Chapter 226: VR Game Production Principles
How popular was *Minecraft* in Chen Mo’s previous life?
To put it simply, it was the most successful indie game in terms of both popularity and commercial success, bar none. It was the second best-selling game in the world, with sales exceeding 100 million copies, second only to the old-timer *Tetris*.
Considering that *Minecraft* was released in 2009, by then there were already many very good games with a 1m x 1m block size, making it less likely for players to feel lost in the scale of the virtual world, and the finished product was easier to make convincing.
Moreover, *Minecraft* wasn’t just a world generator; it was also a game rich in content.
For Chen Mo, porting this game to the VR platform was a very challenging and meaningful endeavor.
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After Chen Mo finished explaining the conceptual design drafts, everyone began to hurry up and prepare for various tasks. In particular, the tech tree, art style, and derivative gameplay that Chen Mo mentioned were enough to give everyone a headache for a while.
After all, there were no games in this world to reference. How do you make a game that’s basically like building blocks? What should it look like? How should certain details be designed?
These were questions everyone had to think about carefully.
As for Chen Mo himself, he returned to the second floor of the experience store and began researching the relevant rules for making VR games.
The Fantasy World Editor supported making VR games, but the specific production method was different from PC and mobile games.
Chen Mo was now an A-level designer and an honorary committee member of the Game Committee. He had high permissions in the Fantasy World Editor and could unlock the corresponding sections for making VR games.
When he became an A-level designer, Chen Mo had already browsed through the relevant processes for making VR games, and now he confirmed them again.
Earlier, Chen Mo had also experienced VR games represented by *Earth Online*. In simple terms, the VR technology in this world allowed players to directly input their consciousness into the game pod and receive feedback signals.
The game pod replaced traditional input/output devices, such as keyboards, mice, monitors, etc., becoming a bridge between the player’s consciousness and the virtual reality game world.
The game pod had the ability to parse the player’s consciousness.
For a simple example, if a player wanted to reach out and grab a certain item in the game, the game pod would parse this consciousness, convert it into the character’s action in the game, interact with the game world, and the final result would be the game character picking up the item.
Similarly, actions like moving, climbing, jumping, attacking, and shooting were all realized in this way.
Theoretically, the virtual reality technology of this world could parse any intention of the player, but whether it could be applied in the game depended on whether the designer had designed the corresponding rules.
In simple terms, in a cold weapon combat game, a player could send out the consciousness “I want to pull the trigger,” but after the game pod parsed it and transmitted it to the game world, because the game world did not support that action, the character in the game would remain motionless and not react at all.
For a specific VR game, what actions were supported and what operation methods were available all depended on the designer’s design.
For example, in a game, if you were a soldier holding a gun and you wanted to make the action of “stepping on the gun,” but the designer hadn’t designed it, then your character would remain motionless.
It sounded strange, but after playing VR games for a long time, players would get used to this setting. (Just like in many AAA games, you often could only do the actions the story required you to do.)
Therefore, the more executable actions the designer designed for the game, the freer the player would be in the game, the more things they could do, and the more realistic the game would feel.
But in turn, the greater the game’s load, the more mental energy the player would need to consume.
This was also one of the reasons why the VR platform generally didn’t make games like RTS.
There was no particular advantage in artistic performance.
The cost was enormous.
Players needed to consume too much consciousness, leading to fatigue and the inability to play for long periods.
If there were an RTS game on the VR platform now, the player’s consciousness would need to select a unit and then execute an operation. In the endless cycle of this behavior, they would also have to constantly think about combat strategies. For the player, the mental energy required would increase exponentially.
The PC platform was different. Players also needed to think about these things, but all operations were completed through the mouse and keyboard, and many were subconscious habitual actions, so it wasn’t as tiring.
Therefore, some VR games would deliberately simplify game operations to prevent overly complex operations from causing mental fatigue in players, thereby extending the game time in a roundabout way.
For example, in some VR games, all of the player’s “attacks” were punch attacks, and they couldn’t decide the direction, angle, force, or other attributes of the punch. This was to simplify game operations and reduce the burden on the player’s mind.
Additionally, in terms of perception, VR games had the ability to fully simulate the player’s senses, including vision, hearing, smell, touch, and so on.
The in-game visuals would be transmitted to the player in the form of visual signals, matching the overlapping field of view of a normal person’s two eyes, which was 124 degrees, with the area of focused attention being about 25 degrees. This was consistent with reality.
Hearing and smell were also transmitted to the player in the form of signals, fully simulating the sounds and smells of the real world.
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After understanding the basic principles of VR game design, there were some basic design guidelines.
This site’s address for geniuses remembering one second: