Three Tips for Developing a VR Port
When a VR port was brought to the table as an idea for Kibbi Keeper, I was a little bit nervous. Most of our team didn’t have much VR experience and I had never produced a VR port or game before. We were already having to navigate an unfamiliar genre with quite a large art scope, but the more our lead team thought about it, the more we wanted to give it a try. Besides, who could resist seeing a Kibbi in VR?
While it might be unusual for a small team of 15 people to develop a VR port along with the development of the base game, our team learned a lot from the experience. Here are some takeaways I discovered while producing Kibbi Keeper VR alongside the base game:
(1) Start small and take small steps.
When developing a game from scratch, I always like to start with the MVP (minimal viable product). For example: Our MVP for Kibbi Keeper was a herd of the default Unreal Engine men chasing “food” that the player could throw, attacking objects that the player could target, and running away from an alarm a player could place on the ground. For VR, we started even simpler: Get a Kibbi in VR space.
This was our “hello world” of Kibbi Keeper VR. Because we were developing our VR port alongside the base game, the first few steps were small and simple. This helped us identify the risks and answer questions that allowed us to ensure that a VR port was feasible:
- Can we get the player in the same space as a Kibbi? Is it still cute?
- What if the Kibbi is moving around?
- What if the player looks at the Kibbi up close?
- Does our art style work in VR?
There were a lot of questions to answer, so we started off the development of our port very slowly, trying to answer each of these questions before committing too much time or effort. Once we discovered that the Kibbi were still cute in VR and that our art style would still look okay, we felt more comfortable committing to the port.
(2) What makes your game great for VR?
After we knew that a VR port was feasible, we had to figure out what mechanics were going to carry over into the port. What mechanics were fun? What mechanics were frustrating? What mechanics are risky?
Kibbi Keeper focuses a lot on exploring a vast and beautiful environment while solving puzzles with your new companions. While we may have been able to successfully port the puzzle-solving and exploration mechanics to VR, that was really never our goal. The appeal of Kibbi Keeper VR was interacting with the Kibbi and watching them do cute things in the game space, so we chased the charm by focusing on ways that the player could interact with the Kibbi. This essentially became one of the guiding design pillars of the port. Anything that would make people squeal in delight while playing the base game would make a great mechanic for Kibbi Keeper VR.
(3) Some games might not work as a 1–1 port, and that’s okay!
Somewhat related to the second point, sometimes a VR port will be more fun and more successfully developed if it isn’t a direct one-to-one port of the game. This was really important to keep in mind for the development of Kibbi Keeper VR, since it allowed us to bypass questions and risks we didn’t have time to address.
As an example, a big consideration for any VR game is the performance. In VR, it is highly recommended that the game be kept at a stable 90 FPS so that players will not get motion sick. This was always something we were cautious and worried about as we bumped up against performance issues while developing the base game. Our solution for VR was to restrict the player to a simplified hub space, where they could play with the Kibbi to their heart’s content. We were already focused on the mechanics that allowed the player to play with the Kibbi, so this was a natural step in the VR port’s development.
Another example are the mini-games that are exclusive to Kibbi Keeper VR. What started as an experiment by one of our VR programmers ended up making up the bulk of the VR port. The mini-games feature the Kibbi playing one of three games with the player for points. Not only did this increase the replayability of the pet simulator-like port, but it also fed into our natural forming design pillar of our VR port of playing with the Kibbi.
While Kibbi Keeper is usually compared to games like Slime Rancher and Pikmin, Kibbi Keeper VR shares a closer likeness to Nintendogs. Looking back, we may have been able to achieve a one-to-one port, but we were all happy with our choice to experiment with mechanics and let the fun of the VR port guide itself.
Kibbi Keeper is now coming soon to Steam! You can wish list Kibbi Keeper here and you can read more about the development of Kibbi Keeper here. Also keep an eye out on Steam for our VR port beta, which will be coming to Steam shortly after launch!
