Back at Steam Dev Days in 2014, Valve released the "VR Bible" which was a general developers guide to the current best VR design practices. When VR first became a consumer (and developer) technology, nobody really knew how to make VR stuff. With regards to things like 3D games on conventional screens, there have been decades of refinement to get to where things are now, the ability to just pick up a controller and everything works. Think back to the early mario 64 days of 3D gaming, or even earlier. Remember when the camera was a huge part of games, how sometimes entire games would be broken because the camera would be poorly programmed? Get stuck in walls, or just not be smart enough to give you a good clean view of what was going on? Remember how long it took before we had proper mario 64 style analogue controls?
You know how virtually every game has the same dual analog controls these days? Button placement has conglomerated among the systems? Things like that happened organically and slowly over time. Iteration and experimentation leads to that.
The change to VR meant a reboot of all those things. When you properly develop a VR game, and not just make a game like you make on a normal television in "3D", you have to rethink how everything works. From minute things like "don't grab the camera away from the player's face" to complex things like "how do you move around without making someone sick." For modern game development, you can go on google and find endless amounts of literature from people talking about how one should approach making conventional games. In 2014, absolutely no material existed for VR.
So at dev days, Valve said they had a large team of people experimenting with VR game development and were figuring out what works, what doesn't, and how to make long form games without making other people sick. The "VR Bible" was a list of the practices they had found since then. A few years later, the lab came out, which was a glimpse into how their research for "VR bible" practices were going. The "VR Bible" and "The Lab" weren't meant to be full games, they were tests of small concepts for a larger project. Valve also released "The Unity Renderer," a renderer built for VR development that other devs can use, and things like Steam Skeletal Input, which aimed to unify all VR controllers into one API, along with their own bleeding edge VR controller -- the Valve Index controller.
All this experimentation and iteration has been leading up to this game. Beyond Half Life and Valve fans, VR fans should be bonkers nuts for this, because this is the company that has been leading the charge for VR development finally revealing it's very long term hand here. I fully expect this to be the best-in-class for VR. This is going to be a new Doom, a new Mario 64. Really, really befitting that it's using the Half Life setting.
You know how virtually every game has the same dual analog controls these days? Button placement has conglomerated among the systems? Things like that happened organically and slowly over time. Iteration and experimentation leads to that.
The change to VR meant a reboot of all those things. When you properly develop a VR game, and not just make a game like you make on a normal television in "3D", you have to rethink how everything works. From minute things like "don't grab the camera away from the player's face" to complex things like "how do you move around without making someone sick." For modern game development, you can go on google and find endless amounts of literature from people talking about how one should approach making conventional games. In 2014, absolutely no material existed for VR.
So at dev days, Valve said they had a large team of people experimenting with VR game development and were figuring out what works, what doesn't, and how to make long form games without making other people sick. The "VR Bible" was a list of the practices they had found since then. A few years later, the lab came out, which was a glimpse into how their research for "VR bible" practices were going. The "VR Bible" and "The Lab" weren't meant to be full games, they were tests of small concepts for a larger project. Valve also released "The Unity Renderer," a renderer built for VR development that other devs can use, and things like Steam Skeletal Input, which aimed to unify all VR controllers into one API, along with their own bleeding edge VR controller -- the Valve Index controller.
All this experimentation and iteration has been leading up to this game. Beyond Half Life and Valve fans, VR fans should be bonkers nuts for this, because this is the company that has been leading the charge for VR development finally revealing it's very long term hand here. I fully expect this to be the best-in-class for VR. This is going to be a new Doom, a new Mario 64. Really, really befitting that it's using the Half Life setting.
