Recently we had another playtesting event, this time at the Loading Bar in Dalston, London. They run a semi-regular “VR In A Bar” night which we’ve been to a few times now and is always great fun – lots of people with all sorts of backgrounds and experience levels, and a really good vive overall.

The Setup

Our last couple of times at Loading Bar we’d been running first on a DK1 (retro at the time!) and then a Gear VR. This time we wanted to playtest some new things, so we had been making a special build of our game for the Cresent Bay development kit we’re using here.

We had some new levels for people to playtest (more on that in a bit) but we also wanted to see how the game would control with a gamepad rather than the touchpad on the side of a Gear VR. And we also have a prototype chaperone-style system to keep players within the tracking volume of the CB.

Playtesting is exhausting!

Playtesting is always awkward because you’re putting someone in an unfamiliar environment (in this case, a crowded and noisy bar) and expecting them to play the game like they would if they were at home. And on top of that you’re trying to watch their physical behaviour and their virtual behaviour at the same time and trying to guess if the game is responding to their expectations or if it’s not responding at all (or worse, responding in the wrong way).

Results were overall positive – people were able to pick up and play the game with minimal explanation, which is always a tricky thing to get for any game, although watching people’s fingers while they played suggests some good control scheme improvements that we could make.

Player expectations and movement

It’s also interesting to see the change in expectations when you give someone a gamepad. When people play the Gear VR version of Smash Hit Plunder, they’re usually very animated and rotating and moving quite a lot, which is great. With a pad in their hand, people (especially experienced gamers) become very static. It’s as if we regress to a past memory of sitting on a sofa with our head and neck very still so we don’t miss anything on the screen.

Some people really, really don’t want to use their head to look around in VR, not even a small 30 degree arc directly in front of them. This tends to result in them fighting with the left stick at they were constantly making micro corrections with it while twitching their head slightly in the opposite direction. This is a pretty unfun way of playing, it’s not actually sickening but it is disorientating and generally feels unsatisfying. It’s tempting to assume that this kind of behaviour will go away as people become more familiar with VR, but at the moment the control scheme actively encourages such behaviour, so we’re going to have another look at that aspect of it and try some alternate approaches.

Finally, we had some new levels we wanted to playtest. Unfortunately since we left them in their default position on the level select screen most people either didn’t see them or went for one of the earlier levels (that we’ve already playtested a lot). Obvious in hindsight but something we missed – next time we’ll make the level we want playtested the first option in the level select screen.

Still lots to do!

Overall we learned a heck of a lot (as we usually do at these events) and have come away with loads of new enhancements and changes we want to make. Playtesting for games has always been super important, but for VR games it seems even more so. We’re still investigating lots of platforms and hardware, so look out for us running more events in the future.