Games
Well, virtual reality anyway: the story of the Marty McFly game we’ve all been waiting for.
Back To The Future got everything wrong. We’ve almost reached 2015 and we still don’t have flying cars, self-tying shoes or pizza pills that expand in the oven. Way to get our hopes up and dash them, Robert Zemeckis.
That said, Back to the Future Part II wasn’t entirely off the mark. For instance, we do have hoverboards now, even if they’re not quite as cool as Marty McFly’s. That’s right: hoverboards are now a thing, thanks to one intrepid Australian developer. There is one catch, but it’s only a small one: you need to be wearing a virtual reality headset to use one.
Still, if you’ve got one of them, Kieran Lord, a Unity3d developer from Brisbane, can help you. He’s the creator of Hoverboards Inc, a new game in development that simulates the feeling of floating over the ground with little more than an Oculus Rift headset and a balancing board – the first prototype was actually just a plain old Nintendo Wii Fit Balance Board, but he’s created two more custom models since. He’s hard at work turning the concept into a futuristic racer, and after a successful showing at the PAX Australia expo earlier this month, we caught up with the man to find out more about the game, falling over lots, and his plans to bring it to the public.
What was your first ever experience with virtual reality? I've been in the games industry since about 2005 – I worked at Pandemic Studios, Krome and Strange Loop Games – but even before that it's pretty safe to say that games and making games have been a major part of my life since day one. My first experience with VR was back when I was a kid and they had a demo of Id software's Doom on a VFX1 headset at my local games store. It was heavy like wearing a bike helmet and the resolution was awful but even back then it was pretty clear that this stuff was the future.
What was the inspiration for the idea? It actually took a while to decide to make the hoverboard game. The aim from day one was to find a gameplay experience that felt "just like the real thing" when played in VR. Early on I built a lot of really simple prototypes to try out each idea, so you could really say that there's a long list of inspirations including Iron Man, Lord of the Rings, Magic Carpet, Pacific Rim and so on.
Admit it, it was Back To the Future, wasn’t it? Absolutely. The first prototype even had a parked DeLorean and the theme tune playing!
When did you first get the idea to combine a Wii Fit board with the Oculus Rift? Actually that was for the Magic Carpet prototype. The Wii Fit board is actually a really awesome device, you can use it in VR to move around in a way similar to riding on a Segway.
How long did it take to create a prototype? It would be easy to say that working on a VR game is a dream but actually it's been really hard. You basically have to re-learn nearly everything you know about designing games, especially user interfaces and controls.
There have been three prototypes of the hoverboard project now. The first was incredibly simple and was made basically as a joke the night before a panel I was on where we were discussing "The future of games and VR": making a Back to the Future demo seemed like a bit of a laugh.
The second prototype was an effort to model the physics of a 'real hoverboard', imagining it as if it had two repelling plates that would push away from surfaces if they got too close. It felt really good to ride and really responded well to subtle twists and movements of the board. But ultimately this prototype was a failure, as the unusual edge cases in the game's physics could cause all kinds of chaos... and those problems were taking up too much time to actually make the game.
The third prototype is the current one. It uses a simplified physics model. Instead of getting the 'feel' of riding the hoverboard right with physics it instead uses an overlapping set of pre-programmed behaviours to achieve this, which makes other parts of the game more complicated but removes the physics problems that made the second attempt unworkable.
Tell us what it’s like to pair the two. Is it hard to keep your balance? How many times have you fallen over? At first it was really easy to fall over, and absolutely I stacked it myself on many an occasion. People playing the game would compensate for movements and momentum that they thought they should be feeling. Now the game compensates for that in a number of ways.
It must be hard to recreate a device that doesn’t really exist? Actually I'd say the opposite: people don't really know what to expect, besides that the boards don't work over water. Being able to take liberties with the way the board moves without it being compared to a real thing is what allows the whole experience to be made to focus on only the things that VR does really well. Because the board doesn't catch your body as you move it feels far more sensitive than a real skateboard. In fact from talking to people I'm getting the impression that the experience feels somewhere between surfing and skating.
Tell us about how the game’s structure will work. Will there be races, multiplayer? Races are going to be a big part of the game, not the only event but probably the main one. While it's an amazing experience to be riding a hoverboard in VR and being able to look down and see your own body and board, it's not nearly as cool until you see someone else on a board tear past you and you think “That's what I'm doing right now!” Multiplayer is also something we've talked about a lot. It's one of those things that would make the game incredible but it also needs a ton of work, so we can't really say a lot more at this stage.
Who have you shown the tech to so far and what has the response been? Has anyone falling off in spectacular style? Recently we took the hoverboard project to PAX Australia. The plan originally was that we were just going to show the game privately, but the day before the show we got the chance to demo it to other developers at an open event and the response we got inspired us to demo the game publicly to folks attending the show.
We didn't have a booth, so we just carried the Wii Fit, Oculus and a laptop around in bags and set up the game randomly for people to try. At first I was worried we'd get into trouble... but everyone seemed totally cool with it whenever we set it up. The highlights of PAX for me at least were when someone called it "Best game of show" and getting Jerry Holkins [Tycho from the legendary Penny Arcade] to play it.
What’s the future plan for the project? Will we see a commercial release? That's the plan! It's hard to predict how VR devices are going to sell, when they'll be available, who will be buying them and so on. That makes it really difficult to get funding through publishers who like certainty in these sorts of things.
So despite everyone on the team being experienced at making big budget games, we're much more likely to be using options like Patreon and Kickstarter to make this game happen.
Will it be on PC? What about consoles? Hopefully both! I've had some interesting discussions with people regarding both of these options and at the present time I can't say with certainty what platforms it will be on.
What would you like to add next? The feature I want to add next? Cop-bots that chase you around like the ones in Wall-E, that would be so much fun. As for features I want but I can't have... being able to touch things in the world, step off the board and so on. One-day technology will let us experience virtual worlds just like we do the real one, but for the time being I have to be content with my hoverboard.
If money was no option, what would your hoverboard game look like? The goal would definitely be an open world game that would deliver on the experience of being in the future. Letting the player explore a world like they dreamed the future would be like as children, and doing so with their friends – while beating them at all kinds of events of course. Get the best gaming stories delivered straight to your inbox with the Red Bull Games newsletter.
