Raise your hand if you like Echo Arena and Echo Combat. (Imagine me raising mine in this moment)

We all love those amazing games, that are developed by a game studio called Ready At Dawn. They have a great expertise in developing virtual reality games and that’s why I have been very happy to be able to interview their art director, Nathan Phail-Liff.

I was a bit scared to interview such an important person, but actually, Nathan made me feel comfortable since when we sat together on the sofa for the interview and answered all the questions with incredible kindness and having always a great smile on his face. It has been a true pleasure talking with him, he’s a great man. He also provided me a lot of interesting info, that I want to share with you in the classical three-way mode, giving you:

That’s it with this introduction, let’s go to the real interview!

All the VR games you make become instant hits. What’s your secret? (0:25)

It’s tough to answer… I guess the secret is trying and failing a lot. Doing Lone Echo required a lot of trial-and-error, and also to step back and be objective about some of the pre-conceptions we might have about what could have been good. Because along the way we got lots of ideas that we said “oh, this is going to be good” and then we focus tested them with people in the studio and we also brought outside people for focus tests and then we’d see there were all sorts of problems in terms of comfort, movement ability, comprehension of the story. And so we are trying to develop a good process to be able to try things quickly and then being objective regards assessing if they are good, or they are bad or they are almost good and just need more work and I think that’s really a key ingredient.

Design of UI (and UX) in VR is still rough. You experiment a lot on it and implement great UI in your games… what is your general take on UI in VR? (1:49)

It was very interesting that different people in the team could work on different UI paradigms. Roby, the system designer, made a lot of work on the user interface of the arm computer (and wrote an article about it on Road To VR). And so, really, our goal for UI was to make it intuitive but also make it feel completely natural to the world, because we never wanted to take the player out of the fantasy of being a character of that world, and so that’s why we really looked at a novel approach that required the player to interact with his own body, which can reinforce the feeling of being this robot (AN: the robot is the character you imperson in Lone Echo). And even for communication, we are really used to use cell phones or iPads, so we really looked at them to have the inspiration to create a virtual tablet that you can move around and adjust ergonomically and when you don’t need it, even throw away so that it disintegrates.

So, looking at what works in real life, was of inspiration of what we should try to do in VR.

Interesting, so you said yourselves “people use smartphones every day… why don’t we take the smartphone in the game?”… (3:30)

People have been developing smartphone UI for 10 years. So, let’s start there and then if we’ll need to make changes, we’ll do that, but we don’t need to reinvent the wheel

And why not vocal interfaces for instance? (3:51)

That would be really amazing if there wasn’t a high failure rate. Because we didn’t want frustration to take people out the game, and just imagine the frustration that you have with the automated assistant of the phone… I try saying my name and I continue saying “Nathan, Nathan, Nathan”… and while you say that, you’re actually angry and frustrated, and so unless we can guarantee a 99% successful detection rate and we can support all different languages and the accents… it would be just a risk point that could alienate people. But I like the fantasy of it, if you could just talk with your voice, it would be amazing. I think we are probably just not quite there in terms of technology.

And in your opinion in how much time we’ll get there? (4:45)

I don’t know. We have limited time and resources and we evaluated the risks and the benefits and for us it was not an avenue in which we would like to spend a lot of time to develop a custom R&D solution for voice, so for us it is more than for the value it adds… it is better that we wait for other industries to catch up… if there is an off-the-shelf solution that can guarantee good results and can integrate with our game engine, we’d absolutely look at that.

Do you want to take 5 programmers and make them work for six months to try maybe fail in doing this… or you can bring more features into the game? It’s just like that balancing…

VR is a platform where there are difficult computational constraints one must adhere to keep 90Hz for 2 eyes, but at the same time, it is important to offer a pleasant VR environment. How is it possible to obtain that? How to optimize the experience to satisfy both requirements? (5:52)

We use our own engine, so we heavily optimized our game for VR, so the engine developers made a lot of work to make it performant. I mean, you’re rendering at 90Hz and you’re also rendering in stereo, so we implemented a technique that doesn’t require to render all the elements twice every frame, so there are technical things. And from the art side, we had to rethink the pipeline, so to do very aggressive LOD, and I also detailed (in the talk) how we made objects so that they look very detailed up close, but details very quickly fall away (when you go further from the object) in a way that hopefully, you don’t notice that. And then you have to use fewer lights. On non-VR games, we were able to use all sorts of dynamic lights, but in Lone Echo, we had to be much more careful, we used quite a few, you have to be more careful with dynamic lights and shadows.

But I think what’s interesting of the advancements of technology, it’s not just about more resolution… because even if overnight we double or triple the resolution, well, no one would be able to make a game for it. So, it’s more like a balance between efficient hardware and SDKs that can offer a solution to allow high-fidelity without too much performance sacrifice… so, like eye-tracking, foveated rendering, all things we are really excited about and those really unlock the potential of having much higher resolution, but not at the cost of performance so much.

Will you port some games like Echo Arena for the Quest? It would be amazing… Are you experimenting with it? (8:40)

We can’t really talk about new projects that we may or may not have.

But… as developers, we’re excited about the Quest, because it can make us reach a much wider market, so it’s definitely something that we can keep in mind for the future.

What will be your future games? (9:30)

Well, the big one that is coming right now is Echo Combat, coming out in about two weeks, on November, 15th, and that will be a big step: (Echo VR) from just an arena sport game, is now expanding in a whole social space that has different game modes that can appeal to different people, so we hope we can continue to build additional gameplay for the community around Echo VR. And then Lone Echo II has been recently announced, so that’s a big endeavor we’re really focused on right now. People are very excited to see that the story is going to continue from the first game and we can see what we can do introducing more compelling things to the game.

How are all these Echo games born? You started with Lone Echo, then Echo Arena came out during an internal game jam… so, how was Echo Combat born? (10:19)

Well, in some ways, Echo Combat probably was more the game jam… so, Lone Echo was the game, a single-player campaign and that’s it, but half-way the development we had a game jam and someone prototyped a multiplayer game that actually had shooting, so we had a few game modes, there were different blasters, also different weapons, ridiculous… we had one class of characters that was called “the moon wizard”… it was just awful (laughs).

But what was interesting, for the time we had, we knew there was so much magic in hands and locomotion and in the multiplayer space social, and we found when we were playing with each other, that was just a shooter… for the prototype we had, it wasn’t really social, we just stood away and shoot each other, but it didn’t have interaction, teamwork, coordination, that was the appeal to us in making Lone Echo multiplayer. And so we introduced the disk, and we still had guns, and it was like “there’s too much going on” and it wasn’t still helping the social aspect, so then we took away the guns and suddenly everything clicked.

It’s like: you’re getting more close, more physical, you can coordinate with passing, with communication, and so we wanted to make sure that the first multiplayer game we did in VR had this strong sense of social presence. But this didn’t mean that we weren’t interested anymore in guns, we just didn’t want to cram it in a very quick time, and that’s why after Echo Arena was successful and Oculus was really interested in expanding the game, we took a deeper look at how we could introduce guns, but still have social, and so that’s what we are really trying to do with Echo Combat.

Yeah, (Echo Combat) is not really the typical action game, there is a pink flamingo… (12:54)

That was like a happy asset of what our texture artist did as a joke… and she wasn’t taking it seriously, but I saw that and me and a few other people were like “THAT, is amazing, we’re definitely shipping that”… some people were kind of skeptical we could fit it into the game… but what I like about that is that some kind of softens the violence a little bit. It’s still like a competitive shooter, but when you’re fighting over a giant pink flamingo, it’s like “am I like taking myself too seriously?”… so it’s kinda like support more friendly communication, inclusion a bit more.

[Then he asks me if I had played the latest available version and I say now, what a shame 😀 ]

The game will be out in two weeks… there’s a capture the point mode now… and a new map… and there should be some more surprises on launch.

And there will be other Echo games? (14:16)

We’ll see (laughs). We have two in the play right now, so maybe in the future.

You said that Lone Echo started with a gamepad-based interface… is it true? How have you evolved the game from gamepad to Touch Controllers? (14:36)

We started with gamepad because that was all that we had! Well, the locomotion mode (by grabbing things) it worked, it worked with the controller, but with gamepad the limitation we had… this canned hand-grab and then pull yourself to the world movement, and it somewhat worked, but we also had the problem that we were using one sensor… so gamepad and one sensor, so we had to do all sorts of weird controls, for instance, to spin you around and then, when we were 6 months in the projects, Oculus announced Touch and we saw that and we were like (makes mind-blown gesture): it just fixes it, this is amazing. And when we did see Touch, there was a demo called Toybox, and it was like the spark for Echo Arena, too, because the magic of social presence was incredible in Toybox. So, between Touch and having seen how hands presence can be impactful for multiplayer… this really influenced the game.

You are the art director of the studio… now there are tools to draw or model in VR (Quill, Medium, etc..)… do you use them while developing games and what is your favorite one? (16:08)

Medium and Quill are built for different reasons, they are two different things. I love playing with both of them, I haven’t used them as a development tool, but I can definitely see the potential.

Can I ask why you don’t use them in production? Is it because the standard tools are still better? (16:43)

Yeah, we can use the current tools… also, the resolution in headset is good, but not incredible, and also everything involves also text, lots of small text with data stuff… so just drawing an illustration in VR is great, but often we’re doing very technical blend of things when working with art, so I think that until displays won’t have a higher resolution, it won’t be comfortable to work for a long time in VR.

VR is mostly gaming now. What is your favorite artistic experience that you have tried? (17:32)

It’s very hard to separate the art from games. I love Superhot, Superhot is great… and Robo Recall is usually fun. And also some shorts like Dear Angelica, this kind of short stories, VR experiences… I like to look at everything, you look at the games we make, we don’t have something like one style around which we gravitate to…. so all these experiences are compelling for different reasons.

What’s your vision for the future for VR? (18:23)

Seeing it grow into a larger user base, that is accepted across broader society, it is something that I’m really excited to see. Because it can bring social, interactions, with gaming, it’s going to open a whole new world of entertainment… I think that right now it’s right on the cusp. The quality is there, it’s good enough, but none of the people has been exposed to the right thing that can open their eyes to understand why it is so powerful. So we’ll continue developing compelling experiences that can drag people into the medium.

Do you want to add something to this interview? Like an advice for people that want to do your same job… (19:23)

Well, for artists it is really (important) the portfolio, but also understanding how gameplay experiences are like, to understand how to really show how you can really build a world and understand how game players can access the world. It is something that is very important to us because if you look at Lone Echo, the entire set is gameplay, you can touch everything, and so you need artists that just don’t want to make pretty stuff, they wanna make a great game experience.

So, it would be great to see someone that does not only do great artworks, but he/she is working directly in the game engine and making small demos and experiences that really show that he/she has a passion and understands gameplay. These are the two things that are required and sometimes understanding the gameplay, how to make a compelling experience might be more important than having the best portfolio piece. So it’s nice to have a nice balancing of these two things.