Tom is an expert in all things Fortnite or the latest RPG release, but is probably spending too much time on the latest EA FC game.
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Moss Book One and Book Two are two of my favorite VR games. They’re not technical showcases to the same degree as Half-Life: Alyx or Asgard’s Wrath, instead boasting interesting player perspective, atmosphere, and puzzles that work wonderfully in virtual reality. I was excited to see how Polyarc would transfer the game to flat-screen devices, and having played Moss: The Forgotten Relic, I came away as curious and intrigued as I was impressed.
The collection is great, much like the VR versions are. Following the lovable Quill on her journey, you take on well-designed puzzles in a whimsical world. The translation has worked really well, with the only downside being the lack of scale that playing in VR gives the setting. You’re not surrounded by towering trees and curious deer in the same way – it’s a traditional ‘small character in a big world’ story you’ve played in platformer games before. That does mean The Forgotten Relic isn’t as pretty as the original versions were.
Throughout, though, I couldn’t help but think about how Polyarc transferred the game from VR to standard systems so well. It’s not something we’ve seen much of. Games have been released on standard systems first and made their way to VR, but rarely the other way around. How did Polyarc do it? What was difficult about it? I spoke to Tyler Walters, Technical Art Director on the game, to answer those questions.
“Our process began with a proof of concept prototype years ago,” he told me. “That gave us confidence as a studio that the games would be fun and engaging on flat devices without needing to rebuild everything from scratch. It was clear to the team at this point that input paradigms, gameplay cameras, and cinematics were going to be the bulk of the work needed to land our vision.”
However, as Walters says, “it was no simple task, requiring a lot of hard work and dedication from everyone involved.” Since the Moss games were never developed with the translation to flat-screen in mind, Polyarc had to do a lot of technical work to ensure the game still played well.
Walters explained exactly what had to be done. “Removing motion-tracked controllers from the equation meant that we needed to build a new fluid interaction system using a joystick/mouse controlled cursor. For this, we took an approach that is considered 2.5D, initially mapping the cursor location on screen in 2D for reliability with input, which is then projected into the world as a 3D visual to maintain a sense of groundedness for the Reader being a character and not just a UI element.
“In VR, we did not have to worry about depth perception because of stereo rendering and natural visual perception. On a flat screen, this became a core challenge in translating the experience as we needed to be sure players wouldn’t miss jumps or important design elements due to camera and perception imbalances.
“We opted to handcraft every detail of camera movement and rotation as a means to lead players and frame essential gameplay elements throughout each level, removing the need for players to reorient their view of the world to understand the objectives or feel comfortable navigating.
“In VR, the player is the director and can choose to look at whatever they wish. Being able to add cinematic cameras and show the story in a movie-like representation allowed us to hone in on emotional elements and get closer to the characters. In many instances, we felt like these new perspectives elevated the game emotionally in unexpected ways, often giving the development team a sense of awe seeing our own content for the first time in this format. These are just a few buckets of work that took the majority of our focus, but behind the scenes we went all in on elements of audio, VFX, haptics, rendering, etc, to all feel native to each platform that we shipped on.”
That’s what’s most important: making Moss The Forgotten Relic feel good to play. There will always be a degree of being able to tell that a game was designed with VR-only in mind, but Polyarc has managed to ensure the new versions of Moss replicate the gameplay extremely well.
I’d love to see the likes of Half-Life Alyx make the same jump. Of course, it’s a more complex game, and as Walters says, “games with lots of complex VR input requirements or high-energy movements would likely be the most challenging to translate,” but it’d give loads of new players the chance to experience it. Before that, though, Moss: The Forgotten Relic is the perfect example of games making that jump.