S02E09: Design Deep Dive – Half-Life: Alyx
How could we not?
Valve’s Half-Life: Alyx is a masterpiece in immersive design implementation, even if the scope of its vision doesn’t match up with some enthusiasts’ expectations for a wealth of radical new, envelope-pushing embodied IxD techniques.
In this episode, we touch on such sub-topics as
- Overlay interfaces (menus)
- World-as-interface (‘storage’ systems etc.)
- Spatial puzzles
- Interacting with the objects and environments
- Character interactions
- Sound design and music
…and that’s not even to delve into game design considerations such as combat, pacing, or more abstract topics such as how Valve handles way-finding and embeds non-verbal signifiers. (Hint: If it’s red, you can probably either blow it up or grab it!)
(N.B. We left locomotion off the list in part because it’s common to almost all VR games, and in part because it’s better covered by Valve team members themselves, as in this video, also mentioned in the episode.)
Our discussion is spoiler-free, but you’ll probably need to either have played Alyx yourself or watched a few gameplay videos in order to follow along.
The gist of our discussion is that Valve’s (game) design philosophy brought into VR and scaled up to a full-sized AAA title necessitates keeping players on a relatively short leash. What Alyx lacks in latitude — i.e., in terms of accommodating player ingenuity and/or silliness (you can’t toss weapons from one hand to another, for instance, as in Boneworks or other physics-based shooty sandboxes) — it balances out in precision, slickness, and polish. If you don’t mind Valve’s veteran designers sticking with their studio’s secret sauce and effectively writing the playbook, almost everything you can do in Alyx feels meticulous.
The puzzles (above) are a highlight for Aki, as they very much dovetail with spatial affordances without presuming that players have a wealth of prior experience with VR or a massive physical play-space. The “constellation” puzzle in particular — something very similar to which we’ve seen before in Funomena’s Luna — feels thoughtfully designed to accommodate newcomers to “6DoF logic”.
6DoF logic? Let me elaborate. Consider how straightforward it is to walk around a tracked volume in a tethered headset — it feels more or less like normal walking. In this instance, you’re exercising 6DoF logic without even consciously trying, because the actions you’re performing are selfsame as in unmediated reality.
Now consider how people start to draw as if constrained to a flat plan the first time they dive into Tilt Brush. It can take some time to re-train yourself to “draw” with six degrees of freedom along three axes. You have to consciously re-frame your intentions and effortfully re-figure your actions so that a normally 2D exercise (drawing) is translated into a 3D volume (essentially sculpting!).
It’s a similar thing with the “constellation” puzzle in Alyx: A children’s exercise like join-the-dots becomes just cognitively demanding enough when translated into 3D that the puzzles are satisfying to solve without feeling like clunky, sudden departures from the bread-and-butter gameplay that is a-shootin’ and a-lootin’. They break up the usual activities without feeling insultingly easy or confoundingly esoteric.
We could’ve talked for a lot longer than the hour we recorded, and I must abstain from this stream-of-consciousness companion blog post before I bore you or cease to make sense. Suffice to say, if you own a VR headset and up-to-spec PC and have not yet jumped into Alyx, it’s worth a whirl even if you don’t like gunplay.
I, for one, am extremely excited to see what rolls off the Valve production line next, regardless of length, scope, or whether it has anything to do with the beloved Half-Life IP. But given the company’s private status and fluid creative M.O., it’s almost impossible to predict what Valve’s next move will be. I relish the surprise.
– Dooley
