Blogs - TeamPhoenixGame

Hey guys, Mani here, one of the VR developers!

Today I give you an insight into the VR tutorial level. I'll explain different thoughts, the structure of the tutorial map and some exclusive built-in features for the tutorial. This tutorial level is not a singleplayer level, it's for both PC and VR because we wanted to give them the same feeling as late in-game.

The first thing we discussed was the structure of the map. The VR player shouldn't be overwhelmed by the complexity of the map because it's the first time for him/her to get in contact with it. So it should be easy to read. But it shouldn't be too easy for the PC players so they can complete the tutorial without any help of the VR player.

In the image above you can see our current map. Both PC players start in the bottom corners. It's easy to understand for the VR player that he/she has to guide them to the bigger room on the top of the map. It's also a very clean map design with minimal complexity and only one way to go for the PC players.
The long way upwards has two reason: (1) the PC players have a jetpack which needs oxygen. The oxygen is not sufficient so it's not possible for them to just fly to the top, this prevents them from getting to the goal themselves. (2) The VR player is forced to rotate the map to finish the tutorial successfully (get both players together). A nice way to teach him/her the moving possibilities with the map.

In this section I will explain you the "tutorial steps" for the VR player. Unfortunately we're not finished yet, so for now the PC players have no "tutorial steps", but this will be discussed in section 4 (further steps) :)

The tutorial should guide the VR player through the possible movements and their impact on the PC players. So I visualized the core movements for the map (horizontal rotation, vertical rotation and scaling). As you can see in the first video below, it's the same hand mesh the VR player has, so it's easy to understand what to do.

The hand mesh has three animation steps (the same, the VR player has), (1) grab, (2) move, (3) release. In the video you can also see the three progress steps of the tutorial he/she has to complete. When all steps are finished, the hand disappears.

The most important thing in tutorials is that you cannot lose! The tutorial level should give all players the opportunity to test everything without consequences. So we disabled all losing conditions, no timer and the PC players cannot die when they have no oxygen. At first we thought about disabling the oxygen reduction is the right way to go, but if there is no oxygen reduction, the PC players can use their jetpack without any limitation. The problem would be, that the players can complete the tutorial without any communication with the VR player, and that's not what we want. So we chose the second option, oxygen reduction but the players don't die without any oxygen.

This decision brings a problem: We want to give the players the opportunity to test everything, everytime, but when the PC players have no oxygen, they cannot fly. So we added oxygen dispensers at the player start points, so they can fly everytime they want, but cannot complete the tutorial (full oxygent is not sufficient to get the full way upwards).

The next feature we added for the tutorial is a live feed from both players on the bridge for the VR player (watch the video below). This should give the VR player an insight into what the view of the PC players is. This helps the VR player to communicate and to imagine their views in the real levels. The live feed isn't available outside of the tutorial, this should increase the communication in the team.

In this post I described our current status of the tutorial level, what decisions we made and why. The tutorial isn't finished yet, of course what we try to reach is to teach the mechanics and goal of the game without any personal help.

What we still need to do is:

• Add tutorial steps for the PC players
• Explain controls for both, PC and VR players (Keyboard, HTC Vive Controller)
• Improve understanding of the live feed (we want to try to give the live feed displays the same border color the player has
• Of course let people test the tutorial and get feedback :)

I hope you enjoyed this blog post!
If you have questions (e.g. implementation) or wanna discuss toughts, just comment below ;) Also if you like this post and like our game, stay tuned for future posts :)

Have a nice day!

We are a group of seven master students of different disciplines from the Salzburg University of Applied Sciences in Austria. Most of us have studied and worked together on a number of smaller game projects for roughly five years now.

Phoenix is a cooperative VR experience for three to five players. One player takes the position of the commander of the space station Phoenix, which receives a distress call from a spaceship, that is about to crash into a nearby sun. The remaining players are the only survivors left on the spaceship, they have limited oxygen and the ship hull is about to break apart.

The commander is able to teleport the survivors on the Phoenix, but they need to be close together, because recharging the laser would take too long. The only problem is that the crew members don't know where the others are. Thankfully the commander has access to the ships internal computer system and knows both the blueprints of the ship and the crews location on it. It is his job to guide the survivors to find each other before they suffocate or ship breaks apart. To further aid the players he can change the artificial gravity to help them to get to hard to reach places.

While the ship players need to conserve oxygen, they can invest some of it to use their space suits as makeshift jet-packs to navigate through the ship.

In its core Phoenix is a game about communication. The commander needs to stay cool and keep control of the situation, while the ship players need to think fast even if the commander is currently not able to help them.

We are currently developing Phoenix as part of our master graduation and can't wait to see where our journey to space will lead us. Our next plans are to compete in the Subotron Student Project Live Pitch and work own a first proper trailer that will greatly expand on the teaser you see above.

If you are interested in all things VR and games we would greatly appreciate to follow and hope you join us on our journey.