What did we learn?

A few weeks ago at the VR hackaton I was part of the biggest Hackastory team ever. Last monday evening we suddenly found ourselves at IDFA DocLab presenting that work. We were invited to show our game at a small meetup, with just a handful of other VR creators. There we presented our work in progress to one another and gave each other feedback. These other people in the room were international VR makers like Gabo Arora (Waves of Grace) and Ziv Shneider (RecoVR: Mosul) who had their current work on display in the exhibition downstairs.

And we were standing there with a project that we’d made in only one weekend, at a hackaton.

In two days we made a prototype for a two player VR cardboard game called Dilemma, complete with animation intro’s and a whole background story. In this game one person is inside a 3D maze (a woman) and the other one is outside of it (the man). The person outside has to help te person inside so she can get out. But… the man has a story driven dilemma that raises the question whether he even wants to help her get out or not.

The week after our hackaton we already tested our game at Playground festival in Breda, on some people with little to no experience with VR. There we found out that our biggest problem was that the game was way to hard to get trough in the beginning. We had to help people a lot and even then they walked by this hallway entrance a least 5 times before going inside. This made that there was no one actually paying much attention to the story.

Our conclusion: we had to make the game easier, so there would be more room to tell the story.

But, VR makers do look different at a project like this than other people do. And they told us something we kind of knew already, but didn’t want to know: that there is no room for both gameplay and a whole background story. And that therefore the story is the thing that has to go, not the other way around.

Our game was named after the dilemma the character outside of the cube has to face. But also because our big team had to face the dilemma of combining gameplay and story, instead of letting one of those arise from the other. And after IDFA DocLab a third dilemma originated. Should we strip the game of it’s story, even when 5 storytellers worked on it?

And most of all, will all these dilemma’s lead to the game losing it’s therefore ironic name?