When Hotel Infinity which will be released on PlayStation VR2 on November 13, players will be able to traverse immense corridors and ballrooms on their own two feet, from the comfort of their own living room. We want to take this opportunity to pull back the curtain on how we created this experience and share some of the unique design lessons we’ve learned along the way.
When we started creating Hotel Infinity, our main goal was to make movement in virtual reality as natural as possible. Instead of using teleportation or moving with a joystick, players explore the world by actually walking around it. Building on what we learned from creating the Manifold Garden, we used impossible geometry to transform the space and make a diminutive area feel huge. The result is an experience where you can physically move through game environments without breaking immersion.
Illusion of huge environments
From the beginning, our biggest challenge was to make players forget that they were standing in a living room on a 2 m by 2 m (6 ft 7 inch by 6 ft 7 inch) surface. VR can make you really feel like you’re in a different place, but only if you maintain the illusion. Every corridor and room in the Infinity Hotel had to look broad while subtly signaling where the player could and couldn’t walk to avoid tripping over the furniture.
Sticking to the grid
Hotel Infinity uses portals to create the feeling of walking through impossible architecture. To make these interconnected areas appear seamless, we built the environment on a standard 3×3 grid, ensuring that the portals align perfectly. In the video below, you can see the player walk down a hallway, open a window, and step out onto a ledge that marks a path through this grid in real-world space.
Design for comfort in room-scale VR
Roomscale VR is physical, so the pace must take into account both movement and comfort. Puzzles play an extremely critical role in the pacing of the game, as they not only add variety to the gameplay, but allow the player to rest between exploration segments. We also learned that minimizing the number of repeated turns in the same direction helped reduce dizziness and prevented cable tangling. These restrictions gave the game’s spaces a serpentine structure, making it even more immersive.
Putting it all together
There was no shortage of unique challenges that arose when designing a VR game focused on room-scale exploration. But for every problem we needed to solve, the solution was a recent way to apply VR. Once we had all the rules and design tools in place, we could easily create spaces where players could solve a puzzle, see an open door from the massive lobby, and walk through it by taking a dozen steps around their living room.
We’re excited to share some of the lessons we learned while creating this game. We hope you’ll have the opportunity to explore the spaces we’ve created for yourself when Hotel Infinity arrives on PS VR2 on November 13.
