I’ve been quiet since the holidays, but it certainly isn’t for lack of activity.  For my day job, February marked the release of Brass Tactics, a real time strategy game reinvented for VR headsets.  The creation of Brass was really a fascinating adventure, one of the most interesting and invigorating creative challenges I’ve had in a lot of years.

Oculus gave us pretty much carte blanche to recreate a real-time strategy game that took advantage of the Rift platform as well as the Touch controllers.  This allowed us to kick off the process with a delightful freedom on how to make the controls of an RTS feel tactile and engaging.  We started with crazy-woop-woop-nuts ideas, but honed the game down to something that felt familiar yet fresh.

I’ve written a couple of blogs about this process on the Hidden Path website:  The first blog post talks about our discovery of how we wanted to represent the world and how the player might interact with it.  We started from a very wide set of possibilities that explored how to show the most information to the player with the most comfort.  What we ended up with was quite clean, and felt comfortable for most people.  Here’s the first ugly prototype reel.

The second blog was about how the player interacts with their troops, both selecting them and issuing orders.  This seems simple but we went through a long process to figure it out.  What we ended up with feels familiar, like using a mouse, but definitely embraces the physical nature of Touch.  Directing your troops becomes like being a symphony director calling out orders fluidly, a dance that makes war happen.  It was an achievement that we’re very proud of.  Even more ugly here!

I still have one more prototype video that I need to accompany with a blog post.  Luckily the pressure’s been off lately so I’ve been able to get back to working on Auto Fire.  I’ll try to update y’all with where that’s been going shortly.