Basic Design Concepts

With project Rascals, we once again step well outside our comfort zone.  When we decided to pursue this idea, we were inclined to follow on our only notable success and create a Mount Wingsuit 2, but decided to try this first for a number of reason.  For one, we feel that the VR market could mature a bit, especially hardware wise, before we decide to once again delve into a massive open world.  Furthermore, designing something radically different from the ground up forces us to learn new concepts and ways of handling design challenges, and this is bunches of fun.  This follows on the most important cornerstone of our game design philosophy:  A game that is fun to develop is likely to be fun to play, while one that feels like a drag in development necessarily suffers in execution.  Thus, in chasing a fun approach to game development, we ultimately achieve a fun playing experience.

One of the most important factors in the design of Rascals is a high degree of physicality in every aspect.  It means that every object we decide to put in the game needs to look and feel like its real-world counterpart.  This forms the conceptual basis for cohesion within the game world, and while there are numerous highly abstract approaches to this, mimicking real life is easy to relate to, both for the designers and the players.  A cohesive game world is a key requirement to achieving immersion, which is even more important in VR than in traditional game design.  Requiring the game objects to conform to the real world, at least on a certain level, also makes it easier to decide on how to handle the visual design aspects, which are enormously important in a game like this.

We have decided to constrain the materials palette a fair bit, for the sake of visual cohesion as well as simplicity of design.  As much of the game world as possible will be constructed from wooden objects, since it provides a pleasing aesthetic when done right, in addition to providing a common frame of scale reference.  Certain objects will be very small, for example the gun will be less than 1 cm / 1/2" in length, and constructing such objects from scale accurate wood would be neither pretty nor believable.  This is unacceptable because the same objects will be handled at 20x magnification in first person view, so alternative materials such as plastic must be used.  In these cases it will be both difficult and important to stay true to original scale, which means to create fully mapped models that have sufficient detail to be viewed up close, but are built up the same way a tiny object would be in real life.  For example, casting flaws in plastic are very obvious when looking through a magnifying glass, and will have to feature prominently when plastic is used as a material in the game.

With a game world developed to the required levels of physicality and refinement, we can freely experiment with gameplay elements that feel right in this setting.  The basic goal is to find an engaging set of skill checks to challenge the player in first person, and to balance this with the right amount of strategic decision making.  Early prototypes show a lot of promise in this regard, but we have a lot of conceptual development to get through before we can set about balancing the thing properly.