Revisiting Lands End

started working on after launching the original Monument Valley and, being our first venture into VR, it took us a long, long time to get it right. But we ended up making something that felt more like a world than a game, and that’s what I always wanted from VR.

This January we finally went back to Land’s End. The game originally launched for Samsung Gear VR, but once we knew the Oculus Go was coming (and bringing with it even better visuals and a new hand controller), we wanted to update Land’s End to suit. This article is about the design decisions we took along the way.

The Oculus Go hand controller is probably the best 3DOF controller out there; it’s responsive and ergonomic, it fits in your hand more naturally than the Gear VR or Daydream ones and the trigger helps to balance your grip.

So, why haven’t we redesigned the game to use the hand controller for everything? Why have we stuck with ‘gaze-only’ mechanics like it’s still 2015 before hand controllers existed?

Land’s End is a VR adventure in which you move around the world by gliding from point to point. The key aim was for it to feel like exploring an actual place, for players to forget about the real world and be totally immersed in ours. We wanted it to feel like an awe-inspiring hike around a newly discovered neolithic monument.

It took us a long time to get that player experience right (that’s another story!) but the core element is that you play the whole game (moving around, solving puzzles, levitating giant blocks of stone) by just looking around, never interacting with a controller or worrying about wires — your only concern is the virtual world and after a while you forget about the real one.

Our aim as a studio has always been to make the joy we try to capture with our games accessible to as many people as possible. We have always wanted to bring Land’s End to more platforms but, until now, there have always been sacrifices we didn’t want to make (e.g. dealing with tangling headset cables for PC-powered VR).

That doesn’t mean we didn’t try! We made serious efforts to make a Rift version work and when hand controllers arrived for mobile VR we prototyped various ways of using hand controllers as the main interaction method.

The most successful thing we tried was something we called the Leash.

Leash prototype

In Land’s End, one of the key mechanics is the player’s ability to levitate certain objects ‘with their mind’. It felt pretty cool to use your hands to do the same thing (think Yoda!) but we found that once you give someone the ability to touch things, they want to do it all the time. Everything in the game was designed around gaze-only interactions, including the pacing. The immersion, relaxation and VR comfort of playing Land’s End comes from that pacing, and wanting to frantically interact with everything ruined the feeling of serenity and wonder that is fundamental to the experience.

In the end we realised that Land’s End only works as a hands-free experience, without headset cables, where the player is free to look around, move around and interact with the world without ever thinking about the real world.

So why even bother to update Land’s End for Oculus Go? The short answer is that the better optics, higher resolution and smoother framerate make it the best way yet to play Land’s End.

But we also asked ourselves, “If we’re not using the Go hand controller for gameplay, what can we use it for?”

Here’s what Kirsty Keatch, the programmer responsible for our hand controller work has to say about it:

Players have always been able to take photos in Lands End, but with the new controller we saw the opportunity to give them even more creative freedom whilst keeping the system intuitive. We went back and forth over a bunch of features but ended up settling on an implementation that improves photo taking by using the buttons for precise timing, adding guides for easier framing, recognising when they are holding the ‘camera’ in portrait and saving it correctly, and a general coat of polish over everything.

We have loved having the chance to revisit Land’s End and sprucing it up for 2018, and we’re really happy that the Oculus Go finally makes our game available to anyone interested in VR, regardless of what phone they have.

Give it a try and let us know what you think!

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