Freudian Free Fall, or FFF for short, was the second school project I took part in at The University of Skövde. The game itself is best described as a VR Shmup/Flying Simulator (flying simulator as in a walking simulator in the air and not as MS Flight Simulator) with a hinduistic and psychoanalytic theme. Sound crazy? It was. Both in the sense of the final game aswell as the development process. We spent 10 weeks on the project with a total team size of about 15 people, this time everyone had worked on atleast one big project before (mine being Technorun). Even tough we all had prior experiences working with a game project this big and even tough we had swore to not make the same mistakes again we hit a few bumps in the road. I will tell you a bit more about this and the development in general further down the page if you are interested.
Essentialy the game let's you take control over the main character Chitesh as he explores his repressed memories in a dreamlike existence while daydreaming at work. The game has a very strong focus on narrative and not so much on actual gameplay. For me as a game designer, who wants to create engaging and challenging game situations for players to experience, this didn't give me a lot to work with. Especially because how the game was initially pitched before the project: "Like asteriods in 3D with VR-googles" That explanation gave us designers quite a different idea of what kind of game we were going to make. The game we actually made is a much more slow paced exploration game where the shooting mechanic is secondary to the exploration of the narrative and the game world. Down below is the trailer our grapichs team made for the game.
The first version of the game we designed was supposed to take place in a single cylindrical chamber as shown in the images below (credit to our artists Agnes and Erik). The gameplay idea was that the player would shoot at the moving blue sphere to uncover it's core and complete the level. For each hit pieces of the blue shell would come off and gradually fill up the room creating floating obstacles the player had to dodge. If the player survived long enough to break the whole shell, a voice over would explain a piece of the story and the player would advance to the next level. While testing we found that this idea wasn't gonna cut it at all. Testing showed that the players thought the gameplay was flat and quickly became tiresome. The reasons were many, to mention a few dogde floating shards while flying in VR isn't as easy as it sounds. We also didn't know how to give the gameplay any meaningfull progression since the room's size and scale limited us quite a bit. We decided to focus on making the movement and control scheme of the game feel just right and then come back to the problem with gameplay later, thinking that a fully functional movement system in place would shed some light on things.
The process of designing the movement and control scheme was a painful one. We decided to use an Oculus Rift, as it was the easiest gear to het hold of from school, in combination with an X-box controller for our game. Almost every idea we came up with would make some or all of the testers motion sick. Any movement in a direction that wasn't directly forward or backwards caused some kind of discomfort for at least some players. Rotation, strafing or rolling gave almost everyone the need to stop playing. We solved this by letting the players control the movement with their heads. So you would point your head in the direction you want to go and use the left stick to start moving. This worked great to reduce the nausea but did really work with all the flying and shooting. This made the gameplay possibly even more boring than the already flawed past version. We then had a little mid-project crisis around week 6 (out of 10) and decide to rework the concept.
We decided that the narative was the most important aspect of the game followed by the VR-headset. I came up with the idea to place the blue shapes around a labyrinth like level instead of a single room and reduce the amount of time it took the destroy each shell. This gaves us a much more slow paced game with more focus on exploring the world and narrative while still keeping the VR-experience, shooting and flying. We could use most of the work we had already used, the only completely new things was more 3D models and the level design (both of which we didn't have much to begin with).
I was happy with the change in direction which meant I got to work on level design (the education was focused on pure game design). We found a nifty little online app called 3DTin (sadly they closed down 2016) that we used to make some 3D sketches of the level. Sadly we didn't have much time by this stage in the project but still managed to get together 3 or 4 sketches. The images below shows two of the concepts, the right one is actually a first draft of the one that made the game.
Blue meant a destroyable wall, yellow a sphere and green a painting. The cylinder on the right is the final room where we decided to put the "boss" battle, which is a modified version of the previous version. As a said, we were short on time so not much time was spent on iteration once we had a concept that we felt was soild. Had we had time to do some more testing we would have noticed that the steep vertical shafts was extremley uncomfortable to fly through. We designers completed the whole layout in Unity using a modular kit and tweaked the colission and then handed it over to our 3D artist who decorated and did the lightning. Sadly the only decoration we had is some paintings and some (very nice looking) flowers but I am still proud what the team managed to produce in the last 4 or so weeks we had left when we decided to change our direction. Down below is an image of the finished level inside of Unity and another of a modified version of the first draft.
A small portion of the old team of 15 (including myself) is curently working on improving the game before a submission to SGA later this spring. We're going to improve the level design, make more decorative props and fix bugs and do some polish. That game will hopefully be avaliable to download some where but if you want to try the game played in the trailer you can contact me in some way. Thanks for reading!