How to design characters in VR

Interview between : Jonathan Jennings and Tavis Taborek

Character design in the content of VR is tricky. When you place your player in the middle of the experience, the impact of the virtual world around them is much more real and immediate. Details that are already important in conventional game development become even more so in VR. 

Here are some of the ways you go about it.

I. Character design is typically considered its whole separate aspect of game development.  How does one design characters for a VR game? How is designing VR characters most different from conventional gamedev?

So the big difference between creating and establishing a character in VR is really giving them a sense of presence.  You want players to feel like they are sharing the same space and to have a degree of intimacy with the character they are playing as, working with, or competing against. In Vader Immortal the first time I stood face to face with Darth Vader I understood what happened anytime someone must have seen Vader show up in the starwards universe as his size and breathing tell an intense story about who he is as a character and his history. 

Moss is one of the best VR games I have played and Quill constantly looks at you, waves at you, and even motions for occasional high fives. Likewise in a game like Knockout league when you are face to face with a boxing opponent and they are staring you down there is a sense of life and intensity those characters exude as it looks like they want to pound you into the ground. 

Trying to accomplish something similar in GBF has been a challenge Having enemies shout at you, and me trying to increase their vocalizations and their acknowledgment of you and their environment has been an important focal point as well as the existing training droid intro in which the droid walks you through using weapons, and a basic user interface. So yeah I'd say creating a character who truly feels like they " fill the room" is one of the more different and challenging aspects of working on VR.

II. What are the best tools for designing characters for a VR game?

Does Unity have in-house support for VR character design? What are the other options, and what are their pros and cons? Are there web apps?

That's a great question there's not a lot of tools to help you make VR -specific characters but to be honest the process itself doesn't change much  I'm used characters in my VR games that i've also used in my teaching materials for classes where we make 2D or traditional 3D games it's the same exact asset.  

So constructing the character is the exact same It's designing them to feel " real" and in the same environment as the player that makes them different. So things like 3D audio, being eye-level, shorter than you, or taller than you to express their relationship to you ( Darth Vader is over 6 feet tall and that's important the first time you see him march down a hallway into your ship and see him look down at you at your actual height unless you're very tall). So it’s understanding your character’s size, dimensions, and vocal resonance all feel like they happen in the same space and are directly connected to whoever has the headset on.

III. Creating your own pre-designed characters vs. letting the player choose their avatars?

How do you decide whether to take control of your player's experience for the sake of upholding their vision, vs. giving that control to your players to give them agency?

This is a good question and one I still grapple with honestly. There's value in telling your player who they are because then they can roleplay and exist safely in the comfort that their actions aren't their own, it's the poor virtual Avatar whose body they are inhabiting right now who has to fight for their life. However, I know one of the simplest and most effective VR functions and applications for me is just having the option to give my character black skin similar to mine and allowing me to live in the VR truly in my own virtual skin which exists in the game. 

I think it comes down to understanding the goal of your experience if you want your player to roleplay and escape into someone else’s reality then not giving them the ability to customize an avatar is fine. For example, if I play Uncharted I'm playing as Nathan Drake and if any Uncharted VR game comes out I would expect to be Nathan Drake or his assistant but it all depends on what purpose and value your player has in the universe. 

I think character customization is great and you can come up with convincing simple avatars, one thing I do like about Facebook Horizons is their Avatar creation system which allows for a lot of customization and flexibility.  it feels very personalized and when I see other avatars in that space they feel like real and unique floating people. 

So yeah the answer to that question is largely dependent on what you want your player to feel and experience and how you want them to connect to the virtual world in your game

IV. What's your process for designing characters? From the time you get an idea for a character in your head, what happens between then and the time they're fully interacted and in the game?

So there's not a TON of characters in the current iteration of Galactic Bar fight but the main one you do encounter I call him King Tut (as in the tutorial) the intro droid you see when the experience first starts and immediately begins talking to you. 

So I'm not an artist, but first and foremost I have to think "why does this character exist?" and in King Tuts case I needed a character who could be my stand-in and whenever players begin Galactic Bar fight walk them through how to use blasters, swords, read their health gauge and then usher them into the main gameplay section so King Tut to that point is a virtual me talking to the players ( I voiced him too ). 

After knowing his purpose I scoured the Asset store because I had a tiny art budget but I would have loved ot have sat down with an artist and talked about King tut, his personality, how he should exist in space, and what his overall intrinsic values that I wanted to show up in his character design were. but like I said I had no art budget besides my personal funds so I found a friendly round floating robot who would hover and talk to you and not be intimidating and that was the visual style. 

After that was coming up with his "voice" and not just the vocalizations or words said but how he says the. Is he deferential? Is her Sarcastic? Encouraging? Witty? Rude? After deciding on somewhere between deferential and encouraging I began to write what Tut would say. Not just the directions he'd give but how he'd give them things such as " Oohhhh nice shot!" after the player shoots their first targets.

All that stuff the purpose, look, character voice, audio lines play into how that character should actually exist in a virtual space. I am a big Disney fan and one of my favorite rides is Pirates of The Caribbean and every pirate tells a story on that ride. through clothing, actions, voice, posture, lines, and I think about crafting a character like that. how do all these things marry together to craft a being that tells a small story in relation to our player?

Thank you so much for reading !