As the studio behind the excellent PlayStation VR Worlds, Sony Interactive Entertainment's London Studio has been at the forefront of VR game design since before PSVR even shipped back in 2016. With their latest title, Blood & Truth, the studio sought to deliver its first full-length VR title, and the result is an impressive action-filled journey that delivers the most convincing virtual characters we've seen in a VR game to date. To learn from the studio's approach to VR game design—and to get a glimpse at the artwork that drove and resulted from the game's development—we spoke with Stuart Whyte, Director of VR Product Development, and Anthony Filice, Art Director, both from Sony's London Studio. Editor’s Note: The big, beautiful pictures and exclusive artwork in this article are best viewed on a desktop browser with a large screen, or in landscape orientation on your phone. All images courtesy SIE London Studio. Although, superficially, making VR games doesn't seem far removed from making traditional games, truly native VR games aren't so easily categorized among the non-VR game genres we think of today. You might be tempted to call Blood & Truth a 'shooter', but that really wouldn't do the experience justice. "I think there are genres and experiences that we have in our minds born out of decades of playing videogames in non-VR scenarios. When you move into VR, you’re effectively creating new genres," said Stuart Whyte, Director of VR Product Development at Sony's London studio. "I think we’re closest, in non-VR terms, to the 'Action Narrative' genre, but I also think that Blood & Truth, by the nature of the incredible immersiveness you get from PSVR, is much more an experiential game where you get to feel like an Action Hero." [caption id="attachment_89136" align="aligncenter" width="1418"] Image courtesy Sony London Studio[/caption] Delivering those action hero moments—like leaping from a collapsing building onto a crane, or paragliding into a restricted area—requires significant planning well before the first geometry of a level even gets modeled. The studio found that storyboarding ideas—creating thumbnail sketches of key moments—for major setpiece was "doubly important" for VR development; the team went so far as to use immersive storyboards which were drawn to be viewed in a VR headset. "The storyboard allows us to rapidly iterate and test new ideas and angles without burning through lots of time and money. We actually created 360-degree storyboards which helped us place the player in the space and in the headset, and we were able to test things like composition, lighting and colour all in VR," said Anthony Filice, Art Director at Sony's London Studio. "Storyboarding [in game development] isn’t anything new, but being able to storyboard in VR is where it’s at. We’re exploring more and more ways to be able to visualize & test our ideas in VR before we actually commit to building. It’s super important to see how things are perceived from the point of view of the player, this way we can see and feel for ourselves what type of senses and emotions are triggered by what we’re creating first hand." "Understanding where characters are standing in the scene (rather than in the shot [as would be the case with non-VR]) is super important when the player is the camera," Whyte said. "Typically, once we had finished the storyboarding stage, we would ‘block out’ using ‘grey box’ (simple basic geometry) the space, level, or scene within our engine so that we could get an early feel as to what the challenges would be and how best to approach." [irp posts="82911" name="'ASTRO BOT' Behind-the-scenes – Insights & Artwork from Sony's JAPAN Studio"] In VR, however, the little moments can be just as important as the big moments—interaction drives immersion, but it's challenging to make a completely interactive world. Blood & Truth uses a node-based locomotion system which lets players move between predetermined points. As well as streamlining player movement, this smartly limits the scope of the objects which the player can potentially interact with. Instead of making every single object in the world interactive, London Studio thus only had to consider interactions of objects within arm's reach of each node, allowing the studio to pay greater attention to a more tractable number of objects and interactions. "Setting the visual pillars early on was super important. Those pillars were realism, storytelling and VR immersion. It’s true that the headset will give you some of the VR immersion for free, however to take the immersion to the next level, we had to make some tough calls on where to spend our [development time] for maximum user experience," said Filice. [caption id="attachment_89132" align="aligncenter" width="1920"] As early as the storyboarding phase, London Studio was considering specific object interactions (and how they would drive gameplay moments). | Image courtesy Sony London Studio[/caption] "Anything that the player interacts with in a meaningful way—like weapons, ‘box of delights’, and (intractable) clues—all have to be modeled and animated to the highest level. For example, we know the player will scrutinize the guns close up, so we decided to fully articulate and model them down to the screws. In addition to this, we pay particular attention and placed details as easter eggs for the player to find. In one scene, we placed chewing gum under a desk because we know that the player will probably want to look under the desk. There are lots of desks in the game, so I challenge you to find it!" [caption id="attachment_89137" align="aligncenter" width="1920"] Weapons in Blood & Truth are finely detailed, right down to custom two-handed grip poses when the player brings both hands together to grip smaller weapons like pistols. Some weapons have easter eggs to discover too, like how the revolver can be 'fan-fired' by using a second hand held against the weapon's hammer. | Image courtesy Sony London Studio[/caption] Continue Reading on Page 2 » To deliver the level of immersion it was aiming for, the studio knew it wanted to push the boundaries of VR graphics from the outset. For all of the extra horsepower available to VR on PCs, Blood & Truth on PS4 Pro is easily among VR's best looking games and its virtual characters specifically—which are key to propelling the game's narrative—are truly unrivaled in VR at this scope. Whyte explained how important it was to set an early target for both pacing and visuals to ensure that story and gameplay were woven together throughout. Note: Whyte and Filice make regular reference to 'The London Heist'. This was one of the most popular mini-games in PlayStation VR Worlds, developed by London Studio, which launched with PSVR in 2016. 'The London Heist' is in many ways a predecessor to Blood & Truth. "We discovered early on that, whilst explosive gun fights in an environment are fun… they can also be super intense. We needed to break up the gameplay pacing and intensity to make a great experience," he said. "Story helps a lot in this regard. 'The London Heist' showed us the basics of how a good narrative can add to a gameplay experience—we really built on this with Blood & Truth and used the story as our backbone [...]." "We had a great [visual and gameplay] foundation with 'The London Heist' experience from PlayStation VR Worlds, but we wanted to push this further. We wanted to increase the fidelity of the world (which is possible as we have a bespoke in-house engine created from the ground up for VR) but also the fidelity of our characters; we moved towards photogrammetry (scanned) actors within our game and then we performance-captured them on a mocap stage." Whyte said. "When you see, say, Ryan Mark’s mum acting to you, that is the actress Natasha Little's movements (captured by mocap), face and body (captured by scan), and voice (captured on set as part of the mocap). This makes our performances, with our great cast, that much more impactful and really helps towards the narrative of the game." [caption id="attachment_89134" align="aligncenter" width="1358"] The characters in 'Blood & Truth' are not only visually quite stunning, their motion-captured movements are convincing even when scrutinized up close in VR. | Image courtesy Sony London Studio[/caption] Having an in-house engine gives London Studio the flexibility to build their tech to fit their vision. Whyte spoke to some of the technical upgrades made between 'The London Heist' and Blood & Truth. [caption id="attachment_89128" align="alignright" width="640"] Image courtesy Sony London Studio[/caption] "Our tech and engine team have made a number of changes. Some are invisible to the end user (quicker editing times to help with iteration) but others are more player-facing—such as improvements to how we handle tracking for reduced latency, changes and improvements to our fixed foveated rendering (for higher quality in the peripheral compared to PlayStation VR Worlds), better utilization of PS4 Pro (higher res, better shadows, added volumetric effects), improved quality of temporal anti-aliasing (sharper image) and a large number of new visual effects—for example how we approached lit particle effects and character shadows." From a gameplay standpoint, Whyte says that maintaining user-friendliness was an essential guidepost throughout the development process. "We spent a lot of time iterating around locomotion, gunplay, AI, and what we call 'hero moments'. We wanted to have a player experience which was fluid and fun above all else—we didn’t want people to struggle with our game systems… there was a danger that, with over complication, we’d lose the 'action hero' feel." [caption id="attachment_89135" align="aligncenter" width="1920"] Concept artwork—like this one showing the player paragliding—inspires both mood and gameplay, giving the 3D artists and game programmers a shared vision to build toward. Image courtesy Sony London Studio[/caption] As with any great VR title, experimentation is key. Finding out what doesn't work—and being willing to cut it from the game—is equally as important to finding out what does work. "As to experiments that didn’t make the final cut. I think there’s a couple of examples—we played around early on with the concept of dropping/throwing away weapons and it was cool… but it created a number of design problems that didn’t make our experience fun (accidentally throwing your gun away wasn’t great!)," said Whyte. "We also experimented with a number of different weapon types and AI archetypes—early on we experimented with Molotov cocktails and sniper rifles, but we went in different directions in these cases as the removal worked better for our story and tech." [caption id="attachment_89133" align="aligncenter" width="1809"] This concept artwork shows some of the moments that London Studio considered during development but which ultimately didn't make it into the game. | Image courtesy Sony London Studio[/caption] Indeed, experimentation in VR game design is especially important because of just how young the medium is. Whyte and the London Studio team were cognizant of not being held back by assumptions of what would or wouldn't work in VR. "I think the biggest lesson that we continue to come back to is 'Don’t treat established wisdom on what is or isn’t possible in VR as set in stone'. A great example was that there was a lot of early thinking that photogrammetry-based character art wouldn’t work in VR and we spent time working through this—and showing that it can!" he said. "It’s easy to have theories on what should and shouldn’t work in VR—we have assumptions on what things won’t work—but sometimes we find that when we code up a quick prototype to test these assumptions that it’s not as simple as it might seem on the surface." 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