Games Designer
Grand Theft Nigel is a Virtual Reality interactive farce, in which the player assumes the roll of an incompetent henchman as part of a team pulling off a heist. You must guide your teammates through the facility towards your objective, trying (and failing) to act like you know what you’re doing. I wanted to make the player feel the same as if they were suddenly on stage acting in a play … only without having attended any of the rehearsals or learnt any of the lines!
Note: This project was made under a very short time frame, in just over 4 weeks, and as a such functions more as a prototype with unrefined visuals and scene dressing. Unfortunately, the map screen remains incomplete, merely a basic still image rather than the intended updating display that shows the real-time position of teammates and guards, and so the first initial objective of navigating your team safely through a patrol of guards remains absent (cf. 0:50 – 1:15 of the playthrough - the player just has to press the button at any time to progress). However, all other game logic & puzzle elements of the game, including speech recognition, remain fully implemented.
VR tailored interactions
I believe that when designing a VR game it is important not just to transplant a 2D game into VR, but to justify its existence as a VR title with immersive mechanics and physical interactions that you couldn’t achieve in a PC/console game.
One such example is when the player is tasked with turning off the security cameras (1:17- 1:52 in the playthrough above), which affords the player the opportunity to engage in some classic farcical plate-spinning.
To begin with, I place the switches directly behind the player as a visual gag: it often takes people a long time in VR to think to turn physically and look behind them, by which point their team will have started to comment on Nigel’s slowness.
Then in order to access the big red button from behind the glass panel, the player will have to turn both handles. The catch? As soon a handle is released to press the button, the glass plate will quickly slide back into place. The player is therefore unable to push the button with his hand, since he needs both to access the switch, and must use the only other body part available to him - that is registered by their headset - their head! They must hold a handle in place with each hand and headbutt the button.
(And to ensure that no one gets stuck here, if the player takes too long, their teammate will finally exclaim “Come on, use your head!” as a figurative and literal instruction (and gag) all rolled into one).
Another example is passing the security scan with a “state of the art” disguise, which turns out to be nothing but a hat, glasses and false moustache on a stick (2:54 - 4:01 in the above playthrough).
Not only must you locate these items across the environment as in a normal 2D game, but your vision darkens when you put on the glasses, you see the tip of your hat resting on your head, and you have to physically hold up the ‘tache in front of your face as you’re scanned – which heightens the ridiculous nature of the situation to a degree that a 2D game could not match.
Speech Recognition
As an extra layer of immersion, I knew I wanted to implement speech recognition and have the player physically talk to his AI teammates, made possible by the fact that all Oculus headsets have a built-in microphone.
At points throughout the game your team will turn on their comms and question you, requiring you to press the tannoy system button in front of you and physically reply. Using this button system enabled me to not waste computing resources constantly looking for keywords until the player was actually intending to speak to his team (as opposed to themselves, streamers, or other people in the room).
But there is one point in the game where the voice recognition serves not just to immerse but to challenge, and play with player expectation: when the player completes the facial recognition scan he seemingly succeeds and is greeted by a robotic voice “Welcome agent Carter” as he logs in. However security are alerted to a potential breach and telephone to check who has just logged in.
If a player was NOT paying attention, they will not know what to reply and will fail the check, blow their cover and receive the “mauled by attack dogs” ending (4:39-6:28). But if they were paying attention and my scripting picks up the keywords “Agent Carter” or “Carter” in their response, then they will pass the check and receive the “accidentally blown up by teammates blowing into the vault” ending (7:09 -7:40).
Such a puzzle would simply not be possible in a 2D game (since not every player would necessarily own a microphone). The simple act of giving you an “Agent Carter” as an option to respond with would completely nullify both the challenge, and all the humour in accidentally failing it (as you would have to choose to fail the check deliberately).
To ensure that players realised they would have to speak using their own larynx, and not some gameplay system, the game starts with a phonecall from your brother and does not progress until a verbal response is detected. If you remain silent your brother will keep prodding you to respond, growing more and more impatient and sarcastic until it becomes painfully clear that you have to talk back.
NOTE: In a full commercial game released at scale, voice recognition would not necessarily be practical, due to accents and language localisations etc. But the solution to this would be to break the players microphone after a very short amount of time, and have you communicate with your team by making gestures: pointing left/right, giving thumbs up/down etc.