Experiment 7 is a bi-coastal VR company focused on bringing the world of table-top gaming to virtual reality. Their latest title brings the best-selling boardgame experience of Settlers of Catan to virtual reality on Oculus Rift, Gear VR, and Oculus Go. Optimized for virtual reality, Catan VR allows tabletop fans and new players alike to watch the island come to life in VR for the first time, with beautiful in-game environments and cross-play functionality. Created in conjunction with Klaus and Benjamin Teuber, along with the Catan and Asmodee Digital teams the experience stays true to the classic boardgame experience.
We chatted with cofounders Demitri Detsaridis and Geoffrey Zatkin along with Artist Kelly Mermelstein to learn how the Experiment 7 team brought this cross-platform boardgame experience to life!
Environment is Key
An environment that can fully immerse users can make or break a VR experience. For the Experiment 7 team, the challenge was figuring out a way to create a boardgame experience within VR without making it “gimmicky.”
Their solution? Catan VR is not a replacement for the classic boardgame, but a simply a new option to play with friends around the world.
With this in mind, the team worked to create an environment that felt like an emulation of a traditional boardgame while also incorporating new UI and mechanics to enhance the player experience. When the team went about creating the first room environments for Catan VR, they focused on creating a realistic space by utilizing light, proportions, and volumetric sounds.
Ensuring smooth social co-presence was a driving force behind the environmental design decisions of Catan VR. For social games, the team knew they needed voice chat, multiplayer matchmaking across all available platforms, postional hand tracking, positional voice, and avatars to bring the experience to life. The team found that four player VOIP in combination with the customizable Avatar system immediately brought a new sense of immersion to the experience - these two capabilities became the baseline of the table top interactions within Catan VR.
They found that by focusing on creating an inviting environment, users felt more immersed in the Catan VR experience and were more likely to stay in the experience for longer periods of time.
Developing For Multiple Devices
Catan VR will be available on Gear VR, Oculus Rift, AND will be one of the first applications available on the Oculus Go. No matter which device you're logging in from, users will be able to play with each other. From a design perspective, the team faced the challenge of bringing the same experience concurrently to devices with varying visual specs, controller types, and frame rate capabilities. Not only did the team tackle this challenge, but they also had the added challenge of developing for completely new hardware - Oculus Go.
One huge advantage they found for developing for Oculus Go versus other VR hardware, is the ability to accurately predict what the end-user's experience will be with the product. With Oculus Rift and Gear VR we know a lot about how the software is likely to behave based on how it's being used, but there are still many conditions that you can't predict or control - like the power of a user's PC CPU/GPI or whether their phone battery is old or if they're running multiple applications in the background while they're playing your game. With Oculus Go, the Experiment 7 team could confidently know if the experience is good during testing it will be the same or similar for players.
Top Tips for Developers From Experiment 7
- Give users as much opportunity to express themselves as you possibly can. We adapted one of the most popular and engrossing tabletop games in the world and we STILL spend about 33% of our time trying to crack each other up with fun uses for Catan VR’s hidden hand poses. Between avatar customization, hand animations, VoIP, and movable objects, your community members should find a ton of “toy value” in your social VR experience…and that’s how you accumulate enough goodwill to ride out the inevitable bugs and hiccups that accompany any brand new paradigm like social VR applications.
- Positional audio matters way more than you think. Getting this right gives you a huge win both in verisimilitude (real life has positional audio so if you don’t that’s one more small thing contributing to social distancing) and it helps in your capacity to add more people to a scene. If VoIP audio isn’t attached to avatars and you have more than three in a room, figuring out who is talking starts to require its own cognitive overhead. If you DO have VoIP attached to avatars, conversing with four or even more people in different locations around a VR “room” feels very natural.
- Give your users a nice place to play. This is VR – we could be playing anywhere… so why not somewhere nicer than most people normally hang out? If you want your users to play/hang out socially for long periods of time, make the environment friendly. Avoid dungeons, dark color pallets, monochromatic wastelands, claustrophobic rooms and anything that might have cobwebs in favor of warmly lit environments with lots of space and a great view. Add good music and ambient effects, friendly avatars (non-creepy avatars are an absolute MUST), and color. People react to their environments, so design your spaces to reinforce the emotional and social responses you wish to elicit.
- Take advantage of the Unity Asset Store. The Unity Asset Store, for sure, was a huge help in getting what we wanted. We have a small team, so being able to rely on the many assets that the store has was a big win for us.
- Use the Oculus Store's developer platform to manage your builds. Managing builds with the Oculus Store’s developer platform is incredibly easy. No one – literally no human being ever – likes sending out zipped executable files to partners, vendors and reviewers. Versioning is impossible and build security is basically just ignored. The Oculus build management experience just erases all of those worries entirely. We are probably saving hours per week with it.
- Unity's new Progressive Lightmapper is essential! Unity's new Progessive Lightmapper was also helpful in creating a streamlined view between the Rift and Gear/Go. We were able to quickly and easily make all three platforms feel very close to one another, without having to sacrifice too much quality.
