After more than a decade of working on home and portable consoles, Ready At Dawn last year released Lone Echo and its multiplayer spinoff Echo Arena on the Oculus Rift & Touch. We talked with Ready At Dawn Founder & Chief Creative Officer Ru Weerasuriya to understand how the games came to be, the challenges faced during production, and the future of VR. Editor's Note: In celebration of Lone Echo's win as the Rift Game of the Year in Road to VR's 2017 Game of the Year Awards, Oculus provided five keys each valid for a full copy of Lone Echo on the Oculus Store. We decided to give them away in this article that we published back at the game's 2017 launch by hiding the five keys within the images in this article. All five have been claimed, but if you like scavenger hunts they're still there to find! The article was original published on July 24th, 2017. “Literally, from that one conversation, everything happened,” an animated Ru Weerasuriya told us, talking on the eve of Lone Echo’s launch. He’s referring to a conversation he had with Jason Rubin—Head of Content at Oculus—way back in late 2014. “We were in the last six months of working on The Order (2015) and we had ideas in the team about what we wanted to do next. I happened to meet Jason at a convention and we just took a little time to the side and started talking. He was telling me about why he had joined Oculus and what they wanted to do there, and I shared some ideas about what Ready at Dawn wanted to do.” The team had their interest in VR piqued around 2012, at an internal conference for Sony developers. [caption id="attachment_10574" align="alignright" width="490"] An early prototype of PlayStation VR, codenamed Project Morpheus | Image courtesy Sony[/caption] “Shu was there with the tech team,” Weerasuriya said, referring to Shuhei Yoshida, President of Sony’s Worldwide Studios, “they were showing the very first iterations of 'Morpheus' which of course became PSVR. We had a chance to play, a chance to experience what VR would feel like in this generation.” Clearly that early experience had a big impact on the team. “Every time before that where VR had started and stopped I don’t think any of us felt, as development and content creators, that we were totally sold on VR. This time around, though, there was something different about Presence. Not just the resolution, but we truly felt that we’d be able to make people feel like they’re in another world.” [irp posts="60582" name="'Robo Recall' Behind-the-scenes – Insights and Artwork from Epic Games"] With development on The Order wrapping up, with Ready at Dawn talking about future projects, and with a familiar face from the game development scene in Jason Rubin arriving at Oculus, there was what Weerasuriya calls a perfect storm. “But we didn’t want to just start making a VR game, we wanted to figure out what about VR we needed to do differently. And that’s how it started: we created a movement model, trying to figure out how to break certain boundaries in VR. We did a very, very small demo. It was just this little room with the movement model with a controller and two balls that were basically your hands. As you pressed the bumper buttons you would basically reach out to the world and move around. From there Oculus decided to sign it on.” Prototypes & Development [caption id="attachment_66261" align="aligncenter" width="1920"] Space suit concepts | Image courtesy Ready At Dawn[/caption] And so work began in earnest in May 2015 on the project that was to become Lone Echo. At the time, however, it had a different name. “It was called Ascendant,” Weerasuriya said, “since we were creating zero-G movement and a zero-G experience how better to do it than to do it in space, in this plausible vision of a future for humanity.” Turning introspective for a moment, he continued. “What we didn’t understand at the start of the project was what VR was gonna be about. So we started off with the idea of this story-driven single player game, same kinda thing that we’ve done in the past. But we had to relearn the basics of building a game to build it in VR.” This learning extended to team sizes. “At the very beginning it was a handful of guys, four or five guys. Then after the demos the team went from 5 to 15 people very early on.” This is a number that crops up a lot when talking to VR teams working on AA content. It didn’t stop there, though. “We ended up, at the height of the project, at about 60 people on Lone Echo,” he told us. “It’s a pretty big team. A very big team, for VR definitely.” From one conversation and the demo it spawned, Lone Echo and its evocative setting began to take shape. Before fully committing to a direction however, another demo was required to explore the idea further. “The second demo was a space station and a big ball that was Saturn.” And the visual fidelity? “It was all grey-box, very basic.” https://youtu.be/wMBENJSK3Ug Weerasuriya shared stories about people just hanging out in this demo, as simple as it was, and how the team knew they were on the right track. Remembering back to those days, and indeed our own formative experiences with early VR content, we know exactly why this would have been captivating for people. Indeed, in the final game it’s possible to lose a lot of time just soaking up the atmosphere. On the subject of time we shared that Road to VR’s Scott Hayden, in reviewing the game, spent around six hours inside. Was that about par for a play through? “That’s actually on the shorter side,” he suggests. Of course a lot comes down to the individual; some people race between objectives on a sprint to the finish, while others stop to smell the virtual roses. The Tech Behind the Magic [caption id="attachment_74515" align="aligncenter" width="1920"] A finished corridor aboard the Khronos II space station | Image courtesy Ready At Dawn[/caption] With the team in place it was time to move beyond the grey boxes into a world of 90Hz refreshes and forward renderers. Was there a temptation to jump into engines such as Unity or Unreal to jumpstart development? As it turns out, no. “Everything is proprietary. It’s still the RAD engine. It’s the engine that shipped The Order, it’s the engine that shipped Deformers.” Perhaps that answer isn’t surprising. Ready At Dawn are famed in the industry for being able to extract every ounce of power out of a host system, notably with their work on the God of War franchise on PSP and PS3, and more recently The Order: 1886 on PS4. It’s one thing to build for a more traditional console title, however, and something else entirely to build for VR. When quizzed about the pitfalls and challenges in moving the RAD engine into VR, Weerasuriya seems entirely unfazed: “Those are the barriers that we love having, put it that way.” A little bit of revolution to mix in with the usual technological evolution then. https://youtu.be/KCzCdbdOmVc Were they not perturbed at the challenges of making their engine work with the intricacies of VR rendering? “The reality is that everything is hard. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter whether you work on mobile, or VR, or PS4. Whatever it is, everything is hard,” Weerasuriya said. It’s a very pragmatic view to take, and suggests a fearlessness in the face of the technical hurdles. “It’s a brand new beast. You have no idea what it’s going to be like.” “The engine actually adapted quite well where the rendering was concerned. Yes: hitting 90 FPS is a must and therefore we needed to find inventive ways to actually get there, but I trust [our tech team].” The larger challenges, it turns out, were to come in an area that works hand-in-hand with the pure rendering capabilities of an engine: believable human characters driven by AI. Continued on Page 2: Believable Characters » Believable Characters [caption id="attachment_66275" align="aligncenter" width="980"] Olivia concept | Image courtesy Ready At Dawn[/caption] Lone Echo places the player in close proximity to Olivia, the sole human on board the space station and someone the player works closely with throughout the game. When the game begins it is evident that they have a long standing working relationship and a casual familiarity. The game gambles somewhat on the believability of Olivia by not shying away from close interactions. Moving around the cramped confines of the spaceship there is a feeling of a shared space, of two people working in tandem, though ironically the player inhabits a robotic body and takes the role of an artificial intelligence. [caption id="attachment_74518" align="alignright" width="640"] Image courtesy Ready At Dawn[/caption] We asked Weerasuriya whether this reliance on Olivia feeling like a real person evolved through development, or was there from the start. He smiled at the question, and confirms “That was very early on, for the simple reason that we start games with certain pillars that we want to tackle. That was one of those pillars: can you make an artificial presence feel real, and can you make a player care about it?” Of course games have been chasing that ideal for a long time, many with some considerable success, Weerasuriya agreed. “We’ve done that in games. There are brilliant writers all around games, I think of Neil,” he said, referring to Neil Druckmann of developer Naughty Dog, “and the work he’s done on The Last of Us… and yes, we’ve started to care. We have those emotions running through our heads and hearts when we play those games.” So what’s different about chasing the same goal in VR? It’s complicated, but after a moment’s thought Weerasuriya offers: “The question is, when we cross the boundary to immersion, can we build a character that now people are going to be able to scrutinise? It’s way more than just a camera looking at that character, seen through a TV. Now you’re gonna be able to just walk around that head and scrutinise. Can we make them feel something for that character?” [caption id="attachment_66255" align="alignright" width="640"] Image courtesy Ready At Dawn[/caption] It’s an interesting problem as the Uncanny Valley is magnified tenfold when inside VR. “That was very early on a challenge that we gave the animation team and the narrative team. So every one of our teams got their own challenges in VR. That, I think, is still in the infancy of what we can do in VR. What you see in Lone Echo is our first step, a baby step, into what we’re going to do.” Ready At Dawn’s most recent PS4 title, The Order: 1886, was notable for some excellent character work in terms of the rendering and animation, but also the performances. It turns out that it wasn’t only the engine that came across from that game. “We did carry something very clearly from The Order to Lone Echo,” he revealed, “and that’s Olivia herself. Olivia is actually the main character who played Isabelle in The Order: Alice Coulthard. When I started writing the project, even before the synopsis was done I called Alice and I said ‘We’re working on this project, I need you as the lead. Do you have the time, and would you like to be in the game as yourself?’ So we ended up scanning her, so the character that you see in the game is actually Alice, the real actress.” [caption id="attachment_66271" align="aligncenter" width="980"] Actress Alice Coulthard is the face and voice of 'Lone Echo's' Olivia. This render shows remarkable attention to detail paid to Olivia's in-game representation. | Image courtesy Ready At Dawn[/caption] This makes a lot of sense. If your mission is to create a believable AI-driven character in a game, you might start with an actual human being as a minimum. “I wrote the character around her,” Weerasuriya said, “because I had known her for a few years, so it was very easy to say that I knew her mannerism and how she would deliver a lighthearted line, or how she would be a little more emotional in certain areas. So it was really cool to work with her.” If Lone Echo's human-driven representation of a game character is just the beginning, what’s the end game? “All of us in the team have aspirations as to what a true AI character in VR could be like. I’m going to go in, and I’m going to talk… and I might be talking to a person like we’re talking now, and it might not be an actual person.” So that’s the end game: a face-to-face conversation with an AI that is some distance beyond passing the Turing Test. “A scary end game,” he adds. Continued on Page 3: Discovering Locomotion » Discovering Locomotion [caption id="attachment_66277" align="aligncenter" width="1021"] Khronos II concept art | Image courtesy Ready At Dawn[/caption] The thorny subject of locomotion in VR experiences crops up with every major release. On the Road to VR team there are people who have cast-iron VR legs and people who can’t handle more intense sessions. Both groups seem to have weathered Lone Echo without much discomfort or complaint, which is interesting for a movement scheme which, not more than a year ago in VR's rapidly developing timeline, would have inspired thoughts of instant nausea. Whilst the game defaults to a more comfortable setting, there are options to allow full freedom of movement and rotation for people that want a no compromise experience. Was the Lone Echo movement system and its defaults a reaction to community feedback, we wondered, or perhaps a reflection of lessons learned from other experiences such as Adr1ft (2016)? Weerasuriya doesn’t hesitate to answer. “We went our own way from day one. That locomotion system was what started the project in 2015, so we hadn’t seen anything in VR yet and we didn’t know what would work and what wouldn’t.” From my conversation with Weerasuriya, it seems that Ready At Dawn are taking the long view. “I remember people being nauseous just playing a 3D game for the first time on a TV. But now, 20 years later, we don’t even think twice. So for us, we saw Adr1ft come out, but we didn’t try that locomotion. I don’t want to say that we knew better than them, but just theoretically we already knew that was gonna be a problem. We’d thought about the different kinds of movement model. What we found out was that there was potentially a future for that, but we need years of people being comfortable in VR to get there. So as a first step, we decided that we would [do it differently].” [caption id="attachment_74519" align="aligncenter" width="1746"] Space suit concepts | Image courtesy Ready At Dawn[/caption] This isn’t to say that they avoided complete freedom of movement, in fact, Lone Echo has the player covering lots of ground space, with the ability to move very fast. “We did it in a way where we’ve added more extreme options, but they still feel comfortable to people. Surprisingly so. Even the last few days showing at the event in San Francisco, we had some people saying ‘I’m not very comfortable in VR’ and these same people jumped into their first game of [Lone Echo's multiplayer spinoff] and were immediately moving around at speeds they couldn’t imagine. If I had told them how fast they were going they’d be like ‘are you kidding me?!’ but they were comfortable. Even after the headset came off, there was no moment of feeling nauseous.” A conclusion echoed by us here at Road to VR. “I think the movement model helps the brain lie to itself. Because of the fact that we emulate the distance from the hand to the eye, we do things that people expect and that the brain expects to work correctly. I put my hand out, I pull, and my body moves in that direction.” A feat matched by Crytek’s The Climb with equal success albeit in more relatable surroundings. “Although in reality I don’t [move], my brain tells me that’s exactly what should happen. The velocity of pushing off of something feels right. As soon as the brain can lie to itself almost, I feel right. Your brain’s lying to your inner ear, that’s how we look at it.” That the game largely succeeds in making 3D spaces in zero-G navigable—and more than that, fun to navigate—is no easy feat; locomotion that's comfortable, immersive, and still offers such freedom is a big step forward for VR. The Future of VR and Echo Arena [caption id="attachment_66276" align="aligncenter" width="980"] Echo Arena concept art | Image courtesy Ready At Dawn[/caption] With Lone Echo and Echo Arena (the game's multiplayer spinoff) completed and launched, thoughts inevitably turn to the future and what directions technology might take. Weerasuriya warms instantly to the subject. “It would be awesome to get more sensory feeling in your fingers. Fingers have an unbelievable way of detecting anything. The cold, the hot, a breeze blowing by. Things with a different kind of texture, whether it’s a hard surface or soft. Imagine that if you’re in our game and walking around and you touch metal and it’s a little colder than if you put your hand on Liv’s shoulder. Wow! That actually feels like a human being. Those things are things that we take for granted in the real world. How amazing would it be if you got that much sensory input coming from [a VR controller like Touch], and your brain is completely fooled into thinking these things are real. That would be awesome. I wanna get there.” A nice, easy target to set for the guys and gals building the next generation VR platforms then! For Weerasuriya, however, the future is only indirectly to be decided by developers. It’s the players first and foremost who will steer the industry’s direction. “They are the people who will define what VR is going to be. For us that came when people started playing Toybox. People playing in a social environment, passing each other toys and all that. And that came not even one year through the project.” Anyone that has played in a social VR space couldn’t help but agree. From Toybox to Rec Room to Pool Nation to Racket: Nx, there are examples of feeling an uncanny closeness to a person often represented in extremely abstract visual forms. With impressive levels of virtual embodiment and some great looking IK, Echo Arena manages the same. “That’s what started Echo Arena,” Weerasuriya said. “It came out of a full five day game jam that we had at work that basically ended up spawning a different path to the game, and building Echo Arena and Lone Echo at the same time with a split team.” Now that both paths have been travelled, and the games are out in the wild, how does it feel? “The true measure of VR for me personally has been since we started the beta. I sat in the lobbies of the beta, just watching people and their interactions. The amazing thing that actually happened is that you realise that VR is about community. It’s unbelievable to see a community of people that are now emoting as avatars… avatars, but closer to who they really are," said Weerasuriya. "We saw people helping each other in the community. Right now we’re building experiences, but the best thing is what the community is going to communicate back to developers what they think should happen with VR. And that’s the cool thing about just being in the second year of VR, I’m looking forward to a few years time with more games out, more experiences out. New things that we haven’t even thought of right now.” Continued on Page 4: Playing a Cybernetic AI » Playing a Cybernetic AI [caption id="attachment_74521" align="aligncenter" width="980"] Echo unit droid concept | Image courtesy Ready At Dawn[/caption] In the here and now, however, we have Lone Echo. It’s a great example of the VR form, and another stab at the ‘killer app’ some have been clamouring for in the VR space. It’s unique. You play a sentient cybernetic AI in the midst of the rings of Saturn. Weerasuriya delights in people’s reaction. “As soon as you say that people say: ‘What? You play an AI? You don’t play a human being?’ And everybody’s first reaction is that it doesn’t make sense, that [the player] should be the human. That’s a trip for other people who jump in for the first time and realise they’re not the human in the game.” We suggested that Lone Echo, in a literal sense, is a role playing game. After a moment of contemplation, Weerasuriya agrees. “What better way to actually feel in the skin of somebody else—and especially something that you could never be—so yeah, yeah, you could call it an RPG.” [caption id="attachment_74516" align="aligncenter" width="1920"] Image courtesy Ready At Dawn[/caption] - - — - - Check out our review of Lone Echo to see if being an Echo unit might just be a role you’d like to play yourself. And don't forget that you can claim Echo Arena for free for a limited time. More from this series: Stormland – Insomniac Games Asgard's Wrath – Sanzaru Games Blood & Truth – Sony’s London Studio ASTRO BOT – Sony’s JAPAN Studio Lone Echo – Ready At Dawn ARKTIKA.1 – 4A Games Robo Recall – Epic Games