Editor’s Note: Invrse eventually did release a version of The Wake for free.

So it sounds like you guys are very in touch with the community of VR and the demands of the VR consumers. With The Wake, you kind of shifted from that to The Nest based on, what Hunter was saying, that in addition to other difficulties, people were afraid of killing a humanoid so close to yourself. How was the process of reeling in that idea?

Well, the real trick to doing what we do, is making a game that we really wanna play. I was part of another smaller, again two man, studio called PlayOnward back in 2009. The mobile space was just getting started, we were doing phone and iPad stuff. Ultimately, I realized we were making a lot of games that I didn’t want to play. So we changed direction, we tried to make the game I really, really wanted. Ultimately, another company did it first…and better!(Ryan laughs as he says this. I believe he’s referring to Epic Games announcing and releasing Infinity Blade)

So then, the mobile space drifted away from me, I drifted away from it, so then when VR started happening, my first experiences were just…perfect immersion. Things I had never thought I’d see in my lifetime. So, fast-forward to when I get to make my own stuff. There would be nights when I’d wake up in the middle of the night with an idea, by mid-afternoon we’d have a prototype running, and I’d be seeing something nobody has ever seen, and doing something nobody has ever done. Now that we’ve actually turned it into a company, we can make money doing it, which is always good.

Well this whole thing is wish fulfillment, being a creator at this point, and having an amazing programmer, Victor, as a resource, is like…well, I was gonna say “it’s like being a god” but that sounds totally pretentious! It’s not a jerky “Look at me, I’m so powerful”, but it’s like you have the power of creation, and making and seeing things that have never existed before, so if you’re looking into getting into VR, I highly recommend that’s how you think about it.

I don’t know if you’re interested in this side of VR at all, but Cosmo(Scharf) at the keynote was talking about the relationship between linguistics and virtual reality, seeing as how they’re both arbitrary frames of reference for interacting with reality. You were just talking about being having the powers of a god and creating things, so how do you feel about being, let’s say, an author of reality?

It’s a lot of responsibility. To Hunter’s point about The Wake, about how people got scared and ran away…before the game even came to be, we started thinking about whether it could possibly give people post-traumatic stress disorder. You can not understand what it’s like having something that threatening running towards you until it starts ripping your face off. So we did some really interesting experiments which I could ramble on about. But needless to say we found a lot of ways to make people uncomfortable and scared in VR. However, taking a step outside of that, we decided we wanted to help people have fun in VR. So much of our later experiments involve finding mechanics that people could pick up almost instantaneously, and you know, not have them run away screaming.

The sniper rifle, I’ve written a blog about the sniper rifle, well we learned that using scopes solved one of the main issues we have in VR right now: locomotion. We keep you in a fixed position, but we let you see distant enemies from up close. So that was a UX decision that arose from a happy accident, where we found that we could get players close to the action while keeping their distance.

We have another game where we won’t be talking about until it gets further along, but it’s called Natural 20 and it’s our take on Dungeons & Dragons dice mechanics. Everyone who’s seen it so far has really liked it. So we brought the fun to that straight up, it’s a super casual game, focused around bashing dice in a D&D setting. This actually was what we were working on before The Nest, actually.

So how did The Nest come to fruition?

So Invrse was working exclusively on The Wake, and we’d made a ton of art content, we had motion capture coming in, we spent a lot of money, we realized it would take too long, the space was getting pretty occupied by great games like The Brookhaven Experiment. We felt like our game was too…mature to be marketed at places like GameStop, and wouldn’t be an inviting choice as the first demo someone plays.

So I made the difficult decision right after GDC 2016, we wanted to find something that we could get out very very quickly, by the end of the year, and just have a lot of fun with. And that’s where Natural 20 came from! The red-headed step-child of Invrse. So we spent like six weeks working on Natural 20, and it’s very close to being content-complete. But there was a game jam… there was a VR hackathon dot com in Seattle. Victor and I attended, we crushed it, we didn’t get a single minute of sleep. 36 hours straight. And when we were done, The Nest was born. We had a title, and we even had a prop weapon we built!

You still have that same one?

We still have the same one! It’s held together, it’s still made out of cardboard, a two by four, and wrapped in duct tape. Um, but you don’t see that when you’re in VR, you just see a really cool sniper rifle. But yeah, at the hackathon, we did the first experiments with a rifle on the Friday, and by the Sunday during judging, we had a fully functional, properly smoothed tracked rifle. Which was fundamentally SO awesome that we just kept working on it. We actually released The Nest on Early Access six weeks after the game jam.

So from zero to release in six weeks?

Zero to release in six weeks. Zero to prototype in 36 hours, and then zero to release in 36 days.

Just to tie you guys back to the greater history of video games, it seems like being stationary in The Nest with your gun solved a lot of problems that you’d found in other titles like The Wake. Reminds me a lot of Duck Hunt.

Yeah, since 3D games came out, you don’t stay in one place. There are too many things to do, too many things to explore. That’s what 3D is about. But back to 2D games, back before you would side-scroll, or you would move top-down, and almost every arcade game was a fixed screen where they could move pixels around mathematically. So we’ve heard from some retro enthusiasts that VR is tapping into the arcade feel, tapping into game modes with progression, where you just keep playing until you die. There have not been a lot of 3D games that have used those mechanics in the last 20 years! So old-school game designers can jump into VR, kids who’ve played games since they were born can definitely do it. But traditional game designers, people who’ve been in the industry for a decade or more, they seem to have the hardest time transitioning into VR. They’ve learned a particular visual language, they’ve learned an iconography, you know, the players of those games know what to expect. So staying within those constraints doesn’t let you discover things like “what if you hold a sniper rifle and give the player variable zoom?” I mean, some sniper games don’t even have variable zoom. But without variable zoom, really, you only have a window. The variable zoom is a locomotion mechanic within itself.