Gizmag has posted a new interview with High Voltage Software, the developer behind upcoming sci-fi VR shooter Damaged Core. The interview covers how these 20+ year industry veterans have had to completely rethink how a first-person shooter is made in VR, and how it has developed some novel solutions to problems like simulation sickness.
The game positions you as a sniper, overlooking an area that's filled with robotic enemies. However, to move around, the player teleports into the robots themselves. As CCO Eric Nofsinger explains: "We started playing a lot more with different forms of movement, being able to transfer your consciousness ... you do a little bit of that in [the demo] where you transfer from point to point, but we started playing a lot more with that, where we get the player to do a lot of rapid jumps from thing to thing."
This means you're not just teleporting to another point in the environment - you're teleporting inside another entity, and possessing them. From there, you'll find yourself with a number of different abilities, such as different weapons, depending upon what you possessed.
"We've got moments of gameplay where we were able to work some movement in, like we were able to do stuff like transfer onto different enemies that are on moving platforms or other moving structures, and [...] if you frame that correctly it can feel really good," Nofsinger continues. "But that independent movement, where you're going along and changing directions very quickly ... it really doesn't feel very good."
That realisation came to Nofsinger after playing a number of existing first-person shooters in VR, and realising what was not going to work well. "We spent a great deal of R&D around doing what's right for that as opposed to just shoehorning a traditional shooter into the Rift," he continues. "We went the other way around where we tried to make something that felt intuitive and good for the device."
Damaged Core is set to launch in May this year, exclusively for the Oculus Rift.
