When British studio Ustwo released Monument Valley earlier this year, the biggest disappointment was being able to experience it only on a tablet. If you tried hard enough, you could almost imagine yourself wandering its sunrise-colored worlds, exploring the M.C. Escher-style architecture alongside Ida, the pointy-hatted avatar. It was immersive—well, as immersive as a 2-D experience can be—but in the end, you were tapping and swiping on a screen.

It made many people wonder: What would it be like to be inside Monument Valley? Would it be as cool as expected? Would you puke all over the exquisitely designed world? Now we can find out. Ustwo will soon release Land’s End, a virtual reality game for the Samsung Gear VR headset.

The studio is premiering the game trailer here on WIRED, and it looks gorgeous, filled with dreamy landscapes and architectural puzzles that look like they belong in the Water World version of Monument Valley.

Earlier this year, the folks at Oculus approached Ustwo’s game design team to ask if they’d develop a game for the platform. “We jumped at that chance because we’ve been really excited about VR for the last couple of years,” says Peter Pashley, technical director of Ustwo's game division. “We never thought we’d get a chance to work on it—we didn’t see a window.” Timing turned out to be perfect; Pashley’s crew had a gap between projects.

The First Mind-Bender: How to Get Over That Vomit-y Feeling

Ustwo has developed plenty of successful games—Monument Valley, Whale Trail and Blip Blup—but never for virtual reality. “The first thing we did with it was drop a 3-D virtual reality camera into a Monument Valley level and had a look around,” says Pashley. “It was beautiful; there was this feeling of awe of being in these structures and being able to get a sense of scale.”

But Monument Valley didn’t really translate. The game was designed from a single isometric perspective, which works well on screen but not a 360-degree experience. The movement mechanics weren’t quite right, either. In Monument Valley, Ida traverses the worlds in sharp, 180-degree turns. “It’s great when you’re looking at the iPad, but it’s slightly vomit-inducing when you're in VR,” says Dan Gray, a producer for Land’s End. The team knew it wanted Land’s End to evoke the dreaminess of Monument Valley, but it had to be different, in both gameplay mechanics and how you experience the worlds.

Ustwo set about learning how to design for VR. The first thing the team did was determine what kind of story it wanted to tell in Land’s End. The game takes place on a mystical ocean dotted with scattered islands. It’s a puzzler, and much like Monument Valley, players manipulate the shipwrecked architecture to progress through the worlds. You travel around the archipelago by hopping from fallen star to fallen star, like celestial lily pads. Except you don’t really hop. In Land’s End, getting from one place to another simply requires looking where you want to go.

Getting Used to a New Kind of Controller

The Samsung Gear comes with controls on the side of the headset. Ustwo toyed with using these controls to communicate intent. “It just felt like the natural next step was to feel even more like telepathy. if we could do away with having to use the touchpad at all, we should do that,” says Pashley. Gray compares this to hovering a mouse over an icon for a certain amount of time to activate it. It’s a tricky interaction to nail—allowing players to decide what they want to do without getting frustrated. “It’s kind of like trying to read somebody’s mind just by where they’re pointing their head,” says Pashley. “But it turns out that it is doable and it feels really nice.”

There are other considerations like designing movements so players find themselves looking down more than they're looking up. “We avoid environments which force players to crane their neck upward for long periods of time,” says Pashley. And because things that make you sick in real life also will make you sick in VR, it’s best to avoid big waves.

As players explore the oceanic worlds, they encounter strange creatures and weather-beaten structures. Designing a world in virtual reality is similar to designing one in real life. The scale must be accurate, textures must appear real enough to touch. “The doors, windows and railings all need to be correct for the user to feel like they’re properly in the world,” says Pashley. “You have to make towers that look like a person could actually fit in them. This 1:1 scale allows designers more liberties inside virtual worlds. The knobby texture of wood is easier to convey, shapes are easier to form. “It’s much easier to play with that kind of sense of shape and make something that’s aesthetically pleasing through its shape, not just through its coloration.”

Ustwo is still figuring out what works and what doesn’t. Gray likes to compare the new world of VR game design to immigrants arriving on the shores of the United States for the first time. “No one has any idea of what they’re doing; they’re finding their way for the first time,” he says. It’s a little scary to be on the vanguard, helping dictate the direction of future VR games. But it’s also pretty damn exciting.

“It’s that kind of adventure in making video games that we’ve not seen for years,” Pashley says.