Our Inside XR Design series highlights examples of great XR design. Today we're looking at shotguns in a few different VR games to find out what makes them feel great in the player's hands. In doing so, we will reveal the secret of making anything Feel great in VR.
You can find the full video below or continue reading for an adapted text version.
Okay, we'll get right to it… if you're asked 'What's your favorite shotgun in VR?' If I ask: You can probably picture this pretty quickly. But can you tell me? Definitely what does that shotgun Do you feel very good?
This is a bit of a trick question because the answer boils down to 50 different little details that determine how the shotgun feels in the player's hand.
Today we're going to look at some of my favorite shotguns in VR and dig into all those little details to talk about how they add to the feeling. And at the end of this… I would argue that if we can understand what constitutes something: shotgun Feel great in VR, we can figure out how to do it anything Feel great in VR.
Arizona Sunshine 2 – Sunshine is Short
Let's start with one of my favorite shotguns in all of VR. That would be the sawn-off shotgun. Arizona Sunshine 2– let's call it Sunshine Shorty.
Only look at this thing, go. It's incredibly satisfying to use. However From where?
First of all, it is a pump action. You can't beat a pump-action shotgun in VR. Two-handed interactions in VR are always interesting, and making the player make such an instinctive and well-known gesture will always make them feel bad. Pumping the shotgun to load the next round is a clear extension of the 'Guided Movement' concept I introduced in the previous section, and is an example of how such movements can instill knowledge in players. feeling.
The way Sunshine Shorty reloads also has great little details. In many VR games, you can reload the gun by touching the magazine or bullet to the right place on the gun. Arizona Sunactually you need slide bullet into the gun. The developers made sure this felt great by adding a special hand pose to show the player pushing the bullet into the gun.
This little detail adds a lot to the feel of the gun, as it transforms reloading from simply tapping one thing to performing another, a gesture that more captures the fantasy of sliding bullets into a shotgun. And more importantly, still it feels good without being boring. You could say the interaction is like this: generous to the player… you don't need to get the movement or position perfectly right for it to work.
But the movements themselves are only part of what makes it. using The shotgun is satisfactory. Providing feedback to the player intent It's also critical, and the easiest way to do that is with great sound and tactility.
And I get the sounds Right is everything.
Let's hear how much less satisfying it is to use Sunshine Shorty with weak sounds than with strong sounds:
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Unmute for sound
sounds coming out A lot a difference.
Getting the shotgun sound for a shotgun just right It is very important. As someone who has used a real shotgun, I can't say that the pumping sound of the Sunshine Shorty is very impressive. realisticBut remember, the goal is feeling Pumping a shotgun isn't just playing a perfect copy of a sound. This shotgun has just the right amount of crackle, rattle, and metallic sound to give it a very satisfying feeling every time you pump it.
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Turn up the volume for sound.
And even though I can't let me show you Tactile information in the video can be almost as useful as the sound itself, as it links specific weapon sound effects to different positions of the weapon. For example, when you pump the gun, you should feel a tactile rumble in your pumping hand, but not in your trigger hand.
And again, both sounds and haptics are about giving feedback when the player does something. When a player pumps the gun, you convey to them that they are doing something right by giving them a sound effect and haptic rumble feedback.
Another feedback is seeing the shotgun shell fly out of the gun after being pumped. This also reiterates that the player is validly interacting with the shotgun.
And there is one very small detail that the developers added here. In most real-life shotguns, the bullet ejection point is on the side of the gun so the bullet is ejected. far from the user. But Sunshine Shorty has a launch gate on him. top shotgun, just to give the feedback of ejecting the bullet even more visible for players. I love it.
There's a huge thing we haven't talked about yet about what makes this shotgun feel great in VR. These would be the things the player actually fires the gun at -most. You can literally make everything gun-related (sounds, effects, settings, etc.) perfectly, but if the player pulls the trigger and the enemy slowly falls to the ground, it definitely won't feel good.
Arizona Sunshine 2 It might be a bit overdone with the visual impact and sound effects when shooting zombies, but damn it feels great. The important thing is that the impact on the target correctly matches the sound and recoil of the weapon. Since the shotgun sounds In order for it to be powerful when shooting, the target you are shooting at must be satisfactorily impacted to provide the feedback of this expectation.
So Sunshine Shorty feels great for all the reasons we mentioned. But we can also learn a lot by noticing where things could be better. If I could just snap my fingers and do it, these are the improvements I would like to see in this gun:
First: Having an animated transition between holding the bullet and sliding it into the gun in hand poses will make the reloading process look visually smoother.
Second: While the gun works realistically in terms of pumping and loading, when we visually look at the chamber we can see that the next bullet coming out of the gun is not actually loaded into the barrel. The cartridge remains there until the chamber closes and then appears inside the barrel to be ejected after the shot.
And Third: There is no clear way to know when the shotgun is fully loaded with shells, unless you count as you reload. This usually means you'll put another bullet in the gun but throw it on the ground because it won't fit. This happened to me constantly while playing games. Giving players an audio cue to indicate when the gun has been fired almost full and later completely hail is a subtle way to prevent this – and you'll see exactly that in the next shotgun we'll talk about.