Game Designer
Iron Man VR
Iron Man is a superhero that has often been thought of as lacking a game that fans felt delivered on the experience of playing as Tony Stark. Thanks in part to the wonderful core flight mechanics developed by Troy Johnsen (among the amazing contributions from many others) we were able to deliver an experience that, at times, captured the action expected of the Iron Avenger. On an individual level, I learned a great deal about players’ capacity to process information in VR versus more standard game formats and flattening the difficulty curve for a game intended to capture the widest possible audience.
I took over the design and implementation for two missions, the tutorial mission “Prologue” and the mid-campaign “Ghost in the Machine” while also contributing the initial design and iterations for the second tutorial, “Reloaded”. Below are breakdowns of an element of design for each of the three missions I worked on.
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That Montage Feeling - Tutorial Design in Iron Man VR
Like Happy Hogan Taught Me - Teaching Players How to Punch in VR (Coming Soon)
Ghost in the Machine - Exposition in a VR Action Game (Coming Soon)
Home Invasion: Designing Open Airspace Combat Encounters (Coming Soon)
That Montage Feeling
Making players feel like Iron Man starts with the flight mechanics. The current generation of VR hardware is well suited for creating a good flight feel, as the controllers can be rotated to thrust in the desired direction as Tony Stark does in the movies. While many players intuited this, especially if they’d seen the films, the flight mechanics are easy to learn but difficult to master. Through testing, we found that the flight mechanic alone was nearly maxing out players’ cognitive load, particularly for those inexperienced with VR or the Iron Man IP. This overtaxing manifested in players struggling to learn and remember how to perform even the most basic elements of combat.
By the time I took over the early iteration of the tutorial, the campaign sequence, including enemy rollout and player ability rollout, was largely set in place. This meant that by the third mission, players were expected to understand how to perform the following actions:
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Fly
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Shoot
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Shoot while flying with the other hand
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Shoot auxiliary weapons
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Boost
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Rocket punch
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Rocket punch combo
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Ground pound
While this isn’t a massive list of mechanics, the “Fly” bullet point turned out to be much more complex, as we began to find that players often flew upwards and struggled to fly backward, strafe, and fly without bumping into the geo.
Having such a limited amount of time to teach many of the game’s mechanics, the goal was to recreate the feeling of the montage of Tony Stark’s experience learning to use his suit in the 2008 film.
Getting Up To Speed - The Flight Challenge
Given that flying and shooting are the core actions we see Iron Man performing in any combat scenario, we needed to ensure that players could fly well enough to feel confident engaging enemies in combat. To address this, the first skill check in the game is a flight challenge which players are required to complete in under ten minutes. Failure to complete the course in ten minutes leads to a warning from Tony’s onboard AI that combat will be difficult if they can’t complete the course in the allotted time.
The earliest iteration of the tutorial simply consisted of the player looking at their repulsors to form an understanding of how to control their direction while airborne, and the flight challenge itself. The flight challenge is themed as a course designed by Tony’s onboard AI to help explain what would otherwise be nonsensical hoops blocking the view from his mansion. This iteration had players following a drone along the path, using a big blue bubble to indicate the next checkpoint and a small red bubble to indicate the following checkpoint.
The drone was removed pretty quickly, as falling too far behind led to players feeling defeated. However, even with the drone removed, players struggled to complete this iteration of the course, as there was both too much verticality and too many hairpin turns. This resulted in players becoming frustrated, confused, and occasionally nauseous after hitting too many rocks and becoming spun around. Those who displayed a natural ability to fly well felt that the course was too long and a bit boring.
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The next major iteration removed verticality to allow players to focus on flying straight and turning. To better accommodate the successful players, we added a boost tutorial to the start of the course to allow the naturals to try to master flying aggressively. The rocket punch “tutorial” was swapped from a giant boulder to a first pass of a tutorial teaching the player how to punch. There were numerous difficulties with this specific mechanic and tutorial which I’ll cover at a later time. Optional punch and repulsor targets were scattered through the back half of the course as a way to encourage players to use their combat mechanics while flying and reduce their time by doing so. Finally, to guarantee that players would punch at least once outside of the tutorial, the finish line was converted to a checkpoint which requires players to punch to succeed.
New players had a much better time with this course. VR newbies could complete the course in the allotted time while remaining challenged while the experienced and more natural players could breeze through it quickly. The major sticking points became the boost tutorial at the start, the punch tutorial, and difficulty following the path on some of the turns obscured by the geo.
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The issue with boost was that, in trying to do the correct input—double tapping both triggers—players would often position their hands in a manner that resulted in an upwards boost. This immediately recreated the verticality issue I’d tried to correct from the first iteration.
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As mentioned previously, the rocket punch tutorial was difficult enough to warrant a separate post.
To address the boost issue, I had the player place their hands in a manner that would result in a forward rather than upward boost. This change was somewhat contentious, a few players struggled to maintain this position while attempting to boost, but it dramatically improved the overall success of this tutorial.
To aid players in competing visualizing some of the more difficult turns, checkpoints were placed in pairs on curves to provide a clear understanding of the direction players should be exited the corner.
With these changes complete, the final touches were largely accomplished via the UI, providing objective markers for the next checkpoint whenever the player lost line of sight.
Prologue - Teaching How to Punch
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Ghost in the Machine
This breakdown is under construction but in the meantime, you can view the entirety of this mid-campaign mission I designed and am currently writing about as played by Substatica