This is part 2 in a two-part series covering the art style and techniques used to develop Apex Construct, an action-adventure VR game. Part 1 can be read here and covers the visualization, design, and style of the game. Part 2 covers the technical details and know-how to achieve the stylization in VFX, animation, and lighting for VR development.

During the development of Apex Construct, we constantly seek to improve methods of dealing with hardware limitation for the different VR platforms. While technology advances at a fast pace and we see a lot of modern games approaching realistic rendering resembling film industry standards, VR still has quite a few limitations that we as a developer need to address. An example of such issues is the framerate. While a non-VR game often does not need to hit more than 30fps, a VR experience or game must run at 60 fps on the PlayStation, and 90 fps on PC, with no frame drops. Frame drops in VR are bad since latency in the sync from the headset to the brain is one of the major causes of motion sickness. Causing motion sickness is damaging for the experience, but also for the game’s reputation in general. It’s important during development to put the minimum fps bar much higher to avoid a frame drop below the necessary requirement.

As we develop for various platforms, we realized it was necessary to make different builds to reach the requirements for each headset to run the game, but also to fully make use of the high-end headsets without losing quality.

Another example of an issue we encountered was occlusion of objects. As the player has a wider view when using a VR headset than looking at a flat screen, we had to be aware that the game cannot occlude everything in the level where the player is currently not looking. In VR, objects in the periphery will still be visible. The game will have to render more objects on the screen than a regular flat screen game.

VFX

The graphical style of the VFX in the game underwent a lot of back and forth in the process of finding the right direction. The effects were more realistic at the beginning of the production, much like everything else during our early development, while we seek to find our stylization (You can read more about it in Part 1 of the Apex Construct behind the scenes). The first prototype effects were made with stock photos, which later changed as the game became more stylized. The textures for the VFX were instead made from low-resolution simulations in Houdini to get the smooth and chunky stylization.