Flury thought it would be a hard problem to solve, but his co-founder at Drool Brian Gibson had an easy fix. But VR headsets have limited fields of view, and playing Thumper in PSVR's 100-degree field of view made the game feel slow and unexciting. On 2D monitors, Thumper had a super-wide field of view of about 150 degrees that helped the space feel deeper and heightened the sense of speed. First, the field of view had to be adjusted. Flury realized that while the player is travelling fast in Thumper, the travel is generally locked at a constant speed because it's a rhythm game.Įxcited about the possibility of bringing the game to VR after all, Drool got a dev kit and found that many of the fundamental issues in converting the game to VR could be addressed with little difficulty. When the eyes see that you're speeding up or slowing down, but your body doesn't feel the corresponding forces, nausea happens. He attended a GDC China talk about motion sickness in VR, where he learned that many of the problems people experience were due to changes in acceleration. The assumption was that something like Thumper would be a similarly awful experience in VR, but Flury looked a but further into the idea just because he knew there were lots of marketing opportunities in the segment. His first experiences with VR were 'very negative,' roller coaster and skydiving demos on Oculus DK1 that made him very ill. Obviously, lots of things changed over the game's seven year path to release, including the addition of VR support.įlury wasn't a big supporter of VR early on. Speaking at the Game Developers Conference Monday, Drool co-founder Marc Flury said when he first started working on the game in 2009, it was supposed to be an Xbox 360 title. However, one of the standout stars of the PlayStation VR launch, the critically acclaimed rhythm game Thumper, was never designed with VR in mind. Developing for virtual reality is a very different beast from developing for standard 2D monitors, so much so that people have generally accepted that the best VR games are built from the ground up for VR.

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