There’s something quite special about the combination of VR headsets and games that put you in the cockpit of a spaceship at the moment. From Elite: Dangerous to EVE: Valkyrie, this is the kind of game that is almost perfectly suited to the first generation of VR tech, but what Sublevel Zero does is dive even further into the niche, into the territory of six degrees of freedom movement that was popularised in the 90s game series Descent.
Just as in Descent, which is a clear inspiration for the game, you’re not roaming the vast expanses of space, but rather heading down under ground, with gravity and the laws of physics crumbling. The setting and idea partly come from the constraints of the Beneath The Surface themed Ludum Dare during which the game was first prototyped.
“A couple weeks before [Ludum Dare], we’d been in the pub just discussing things, as you do,” explained Dr. Luke Thompson of Sigtrap Games, “and Phi, our procedural coder, had just finished his game TinyKeep, a procedurally generated dungeon crawler and I had been playing around with a prototype of another 6 degree of freedom game, but more of a space sim, and we were sitting in the pub and we were just like, ‘You know what would be really awesome? A Roguelike procedurally generated Descent sort of game.'”
In truth, a 6 DoF game has more in common with a first person shooter than a traditional space game, a lot of the time, except that there are no boundaries to how you can move. You have an unrivaled ability to move around a space as you see fit, as without gravity affecting you, you can move up, down, left, right, forward and backward, as well as simply changing your orientation by spinning and pivoting your ship. Rather than focussing on the forward momentum of a single main thruster at the back of your ship, you motion is slick and smooth, able to change directions on a whim within the the game’s 3D spaces.
“The key thing with [a 6 DoF] game is that in a space sim certain directions are prioritised,” Luke said. “Forward and backwards are a big deal and everything else is kind of secondary. With a 6 DoF, it’s not. You can go forward and backward at exactly the same speed, you can go up and down and side to side at exactly the same speed, and you kind of have that freedom of movement to choose what you want to do at any point.”
You can, of course, play this on a TV or computer screen and with a controller in hand, or with all manner of unholy combinations of keyboard and gamepad or whatever you fancy, but it really does come to life when you put the VR headset on and grab a hold of two joysticks – one of which, Luke pointed out, has to not be right handed. It takes a little getting used to, and determining whether inverted or non-inverted controls work best, but I quickly found myself able to move around the space with ease.
“The interesting part about that is that we only put that in four days ago, so it’s quite new. That said, in that time, it has quickly become my favourite way to play it, especially with the Rift. You feel, and I know it’s a cliché, the immersion factor of having this almost realistic feedback of how you’re controlling this ship, along with the visual feedback you’re getting. It really helps to seat you in the experience, and you just feel like a badass, I’m not going to lie!
“But it’s really important for us to get the controls right – I can’t stress this enough – because with something like Descent, the second to second gameplay depends on the movement. If you can’t control that right, it doesn’t matter. You don’t have a game anymore. So it’s kind of making sure that you never get bored of controlling your ship […] so we’re continually tweaking that.”
Of course, one thing that I quickly lost, especially when having to concentrate on the handful of enemies shooting at me, was any sense of up or down. In truth, it’s really not something that’s important in order to play the game well, but it did lead to me becoming hopelessly disorientated when I found myself in a room with three exits, and wondering which one I came in through. Though still something of a foreign concept at times, wearing the Oculus allowed me to simply look around in order to make my choice, rather and pivoting and spinning the ship any further.
Some of that early learning curve of control will be smoothed and remedied through the systems that Sigtrap are building. Luke said, “We have quite tight control over the parameters of the procedural generation, so there’s things in it where the first couple of levels will tend to be quite flat. You won’t have any rooms coming off at an angle, and then as the game goes on we’ll introduce more of the fully 3D thing, to give people a learning curve, not just in terms of the difficulty of enemies, but also in terms of the movement.”
Though this was a set demo level, it was actually spawned from the game’s procedural generation system, which aims to provide a huge variety of levels for you to play in. Not only that though, it will also features the crafting, upgrading and permadeath that you can expect of a Roguelike game. With relatively limited health within this build, it’s also pretty damn hard.
“The reason that it’s hard is because we want every decision to matter,” Luke explained. “So, for instance, you don’t just run over a health pickup and instantly have more health, you can either apply it there and have it take a little while to apply – so if you’re in the middle of combat, it’s not a panacea – but otherwise, it takes up an inventory slot, and do you have the inventory space to do that?
“We want people to be cautious so that it’s run and gun in the sense of the combat, but we actually want people to be poking around corners, taking off a few shots and then ducking back because they’ve just got a volley of missiles fired at them. Basically for the player to be invested in what’s happening to them at that time.”
While the absolute core gameplay elements of the game’s motion have already been finely tuned, and the pixelated textures and explosions give the chunky graphics a certain charm to them, there’s a lot still to be done to flesh this out into a full game. The enemies, for example, featured very rudimentary AI, to predominantly look at you and fire away, whereas more exciting and interesting tactics could come to the fore.
But with the kernel of 6 DoF gameplay, there’s already a solid foundation on which they can build, and it looks like they’ll be approaching a finished game later this year for PC, Mac and Linux – and they’re exploring other platforms too – at just the right time to live alongside the VR headsets that are approaching their own public releases. The grand space games might be grabbing all the headlines, but Sublevel Zero will be lurking beneath the surface.
TSBonyman
I remember Descent, great game and learning to navigate through 6 axis (which way is up?!) was all new to me at the time. I can see how it would fit well with VR, leaving the player in a seated position and not having to move around the room.