Virtual reality has finally arrived on Sony’s console, with the HMD formerly known as Project Morpheus hitting store shelves today. PSVR is releasing with no shortage of virtual reality experiences to try out, including games like Thumper Battlezone, Wayward Sky, Allumette, Superhypercube, Harmonix's Music VR, and many more.

Gamasutra reached out to the developers creating games for it (or porting games to it) to find out what it was like to develop for the PSVR. There were many interesting insights about the console VR experience, but the consensus reaction was that it was similar to other VR platforms in terms of development. So we opened it up and asked some more general questions about the challenges of VR design the dealt with on their PSVR launch titles.

(Don't miss Gamasutra's dev-centric PlayStation VR review)

Every aspect of creating games and digital spaces would need to be re-examined in the creation of PSVR games, from the way impacts are conveyed to the menus to the movements, and each developer had a little something to say about how daunting, and yet exciting, developing around these new concerns could be.

What is it like developing for PSVR?

We had devs working in Rifts, Vives, and PSVR for this Music VR. PSVR isn’t going to offer quite as much tracking fidelity, but it’s frankly way better than I expected from a console, and it’s the lightest, most comfortable form factor by far. -- Jon Carter, Harmonix, Music VR

I was initially surprised by how well PSVR worked on a PlayStation 4. We were able to get Wayward Sky running at 90fps, which feels much better for physics-based interaction with the world. -- Chandana Ekanayake, Uber Entertainment, Wayward Sky

We are really happy with how fast we were up and running and how nice the project looks on the PSVR. We have put a lot of effort on the tech side so that we can build for multiple platforms, and were able to have Allumette running on PSVR from the beginning of the project. It was working so well we began using our internal native VR creation tools on the PSVR. -- Jimmy Maidens, Penrose Studios, Allumette

What surprised you about developing for PS VR? Were there any lessons you had to learn very quickly, or any habits of traditional game design that you had to unlearn very quickly?

The biggest struggle for VR versus standard game development is constantly optimizing your game so that it runs well during production. Low framerate can cause headaches, discomfort, and ruin your day. -- Ekanayake, Uber Entertainment, Wayward Sky

Because Thumper gameplay is so much about parsing depth, the depth information in VR makes the game easier to play. That was unexpected. We were worried that adding information might be a distraction, like added noise, and that it would be hard to focus on what's important. Turns out depth it is very useful information in Thumper, having a clear sense of where things are in space makes it easier to focus on what's important, I actually play a little better in VR.-- Brian Gibson, Drool, Thumper

There was one late night that I thought everyone else had gone home. I noticed some odd lights in the window overlooking San Francisco. For a moment, I thought I was seeing a UFO.

It took me a minute to realize I was seeing the two colored lights of the move controllers and the PSVR being reflected in the window and that our production designer had been in the loft for hours quietly working in VR.It was pretty amazing that our production designer, who often works in traditional mediums like pencil and paper, was spending hours a day designing in VR on the PSVR. -- Maidens, Penrose Studios, Allumette

If you've had experience developing for different platforms--Gear, Vive, Rift, Daydream--can you briefly describe the difference between them?

Wayward Sky started as a prototype on the Gear VR, and the initial design was around the idea of looking around and using the Gear VR touchpad to click into the VR world. Once we switched to PSVR, the gameplay changed to take advantage of positional tracking and motion controls to allow the player to interact and manipulate puzzles and the world directly. I find motion controls are more accessible for players, as it maps directly with how they would interact with things in the real world. If you see an object and you want to pick it up, its a matter of moving your hand over it and picking it up. -- Ekanayake, Uber Entertainment, Wayward Sky

The lack of full positional tracking on mobile headsets is definitely the biggest difference. If you want to make a truly comfortable experience for the current suite of mobile HMDs, you really need to encourage users to want to be more or less stationary. That said, it’s hard to overstate how nice it is to not feel a tether pulling on your head all the time. In the non-mobile category, the Rift’s integrated headphones are a fantastic convenience when you’re taking a headset on and off dozens of times a day, but we developed MusicVR in Unity, which made it nice and easy to deploy to various headsets. 

For us, keeping a lot of design instincts in check was a recurring effort, both on account of the extreme novelty of VR, and the fact that we were a bunch of game devs working on a visualizer, as opposed to a traditional game. The first MusicVR experience we made was The Beach, which was initially for Gear VR. Given the focus on letting people enjoy music, the earliest rule we put in place for that particular world was “no controller,” which quickly led us to the “gaze activated” interactions you see there. It’s tricky to determine player intent when you don’t have a button press, so we soon realized the importance of finding the right balance between “they’ve looked here long enough to trigger an interesting transformation” and “they’re just glancing over here, and it would be confusing/disorienting for us to transform the entire space.” 

We were thankfully able to draw on our experience developing motion-based titles like Dance Central and Fantasia: Music Evolved for tuning interactions like that one, and there are actually more than a few similarities between designing for VR and designing for Kinect. Namely: you are probably trying to do more than you should. For Kinect, the constant reminder was “you are already asking players to move their bodies, which is a lot, so keep it simple.” For VR, it’s “players are already borderline overwhelmed by just being in this space, so keep it simple.” -- Carter, Harmonix, Music VR

Any more general lessons of VR design you picked up while working on your launch game or port?

One thing we learned along the way was how careful you had to be with movement in relation to the camera. (This isn’t specific to PSVR, by the way.) Not just directly moving the camera in relation to the player, but also watching out for weird perceptual illusions we were causing if the player was looking a certain way, or even visual effects and filters that messed with player’s spatial cues. You’d add something innocent, and all of a sudden everyone would be super nauseous, and you’d have to take it out straight away. You don’t realize how much modern game design relies on cinematic conventions until half those conventions are rendered unusable. -- Cindy Poremba, Kokoromi, Superhypercube

When we started looking at the game in VR, we noticed a lot of little things that were off both in VR and in our game's 2D mode too. We fixed lots of small things, like depth violations, effects that looked too "cheap" in VR, etc. VR forced us to raise the visual quality bar and we improved the look of the game in both modes.-- Marc Flurry, Drool, Thumper