Making Psychonauts humor work in VR -- without making people sick

Making a game that's genuinely funny is no joke. Try to do it in VR, and you've what seems like a recipe for massive headaches.

You've also got the ingredients for Rhombus of Ruin, Double Fine's first VR game and the first game it's shipped using Unreal Engine 4. The story of how Rhombus came to be -- and the things Double Fine learned in making it -- is worth studying.

Out this week for PlayStation VR headsets, Rhombus of Ruin is also Double Fine's first proper sequel to Psychonauts, the 2005 3D platformer that became a cult classic and, over a decade later, still had a fan community large enough to help crowdfund a sequel last year. Rhombus of Ruin tells a short interstitial story between the two Psychonauts, and in the course of working on it the folks at Double Fine seem to have developed an appreciation for VR game development.

"I think now that we're done with it I was kind of like, 'Oh it was kind of fun making a VR game,'" Double Fine chief Tim Schafer said recently, speaking to Gamasutra alongside Rhombus of Ruin lead Chad Dawson. "VR games are pretty cool."

Here's an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Now that Double Fine has its first VR game out, are you at all concerned about the number of headsets that are in the marketplace?

Tim Schafer: Well, when it first came out, I was not one of those people who were like, VR is the future. Everything's going to be VR. I was kind of like, wait-and-see. I don't know if that's where I want all my gaming, as a player. I don't know if I want to come home and see my kids in headsets -- my kid.

But we did want to try something. "We'll make a VR game." And this opportunity came up to do one for Playstation and we were already talking about doing Psychonauts 2 and I wasn't going to tell -- in between Psychonauts 1 and 2 there was going to be this rescue mission that they're just going to be laughing about when they got home, "Ah, that was a great rescue mission, wasn't it?" I kind of want to tell that story but it's a small little, secret mission. Well, what if that's the VR game? And it just started making sense. That's why we did it and we were never planning on -- we didn't know where the markets by the time we launched. We just wanted to see what we could do with it.

Talking about the VR market, you know, it's not something we...You hope it grows. We're not banking everything on it. Even though we're a small company, we're pretty nimble and we can do multiple projects at once. We're doing like four projects, and this is one of them.

I was more skeptical at the beginning of it, but after we made the game and seen what the team has done with it and playing it, it's like, "VR is pretty cool." It proved it out to me, not just as a tech demo or an experience but as a game and as a place to go. You can do comedy in it and you can do emotional stuff, it's just a very active way of empathizing with the character by jumping into their minds for a little bit which was a minor thing you did in Psychonauts 1, but it's the main mechanic of Rhombus of Ruin. I thought it was interesting and so I was like, "VR's pretty cool."

But I feel like it's still just one tool in the game toolset, if you will. I don't know if all games will be VR, but that's because there's a whole bunch of things that we haven't found a way to do in it yet, and there's a whole bunch of new things that we learned about making the game that you can do, so it's just going to be different.

Yeah, I want to actually ask about that, I know -- I mean, I think I know, this is the first time you guys have done UE4, right?

Chad Dawson: Yeah, it's our first time.

Do you feel like doing more? Is this an opportunity to warm up and get a feel for UE4 before you do it on a project?

Dawson: I think so. Psychonauts 2.

Schafer: Yeah, Psychonauts 2 is in Unreal too.

Wow, that's very retro.

Schafer: What? Do we not call it Unreal anymore?

I heard "Unreal Engine 2" and I was like...

Schafer: Yeah, we're doing it in Unreal Engine 2. That's the best one. I think everyone agrees that was the best one.

Definitely.

Schafer: No, it was the right choice for us to start using Unreal, and Rhombus was the smaller of the two projects, so it taught us a lot and we learned a lot on it and Chad's been on the technological cutting edge of that experiment.

Dawson: We built up over the years, starting with Brutal Legend, an engine that we used for a decade. On Brutal Legend we developed in-house an engine that we used for about twenty games that we put out over the past ten years, but it's starting to get a little long in the tooth.

Schafer: You have to pay a lot to maintain an engine.

Dawson: Particularly as we started trying to release our games on every platform that exists. The tech cost of maintaining it were getting a bit crazy, so it was really our first attempt at trying to look at using another engine and it's been great so far. It's a learning curve. Any team will tell you starting out with Unreal and a new engine, there's a lot to learn, but it's really worked out pretty well.

What did you learn from going over to UE4? Was it easier in some ways? Was it harder in some ways?

Dawson: A lot of studios have kind of built up their own tech, so, particularly for programming, there's a little bit of that, "We built it" vs. "They built it" kind of feeling. Because you built up your own tech, you own it and you know it inside and out.

Schafer: And the artists working on it worked around whatever was wrong. Any package has things that are good and bad about it, but you kind of work around it and you grow new limbs to operate the machinery and it changes you.

Dawson: Anytime you start using someone else's engine, they came from a different set of philosophies and part of your game is to get inside their head as developers and say, "How does Epic think? How do they approach a problem?" Once you can kind of figure out their philosophy you can get your code working.

But you initially start out building it like you would've before, and you clash. It clashes and it breaks and everything crashes and you don't know why. So usually that's the first year or so. It's tricky because you're also trying to -- You know we're trying to get the game done during that same year.

Schafer: Yeah, we couldn't have built an engine from scratch in that time. This allowed us to just get in there and start prototyping and playing with stuff really fast.

Dawson: And Epic has done a good job of making VR work with it, so some of that aspect of just getting the VR hardware to work with it, they take on a little bit of that which we would've had to take it on for our own engine. So it was a good chance to look at that.

Has is significantly changed the Double Fine workflow to be working with an external tech company?

Dawson: It has! With a lot of our stuff, it's similar. Our artists still work in Maya. We also integrated a different sound engine for our audio engineers. Programmers are still in Visual Studio, so a lot of the aspects are the same.

Getting the art in the right format to get it into the game, that's a whole different -- That pipeline is different. It has a bunch of gotchas and a bunch of things you have to learn. Things where you're just like, "Don't do that," or, "Do it this way," or, "Get everything named the right way or in the right folders." It's all those little things that add up that can make learning a new engine a little bit trickier.

Once you get them down, you can really start being productive and it feels like we're at a point now that's really great for our Psychonauts 2 team kicking it off to have this experience in this project. Got through a lot of the initial hurdles to be able to come in and hit the ground running with that project, so to speak.

So what have you learned in the last few months on Rhombus of Ruin?

Dawson: We've done more late playtesting where a player actually can play most of the game start to finish. You don't really get to that point in the game until the end. But you always hope that their experience in the beginning will translate into their mastery and skill at the end. it's nice to see people getting to the end. I think an addendum would be try to get that beginning to the end in some form as early as you can. Don't save your last level until the end of the project, try to get it in in some form because it's important to do iteration.

Yeah, I was just talking to Brian Fargo about that, where if someone gave him 12 months to make a game and he could have 9 to build and 3 to test or vice versa, he'd way rather have 9 to test because the game gets much better if you get the whole thing together and iterate on it.

Dawson: Some of that depends on the type of game you're making.

Schafer: I'm already stressed out by just having 12 months to make a game. That's a short time!

Dawson: With this game, it has been one of our shorter cycles. For Tim, it's probably one of the shortest games you've ever written for, to get dialogue done.