Thread by @_LucasRizzotto

Given that @WhereThoughts Go just launched, I wanted to create a thread showing a little bit about the process behind creating it & how messy making games can be😛

This is what the first 3-week prototype looked like: a room where people could say anything as an audio orb! 🎙️

I didn't know what this project would become at this time, but I was really intrigued. But I also immediately realized that people wouldn't say interesting things unless they were asked to. 🤔

So I made prompts! And then I made them physically reactive, which felt amazing. 🤾‍♂️

So now I needed to create levels! But I had never, EVER made a 3D world before. 😨

So I used my graphic design experience to create posters of what I wanted each level to FEEL like. The plan? Do whatever I could to reach that feeling 🤞 This kept things open and the pressure low

Sometimes I would impress myself and get to that feeling quite rapidly (some of you may recognize this as chapter 3)

... and sometimes I'd be way off, I mean what was I thinking here?

But then with time you slowly adjust things... tone the loud parts down...

... and eventually you polish your way into something that makes sense.

We're all at great at criticizing things and recognizing when something is bad. So just make something bad and criticize it until it's good. That ended up being my approach to level design.

Except with this level, this is the only level that for some reason I got right immediately from day 1.

I WISH ALL CREATION COULD BE LIKE THIS

By the way, thoughts initially did NOT have eyes, they were just orbs! But then in testing I realized how people were way more emotionally responsive to orbs with facial features... and adding it completely changed the game. People were kinder and paid more attention!

And this is a HUGE deal. In #VR you can essentially design how people are represented, so that means you are designing how people perceive each other!

At this point in development (5 months in) I realized I would have to re-build the entire experience. The codebase I made was so messy that rebuilding it would be faster - I also needed to make the game work for controllers instead of just @ultraleap hand tracking.

So I did.

Between that date and the release on the #OculusQuest today, I rebuilt the experience from scratch 3 more times to rectify rookie mistakes that led to all sorts of performance issues.

This was the hardest part about making this. The monotonous, endless rebuilding.

The first months working on a project are always the most exciting... but that last 20% is a huge, maddening and extremely time consuming task.

Being capable of grinding through that and finishing something is a huge showcase of discipline & willpower. I finally understood that.

And now it exists. It's out there. I hope you get to play it (and get a friend to do it too!).

If not, it's fine. hope you learned something from this thread 🤗

https://twitter.com/_LucasRizzotto/status/1205202244569833472