretty set from the initial idea for the game. We wanted climbing, crafting, exploration, interaction and combat to be the mainstay of everything that we built. That meant freedom of movement and ‘real-feel’ physical interactions like climbing and bow combat were so crucial that we got feeling great for all types of players,” Barnes say. “Early on, we did look into doing some more wide-ranging gameplay elements to descend from the mountaintops, but ultimately these elements really ended up distracting from the overall gameplay experience, so they didn’t make their way into the released game.”

The bow is central to the game’s combat, so the teams gave it tons of interesting detail. | View clip

Come One, Come All

Another important goal was building a game that anyone could play—whether experienced with VR or not—and to leave a real impression.

“We knew this could be players’ first experience with PSVR 2 and, in some cases, even with VR. That meant building gameplay systems that people could just pick up, play and quickly understand so that we could fully immerse the player in the world,” Barnes says. “We are also big lovers of VR ourselves, and so it became a goal of everyone to blow new players away to show them how amazing a truly VR experience is, especially on this incredible new hardware.”

Building for experiences and new VR players alike also meant rethinking the options for how people would move in the game. This was also driven by the developers themselves, some of which couldn’t tolerate much traditional stick movement in VR. This pushed the studio to come up with an ‘arm-swinger’ locomotion scheme which I personally felt was both more comfortable and more immersive than pure stick-motion.

“Comfort in VR is an incredibly personal thing, and locomotion is such a big part of that. For some of the team, the stick-based movement was difficult to get comfortable with. So the motion mimetic system of moving the player’s arms was conceptualised as a way to help add a layer of comfort that allowed people who were less familiar with VR to play for longer and stay comfortable whilst they did,” says Barnes.

The players gloves also act as a diegetic health bar thanks to the green leaf-like segments

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