VR Game Product Design with Pillow’s Willow : Talk
Monthly Sessions with Product Design Holland
Recently we’ve been lucky enough to start Product Design Holland. A monthly series of talks with some of The Netherlands premier product designers.
This session we welcomed the product designers of Pillow’s Willow Thijs Schipper and Merijn Vogelsang.
Pillow’s Willow are VR Game Designers who are one of very few studios really diving into the limitations and advantages of the VR Medium.
The team pitched their Demo at GDC (Game Developer Conference) in San Francisco just over a fortnight ago with a great response.
Watching the video above it becomes clear why the response have been so good. What they have achieved is truly amazing.
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They discussed 4 key points which we’ve adopted as the format for the session each month:
- What was the design challenge?
- What is the design approach?
- What did you learn?
- Demo the product…
This allows us to get great insights on what it takes to design a VR game directly from the design team.
Watch the teaser before talk
Watch the teaser about the game before you watch the designer talk.
Watch the designer talk
Here is the Product Design Holland talk, it’s a little long, but well worth it if you’re interested in VR UX design.
Key Points from the talk
- Peter the founder of Pillow’s Willow came up with the concept for two game characters Pillow and Dragow who appear in children's dreams. So the user is walking around in a ‘dream world’.
- The first game about Dragow is created for the Samsung Gear VR because of the user base size on that platform. Plus, the Gear VR system is much simpler from an interaction perspective, less moving parts.
- The team is now focusing fulltime on the game Dragow
- Pillow’s Willow will be the next game built on HTC Vive or Oculus Rift
- In the game the sun has been kidnapped and you have to get it back. This is your main mission in the game.
- The system needs to be easy to interact with… Focus is on children, parents and people who are into gaming.
- You collect fire flies and interact with objects in VR
- The Gear VR has limited control methods for control so we have to be creative
- Explaining the doll house perspective in VR and benefits
- Reducing vection and using a static reference
- We then go into more detail on the Interaction System and how we’re not actually moving a character instead the world moves around the user.
- Plus talk about the design goals around the control scheme
- Two inputs on Gear VR, one button and head rotation
- Poke, grab, resource which is the fire fly’s
- Simplify. Simplify. Simplify.
- Discussing game play and modalities
- The team decided to decided to just have poke or hold with heaps of Audio and video feedback so the player knows they can do something and know when it worked.
- Consistency is everything
- Fantastic question session
Conclusion
We hope you enjoyed the talk please follow us for next months session. We have Matte! Nande? discussing animated movie product design. Here at Bankai we’re always wanting to share with the Medium Community. Leave any feedback so we can improve the article and thanks again.
