How Eve Valkyrie and Oculus Rift are rethinking the videogame spaceship

Format: PC/Oculus Rift Publisher/developer: CCP Release: 2014

CCP Games know about spaceships. The company has spent the past eleven years making Eve Online, an MMORPG in which players direct their hulking craft like vast units in a complex, social strategy game.

Eve Valkyrie’s spaceships are very different, though. Not only are they small, one-man fighters designed for rapid, real-time multiplayer battles. They’re designed for virtual reality, having been built from their first polygon to work with the Oculus Rift headset. When you’re no longer making a game to be played on a flat screen, but building something players are going to sit inside, everything changes.

“As we’ve been doing these tests at E3 and Eve Fanfest, we’re constantly saying to people: ‘move your head, look around,’” says CCP’s Andrew Robinson. As one of Valkyrie’s 3D artists, Robinson is partly responsible for modelling the avatars and spaceships players will climb inside.

“Then the missile lock,” continues Robinson. “Once you’ve done it once, people get it and start to look around.” The missile lock mechanic sits at Valkyrie’s core: in order to target enemy ships, you fix your gaze on them for a few seconds while holding down a trigger button on a gamepad. After those few seconds pass, you’ve got a lock, and release the trigger to launch a volley of missiles.

It’s a simple mechanic, but by tying aiming to looking, Eve Valkyrie – or EVR, as its original prototype was called – was one of the first games to make full use of innate abilities of the Rift. It convinced not just Eve Online fans, but CCP’s founders to let the small internal team continue to develop the project as a full game.

The aiming mechanic is just the tip of the asteroid when it comes to how space games need to adapt to better suit virtual reality. “Normally in games with a user interface, you can get away with things like putting the HUD in the corners of the screen,” says Sigurður G. Gunnarsson, Valkyrie’s senior programmer. “But in virtual reality that doesn’t really work, and we really need to re-think how you interact with the UI in the game and try to make it a part of the world around you.”

Valkyrie does that by building the normal elements of a HUD on to the real cockpit, turning what would normally be an aesthetic decision – where might a button look cool? – into something closer to the real practicalities of designing spaceships designed for quick combat.

The closer proximity between art and functionality means that it’s much harder to cut corners, or ‘fudge’ certain aspects as game designers used to. “When you are in virtual reality and when you have a stereoscopic view of the world, your sense of scale is totally different than when it’s on a flat screen,” says Gunnarsson. “When you create assets and you scale it wrong, you can definitely feel it, that this thing you remember being one metre wide in the real world is not one metre wide inside of the game. There’s also quite a lot of challenges with things like visual effects, and hacks and cheats you can get away with normally but if you do that in virtual reality, for example using sprites, they can just look flat.”

Eve Valkyrie, or EVR as it was known at E3 last year.

The upside of this is that those visual effects were used previously to paper over cracks in player’s sensory perception; to make them feel as if they were travelling fast, for example, even when they were just watching something on a screen. Eve Valkyrie and Oculus Rift have the opposite problem.

“We don’t really have to give the hard sell any more that 3D effects are happening, because it’s a much more tactile environment,” says Robinson. “You really feel like you’re inside it and you’re getting that sense of scale and depth much more than you were before, so from an artist point of view, it’s a really great environment to drop people into. Because we really don’t have to push as much fakery around to make you feel as if things are going on.”

As one of the first development studios to embrace the Rift on a large-scale project like Eve Valkyrie, CCP are pioneers, helping to answer many of the questions about how best to make games for virtual reality. They’re hopeful that they can make a great game, and the response has been great thus far, already making Valkyrie synonymous with the Rift. Do CCP worry that the stakes are higher than normal now, because a bad game could hurt people’s confidence in the entire platform?

“Not until you mentioned it,” says Robinson.

We profile more of the developers pioneering a new generation of Oculus Rift games in our new issue. Details here.

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