Well, it’s 100% different than initially conceived, and it took at least three times as long as budgeted for, but the first VR game I designed is now in Early Access on Steam.

Recreational Dreaming is a surreal “sleepwalking simulator”—one part exploration game, one part shooting gallery, one part scavenger hunt—for the HTC Vive. It’s a peaceful and kind game full of otherworldly events and sub-rational moods, and while it certainly won’t be everybody’s cup of tea, I’m proud and pleased that some people have fallen in love with VR through it.

Now, if you had told me a year and a half ago how much time and effort it would take to design and produce this VR game that has little chance of recouping the money we spent on hardware and software, much less replenish my desiccated savings account, would I still have made it? Yup. No question. Do I wish I knew then all the things I learned on the way? Oh hell yes.

So in that spirit, I wanted to write a post-mortem detailing not the development process (winding, recursive, both painful and joyous), but focusing instead on some of the lessons I learned about designing for VR. My hope is to give any designer starting out in this young and exciting medium a leg up, and to encourage anyone thinking about dipping their toes in to do so. I believe that the DNA of VR design is being written right now, and I’m incredibly excited to see what forms it will grow into.

I know that some of what I focus on in here will already be known or will be easily intuited by veteran designers, but the practices I’m writing about have particular importance to VR design. I’ve also included a lot of particulars that were significant to my process or deal with UX and technical issues specific to VR.

I want to thank the many people who helped me learn these things, most importantly Ryan Donaldson, my chief collaborator through most of development, and Becky Win, who offered dozens of priceless critiques over those many months.

So without further ado, the three biggest lessons from designing and developing a weird little VR game:

1. Playtest Early, Often, Variously, and with a Really Open Mind

We got lucky here in a couple ways. First, our social circles include people of a lot of different backgrounds, from many different cultures, with many different ideas of what makes a fine time. Second, we were able to link up with community organizers like Joshua Young (of the PDX VR meetup Design Reality), Tim Reha (of the Khronos Group meetup in Seattle), and Steven Parton (of PDX Creative Networking) who let us set up and demo Recreational Dreaming at their events (thanks guys!). We also invited everyone we knew and met to our workspace to “check out VR.” Well over 100 people went through our game through the course of development, and every single person had something to teach us.

Sometimes you even get to nerd at people.

Who can you depend on for what perspective?

I want to stress the importance here of a true diversity of playtesters. VR is MUCH more idiosyncratic an experience than screen games, and if you’re playtesting mostly among people that share certain characteristics (devs, dudes, a certain age range, members of a subculture or interest group, etc.), you are blinding yourself to the real strengths and challenges of the medium, and missing out on valuable perspective. Not everyone can look at a RPG combat system and offer meaningful critique about the DPS values, but everyone can look around them and say, “I don’t like it here because of [reasons].”

“...so what exactly don’t you like?”

Through this process we were able to understand not just many aesthetic perspectives, but also physical perspectives as well. If people wanted out of the experience, usually that meant we had to tighten our belts a little to boost the framerate back up, or tweak a visual effect, or replace a sound. If someone was a different height than us, well, maybe we had to lower the edge of the wall there so they could see over it, or increase the height of the ceiling so they don’t clip through it.

One of the most impactful playtests never even started. My friend who has only one hand was so excited to try my game, especially after I had introduced her to Tilt Brush and portions of The Lab. I had finished strapping the headset on her when I realized that because she could use only one controller at a time she would be unable to fire the slingshot, which meant she couldn’t get out of the first room. This lead to some soul-searching about what our game was really about, and caused me to think critically of this very central game mechanic.

It was through exploring this question of accessibility that I had failed (and would have continued failing) to design for that I found an answer that also addressed a problem we were having balancing the challenge of shooting. Depth perception over large distances isn’t great in VR, and we found if we offered the player no help they got frustrated trying to hit something too far away, but if we gave them an accurate aimline they found too easy. Consolidating all the game-necessary controls onto one controller allowed us to address both problems at once, increasing accessibility and giving us the impetus to design a new shooting mechanic.

The slingshot became an old metal flashlight with a gem for a bulb, which is not only way cooler than any of the slingshots we had thought up, but also

The other controller is now a camcorder. Its functions are just sugar.

Which brings us to:

2. Try Four Versions of Everything

Don’t forget: VR as a medium is still in its infancy. Maybe it’s a toddler. But a lot of what is known to “work” in VR has not yet percolated into any book, and a lot of what can “work” has yet to be discovered, much less refined. In fact, I’d argue that it’s unlikely that anyone is a true master of VR design yet, at least by Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hours” criteria. Lots of what works on a flat screen does not work in the metaverse. So give yourself the freedom to revise (and re-test, and learn from) everything.

There’s still 1,000 things that “had we but world enough, and time” to change or add or redesign about Recreational Dreaming we would, but through a brutal revision process we ended up with a game way more interesting than the one we were going to make.

Pine trees uprooting themselves to flock towards the Aurora Borealis was
not a first-draft idea.

A selection of what we revised: