Hello!

It was awesome to see the excitement surrounding our initial video release of Project Earth Shaker. We wanted to showcase a bit of what we have been working on since the last update. Again, any and all feedback or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

One of the most common responses we received from our initial user testing was that players felt that the controls were lacking a sense of “impact” — just pressing buttons seemed to cheapen how it should feel to summon large boulders and pillars. This was a problem for us, as VR gives us the unique opportunity to add physicality into game play, and we definitely want players to “feel” as powerful as their avatars should be.

The size of the boulder is set by how far apart your hands are.

Our idea was to implement gestures alongside button controls. This involved figuring out exactly what kinds of gestures we wanted for the game. A complex gesture tracking system could allow for more complicated motions (imagine an entire martial art “form” being tracked), but it has the disadvantage of limiting the user’s ability to creatively mix-and-match abilities. The fighting game genre became a great source of inspiration for solving this problem. In most fighting games, special combo moves are registered by combining otherwise normal attacks in a specific order.

You can now use gestures to direct the way pillars are pointed.

We opted for something similar. Instead of abilities having their own independently tracked motion, they would instead be the combination of simpler gestures. Summoning a pillar for instance, involves a “twist” gesture followed by a “lift” gesture. Summoning a wall is a little more involved: a “cross” gesture initiates it; a “spread” gesture sets the width of the wall; finally, a “lift” gesture pulls it out.

Summon a wall by crossing your hands.

This system allowed for some creative combinations. For instance, since we are now tracking the velocity and angles of the player’s hands, the player can angle the way a pillar shoots out of the ground. This might be useful to push rocks from unexpected angles, or to deflect incoming projectiles on the fly. We hope that in the future players will be able to use their physicality in clever ways and come up with moves that we’ve never even thought of.

Gesture control allows for neat interactions like this!

Finally, we’ve started investigating multiplayer functionality in VR. Here’s a clip of us having fun with it. :D

Rock always wins.

We’re interested in hearing what you guys think about this gesture system, and what moves you might want to see. Additionally, if you like what you have seen so far, please spread the word for us and follow us on the links below. We will continue to keep you posted with our progress. If you haven’t seen our debut video yet, check it out here!

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