When Ben Throop went to the Boston VR hackathon in June 2014, he didn’t know that Valve was going to be showing off some prototype VR hardware that had positional tracking. At this point the Oculus DK2 had not shipped yet, and so he was able to build a VR game using his soccer experience to head soccer balls into a goal. He wanted to see how it felt, and was surprised that it was actually a lot of fun. He decided to continue working on it, and last year the game, Headmaster, was first announced at E3 as a PlayStation VR launch title. Frame Interactive was back again this year at E3 showing off the game at PlayStation VR’s booth.
LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
I had a chance to catch up with Ben at Sony’s GDC press event where I talked to him about the game design principles behind Headmaster, why even non-gamers love to play it, and why the physics of things flying at your face are some compelling in VR.