Environmental Redirection
This page is a stub, please expand it if you have more information.| Environmental Redirection | |
|---|---|
| Information | |
| Type | Room-scale |
| Required Devices | None |
| Description | Design the game in a way to allow the player to move in circles in the play area. Players will never hit physical walls of the play area. |
| Pros | No artificial locomotion or teleport, no VR sickness |
| Cons | Requires meticulous game design, large play area requirement |
| Creator | Triangular Pixels |
| Examples | Unseen Diplomacy |
Environmental Redirection is a Locomotion Method.
Additional Information
How do you mess with the environment to make it feel bigger?
We split up the player area available into four quadrants, let's just say 4 rooms for now. Each room is blocked off by a door. When you open a door, the room in front of you loads. When you step into that room, the door shuts and the room you just left is loaded out. This means you can walk in circles, going in and out of lots of small rooms, with those rooms taking up the space previous rooms were in - ‘non-euclidean space’.
It’s not quite that simple though - if you just did that you would know you’re walking in circles in a tiny space! So we resort to some really smart level design to stop that from happening;
- We distract the player in every room with ever something visually intensive or a cognitive challenge - this means the player subconsciously forgets where they came from and increases the chances that they are moving around within a room.
- We have a particular arrangement of rooms which means that in a special room type, the player actually ‘backs up’ on them self and walks through the same door they came in from. This means you are not always walking in the same direction around.
- We have lifts, which means you also go in and out via the same door, again - stopping the same direction around.
- We make sure to give the player a sense of location as soon as possible - so the second room is always a ‘vista’ room.
- We create rooms that are much bigger than the tracked area, but still actually only have platforms where the player can walk that are within the tracked area.[1]