O.K. So I have been thinking about this for the last few days. On the last sneak peak game play video I posted over on Reddit. u/ Flarfanex and u/ branded both pointed out that the skeletons were “bleeding” when you attacked them as if they had flesh instead of bones and that that seemed “off”.
At first I thought it was a bit nit-picky and completely blew off their comments.
I had worked too hard to make the entire experience run on mobile VR, I wasn’t going to worry about this small detail… and may have even been a tad snotty and slightly condescending in my inet replies to them…
“Firedrake VR is for Mobile VR and I had only programmed one particle emitter into the game for blood effects.. You see… These particle emitters cost a lot, in terms of CPU rendering performance on a cell phone system, so it’s really a good idea to keep their use to a minimum.” I told them … and myself… but it wormed at the back of my mind the rest of the night.
It was wrong, It did feel off. They were right….
The blood effect seemed to almost take you out of the immersion when in VR. The players expectation, based on years and years of Dungeons and Dragons lore, game of thrones type books and a hundred million b movies…. was that skeletons had bones instead of bleeding flesh and when you hack at them they should do something other then bleed…
And if one (in this case two folks had this opinion and voiced it, then you can bet there were 10 others that felt this way that hadn’t spoken up… (the internets famous rule of “Ten’s” from the old CPM ratio days is a golden rule I live by when it comes to measuring these type of metrics…)
In the morning, I realized they were completely right. Skeletons don’t normally bleed, and in VR, it’s this little type of thing that can bring you out of the immersion. And lets face it. VR gaming is all about the immersion. So far , there aren’t too many games that actually NEED VR. Currently VR just gets to put you within the gaming world. Lets you feel the immersion of the experience.
And, I began to think.. If I don’t listen to the feedback from users. Then I am missing a huge opportunity to have a sort of beta test outside of VR. I had posted the trailer as more of an awareness campaign to even let folks know firedrake existed, but also forgot and then quickly realized again that the game trailer is also a “first look” of actual game play. And end viewers, who are highly experienced and sophisticated game players in general (who else watches early access game play trailers!!!???) and may eventually become players, will have feedback and comments equally as valid as any live beta or gameplay tester will have.
So, I sat down and figured out how to bring in some “bone dust blood” into the game. It took a little figuring, since I am a terrible C# programmer, but I think I have a working solution with minimal performance loss. It needs a bit of tweaking, but the base effect works for me.
I am also figuring out a way to have the skeletons just break apart into a pile of bones, once you kill ‘em…. Seems somehow more fitting as I re-think the whole combat loop of the skeletons, But I’m still working on that. Onward!
