DEVBLOG #4 - Immersion

Hey everyone! Another week of work passed quickly here at Twin Wolves, and we tought to share some of our work with you. This week we'd like to talk about the player's immersion inside LIZ: Before the Plague . LIZ: Before the Plague has been developed from the beginning aiming to make it a highly immersive experience, the kind of immersion where the limit between real and virtual is almost imperceptible. For this reason, we prefer to define Liz as a videogame experience because we want to give to future players a more vivid and realistic experience.

UI

The graphical user interface (GUI) is the first element that breaks the illusion while you play, that's why we built a completely diegetic GUI, meaning that there is no user interface in the game that is not integrated into the game world: the player sees what the character sees.

Also game settings and most of interaction interactions pass by the character’s gear, the PDA, as well as by the drone, which will be our guide during the experience.

Character

When we started working on this project we did some studies on other VR games to understand how the main character was currently managed. On many occasions we have seen interesting things, but none of these solutions seemed appropriate to our title and our goal. We started studying a method that allowed the player to feel completely immersed in the scene. We wanted the character's body to follow, as much as possible, the player's movements from the view of the bust to the movement of the shoulders, arms and hands in space. For the legs, instead, we had to approximate the movement, because the hardware does not give us tracking information about the lower part of the body. We can say, however, that during the testing phases it is often natural to want to see the legs! Not to mention the boys who focus for a few minutes on the details of our beautiful main character 😉 Here are a few pics of our game designer testing the body responsiveness ːsteamfacepalmː Steam post image Steam post image Steam post image Always in favour of the immersion, we have eliminated the ghost of the physical controllers in favour of items of character’s gear.

Narrative

Narrative is something not so easy in VR since you have no control over the player's focus (you can just "wait" for it or try to draw his attention) and, as soon as the game is first person - meaning the character's position matches player's one - where the animations cannot be seen, you cannot give the proper emphasis to crucial scenes. We have studied different alternatives, but they were all in line with the current market and not very adaptable to LIZ, so we developed a somewhat different system. In main narrative phases, which need a particular emphasis, the main character will detach from the player point of view, and the player will remain a spectator of the scene where the characters give life to a scene.

This choice seems to reduce the immersion but has a motivation, let's see if you will find out and understand it by playing! As always don't forget to let us have your feedback! Comment and rate! ːsteammockingː