One of my early joys in virtual reality was the HTC Vive’s Final Approach from Phaser Lock Interactive. It put you in the middle of a virtual reality landscape, as if you were standing in a table with miniature toys. You could reach into the air, grab a plane, and set it on a path for landing at an airstrip.
It was a magical and immersive app, the kind of thing you could only do in VR. And now Phaser Lock Interactive is back with a new game, dubbed Final Assault, that turns the same kind of experience into a real-time military strategy game. Now you can stand in the middle of a World War II tabletop battlefield and command an assault on an enemy position. You can use your finger to touch objects on a menu, unleashing new infantry, vehicle, or air forces on the enemy.
I spoke with Todd Bailey, creative director at Phaser Lock Interactive, and senior software engineer Ed Gruber at a recent Oculus Rift event in San Francisco. We talked about what they learned from VR and how they tackled their new game for the Oculus Rift VR headset. They’re showing the game off this week at the Oculus Connect 5 event in San Jose, California.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
GamesBeat: When did you do Final Approach?
Todd Bailey: Final Approach was three years go.
Ed Gruber: It released with the launch of the Vive.
Bailey: Right. But we started working on it in the summer of 2015.
Gruber: We shipped, I guess, March or April of 2016.
GamesBeat: How did that go, from your perspective?
Gruber: Considering it was a brand-new platform, not many units out there–
Bailey: Sales were pretty good. We got a lot of critical acclaim. We won a couple of awards. We got nothing but positive reviews. There just weren’t enough headsets out there.
GamesBeat: There are about 15 levels to that one, you said?
Bailey: Right, 15 levels.
Gruber: Particularly for the launch.
Bailey: We were trying to make a full-size PC game. We tried not to skimp on the level design. A lot of games came out with only one or two levels, games that were more demo-like. We definitely pushed ourselves to make a full game.
Gruber: That was about nine months of development.
Bailey: The team fluctuated between about six people and 12 people.
GamesBeat: How would compare that to this team and this game?
Bailey: We’ve had a lot more different people come through on this game. We’ve probably had about 20 developers altogether, but not at the same time.
Gruber: At any given time it’s been 10 to 12, and we’ve had two years.
GamesBeat: This is the combat version of Final Approach?
Bailey: Basically. We loved Final Approach, and we wanted to bring a combat aspect to that kind of gameplay.
GamesBeat: At least in this level, it’s more about ground combat. Is that consistent?
Gruber: It depends. We gave you a certain division, but we actually have six different divisions — three United States, three German — and they each have different vehicles in them. Some are more air-focused, some are more infantry-focused, and some are more vehicle-focused.
GamesBeat: You’re moving around a lot in this one.
Bailey: In Final Approach you could kind of stand in one place to play it, yeah. The level was built around you. These levels, we want you to move from one side of the map to the other. We definitely give you the ability to hide units behind things on the ground. You can set up ambushes and things like that.
GamesBeat: There’s a certain simplicity here compared to a PC RTS. You’re controlling only a handful of units.
Bailey. There are a lot of things that we found–when we started off our first few attempts at making an RTS, we tried to do everything. But because you don’t have a keyboard, it’s hard to do things like setting up groups. We pushed to a more action-oriented style, which is one of the reasons why we moved away from base-building and toward more strategic combat.
GamesBeat: It feels like you’re identifying some lanes where you can send a lot of units.
Bailey: We wanted the infantry to move down the lanes to keep the action going all the time. To keep either side from turtling up, which is a standard tactic in a normal RTS. Here, neither side controls the infantry. They always move down the lanes. They’re always pushing. That keeps the action moving for you, toward the middle of the field and toward the enemy base.
GamesBeat: They feel like the minions in a MOBA.
Bailey: We took a lot of inspiration from how MOBAs handle their creep lanes. That’s the same way we do our infantry lanes.
GamesBeat: What does the player want to control? Where do they need to develop their skills to win battles.
Bailey: It’s a couple of things. One, you want to be able to identify what units your enemy is using, because you’ll have units that are very good counters to those things. If you’re playing against someone who’s using a lot of planes, you’ll want to strategically place your anti-aircraft vehicles. Those vehicles don’t have any ground defenses of their own, though, so you’ll want to have another unit with them to keep them from getting destroyed by other ground vehicles, but they’re deadly against air targets.
We looked a lot of ways to balance the different types of gameplay style. The infantry gameplay style is completely different, though. You’ll get trucks that will spawn more infantry units, and strategically placing those across the map will help you push the lanes. But again, like the anti-air, they’re defenseless, so you need another vehicle nearby to protect them from being overrun.
GamesBeat: I’ve seen a couple of other RTS-like games in VR. How do you learn from what else is going on in the space?
Bailey: We’ve definitely played all of them. We wanted to look and see what other people were doing. We feel like there’s a different style to what we’re doing. Our game is more action-focused. We wanted to do the World War II thing so we could be distinct. One advantage of the World War II setting is that players look at the units and know exactly what they do. A tank is a tank. A jeep is a jeep. We don’t have to explain a lot of that up front. Players instantly get it. That was the direction we wanted to take.
GamesBeat: What’s it been like doing a VR game with a couple of finished projects behind you?
Bailey: Our second game, Twisted Arrow, was a first-person shooter, and that was a lot of fun. Every time we make a new game we learn a lot more about the hardware, what we can push, how we can get our graphics to look better, how to improve the controls. Controls are one of the things in VR where nobody is 100 percent there yet. We’re all still learning. But every time we release a game we get better.
GamesBeat: How do you feel about the VR market at this point?
Bailey: It’s booming. Every day there’s new articles, more games coming out, more hardware coming out. Oculus is pushing the Santa Cruz to come out next year. PlayStation has been amazing for bringing more people in and making it mainstream. We’re on all three platforms — Oculus, Vive, and PSVR — and we plan to combine them into one audience. That’s our intention. Vive and Oculus play together already, and our intention is to bring PSVR players into the fold as well. Never say never. I think the guys at Sony are as happy as we are to get as many people as they can into VR.