Song In The Smoke
PSVR, Quest, Rift
Since picking up Oculus dev kits on day one, Jake Kazdal has been “blown away” by VR. So much so that when it was time to plan a new game after launching 2D shooter Galak-Z, 17-Bit was eager to pivot towards a medium that felt truly next-generation. “It’s been a long haul – we’ve really watched the beginning of all these different games coming out,” Kazdal says. “I really learned a lot about the differences between a videogame that’s got a lot of standards and templates and something that’s very unknown and different.”
His team had to adapt to COVID-19 conditions, making it difficult for this prehistoric-themed survival adventure to get wider feedback – 17-Bit would ordinarily have been demoing it to people at conventions. Nonetheless, Kazdal gamely does his best as he puts on a headset to walk us through the latest build. As a title co-funded by Sony and Oculus, the studio has had to accommodate the quirks of each VR platform, so there’s a wealth of locomotion options: roomscale, if you have an Oculus Quest (and unlimited space); stick movement; and a context-driven teleporting system that appears remarkably similar to the traversal in Half-Life: Alyx. “We actually had that in place before Alyx came out,” Kazdal says. “Alyx really justified a lot of our decisions, so we were all very excited. I have friends at Valve, so I was in there a couple of times to see some of the early dev stuff. They already established a good working knowledge on a lot of this.”
If the environments he’s taking us through look a bit primitive, it feels intentional – to keep the interactable objects simple. As in other survival games, you’ll need to gather resources, craft items and monitor conditions such as temperature and hunger – albeit without the generic interface and menu clutter. Spreading a cloak out on the ground to sort through items certainly feels like a natural form of inventory management, although there is something comical about checking status conditions on what look like prehistoric smartwatches. Nonetheless, having physical actions helps make everything feel organic – such as when we watch Kazdal motioning to crush berries with a pestle and mortar to make a healing potion, then pouring the liquid into a gourd and lifting it to his mouth, which comes with the sound of your avatar gulping it down. “We wanted this to be non-gamey as much as we could,” he explains. “The VR experience changes the rules quite a bit.”
AI is another crucial element, handled by programmer Akintunde Omitowoju (a Retro Studios alumnus) so animals behave realistically in relation to the rest of the ecosystem. Combat features more traditional game-like elements, such as red targets that pop up indicating the nature of a beast’s next attack, while stamina and weapon durability means you can’t just flail an axe around. But as Kazdal fights a purplewinged raptor, just a few clubs to its head sends the beast retreating to lick its wounds. “They have some self-preservation instinct built into them,” he says. “If the fight’s going poorly, they’ll realise it’s better to back off and hunt something easier, so it’s not just this prescribed, gamey fight to the death.”
While we’re less able to discern how spatial audio is incorporated from a hands-off demo, the sounds of birdsong, cascading waterfalls or the mysterious melody emanating from hidden Singing Stones indicate how vital a role it plays in making the world feel more alive. Its significance in driving the story forward is still under wraps. “By the end of the game, I think it’s pretty clear what’s going on,” Kazdal says. “But without using any narrative language, it’s really more self-discovery as you observe events that happen through the course of the game. We wanted this organic, fun, simulated little jungle that you just go into on your own accord and make your own way through.”
“Half-Life Alyx really justified a lot of our decisions, so we were all very excited”