Developer Perspective: Double Fine

I'm Chad Dawson, a senior Programmer at Double Fine Productions, and Project Lead on Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin. Double Fine is an independent game studio based in San Francisco, founded by industry legend Tim Schafer. We'll celebrate our studio's 18th birthday this summer!

Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin⁠ is a brand new adventure that takes players back into the world of the Psychonauts for the first time since the original game. You once again play as Raz -- an intrepid young psychic and now fully fledged member of the Psychonauts team. The game is standalone, but the story picks up where the original story left off and will take us right up to the start of the currently-in-development Psychonauts 2⁠.

In the Rhombus of Ruin, your character uses the powers of telekinesis, clairvoyance, and pyrokinesis to explore, move things about and set stuff on fire - all with the power of your mind!

The original Psychonauts featured acrobatic 3D platforming levels and camera movement that we knew would not comfortably translate to VR. When we initially brainstormed VR ideas we did find ourselves referring to concepts from the game such as Clairvoyance and Telekinesis as interesting ways to let the player move around or manipulate the world.

At the same time, Tim (Schafer) was thinking about Psychonauts 2, and where exactly the story would pick up again. The first game ends on a cliffhanger that needed to be resolved before the events planned for the start of Psychonauts 2 could take place. Rather than tell that resolution through exposition we realised there was a perfect opportunity to use the final mission as a basis for a standalone VR experience.

First person perspective in VR is a more immersive way to experience and relate to characters than we expected. In the original Psychonauts, you also play as Raz but the perspective is from an overhead 3rd person camera. In The Rhombus of Ruin when you first wake up on the Jet and Milla is leaning down to talk to you, you immediately feel like a small kid talking to a taller adult. When you glance across the aisle to see Lili looking over your shoulder and you turn your head to see what she is looking at and then back to see her look down and not meet your gaze it evokes both interest and concern in ways you might not get from a traditional game experience on a 2D monitor!

It was important for us to capture the look and feel of the original game, and so we brought on members of the original team, such as Peter Chan and Scott Campbell, to provide environmental and character concept art. We strived to match the shapes and color palettes of the first game.

In addition to the visuals, we focused on the audio. The original composer, Peter McConnell, wrote and performed new music capturing the unique Psychonauts musical style and sound. We were also fortunate to have all our original voice actors lend their talents once again to their unique and iconic characters.

The environments and character minds you explore in the world of Psychonauts are trippy enough that we wanted to ensure a comfortable locomotion mechanic that would be accessible to a wide range of audiences. We also wanted movement to feel more like the mental exploration of a psychic, rather than the fast pace running of an action hero.

In the original Psychonauts, the power of clairvoyance allowed Raz to see the world through the eyes of others, and get a fresh perspective on the world. In “The Rhombus of Ruin” this provided the perfect way of letting us teleport players around the world by using Raz’s psychic powers to travel between the minds of other characters to see the world from a different angle. This offered a number of interesting puzzle opportunities as well, including moving characters between vantage positions, sense of scale perspectives, and even states of mind.

Psychic powers also drove the design of our other mechanics - such as using Telekinesis for object manipulation. We use head tracking for targeting and for movement of objects (and sometimes other characters!) that you can then ‘grab’. In contrast to a hand tracked remote object manipulation which can often feel like the player is wizard using a magic wand or a Jedi using the Force, the head-tracked method feels more like you are a psychonaut controlling the world with your mind.

The original Psychonauts was released in 2005, so part of the challenge was updating the visual style from that era to modern expectations. Characters, in particular, received careful attention. The camera perspective in “The Rhombus of Ruin” brings the player close-up with the other characters so we needed to ensure that they looked good with detailed materials and lighting. The environments of Psychonauts are known for their wonky style where nothing is quite a straight line or perfectly symmetric. In VR this can be disorienting as the player subconsciously tries to judge relative object size or even the orientation of up and down. When building these shapes in VR our artists had to find the right balance of Psychonauts stylization that would still feel grounded.

The world of Psychonauts can transform from different character’s perspectives. To have high-quality environments that allow those sorts of transitions, we needed both static and dynamic lighting. In addition to the baked lightmaps, we wrote a custom lighting solution that mixed deferred lighting with fast voxel-based lights that could be used in abundance.

Luckily, some design choices ended up helping with performance. For example, the locomotion method of teleporting between fixed locations gave us some nice opportunities to optimize. We invoked the garbage collector only when teleporting, to prevent hitches during normal gameplay. We also toggle shadows and other effects individually for each teleport location.

Early in our development of “The Rhombus of Ruin” we utilized the Oculus DK2 headset hardware prototypes for rapid iteration on the PC. The pro-active integration and updates of the Oculus SDK into the Unreal engine accelerated our process and let us focus on the gameplay. Additionally, we benefited greatly from the research and sharing of VR best practices from the Oculus team - so, thanks!