May the force be with you, Always.

Yes, I'm starting my first official blog post with a Star Wars reference, original I know!

Don't worry, this will all wrap up nicely in the end, by starting at the beginning. It's important to simply trust your instincts when designing a game, you wont always get it right the first time, but that's ok. Rarely, if ever, has a game been released without changing elements along the way and so as a designer it's your role to manage this appropriately.

After finishing the initial designs for These Lands I was left in a state of flux, I knew the puzzles would work and we had the ability to make them, but VR was an unknown entity to me at the time and this would ultimately contribute to whether the puzzle would be a success or not. VR physics are manipulated by the player and making the game feel natural is vital to immersion. It's no good having a player lightly throw an object for it to shoot miles away with pinpoint accuracy.

So the target in VR is to create realistic challenges found more commonly in a funfair than Fortnite, I'm talking smashing coconuts rather than throwing grenades 500 feet. Based on this assumption, the game really needed lots of testing just like any other game, the difference in VR is it can be exhausting and motion sickness is always a factor. Imagine bowling on a Wii console hours at a time. Creating These Lands was similar to this except we had a better sound track!

To bring this post back to the original point. I had a final vision for the game but I also had to understand when change was ok. After testing it was clear level design had to change, specifically on the levels where the fun factor had dropped. My tip, don't try to perfect the game too early and be open to change later down the line.

If you're starting a project yourself, have a look into Scrum methodology for project management, it's a simple way of re-evaluating an objective continuously throughout a project.

Trust the force and yourself!