‘Damaged Core’: Building VR Locomotion into Gameplay
Kent Bye
in Oculus Rift Compatible GamesOculus Rift GameVirtual Reality GamesVoices of VR PodcastVR GameVR Podcasts
Part of the challenge of creating a first-person perspective game in VR is that there are limited locomotion options for moving around in VR in a way that’s comfortable for most people. Damaged Core is a Oculus Rift launch title that uses a unique and very effective locomotion method where you move between different first-person robots as well as third-person security cameras. This ends up being a very comfortable way to provide a lot more agency in movement than most other survival wave VR shooters, and it also has a lot of elegance in that it’d actually be possible to do in a world of AI-driven robot assassins. You can’t hack into every robot enemy, and so you have to strategically move around a battlefield in the right order.
I caught up with High Voltage Software’s creative director Eric Nofsinger at the Oculus Game Day event during GDC to learn more about their R&D into VR locomotion, FPS game design strategies, and how they were able to make a scoping feature work despite it being against what Oculus recommends as a best practice.