Climb Monkey Climb!

King Smash VR is about being King Kong and smashing planes out of the sky. We pretty much got the smashing planes out of the sky bit, how about being King Kong himself? Well, first things first, King Kong is a monkey and monkeys like to climb. Remember the yellow boxes from before?

Floating yellow boxes

Those were prototypes for the new climbing mechanism. Now the player can climb through the city to get to different buildings. And along the way, smash more things! We started with the yellow boxes to demarcate as climbable. At first we were unsure if it would induce motion sickness as the player would be suspended in the air visually and there was no gravity to make him fall (gravity caused major motion sickness). We thought that this may cause dissonance within the player. Surprisingly after some rounds of internal testing and letting our friends test it, they did not feel nauseous at all being suspended in the sky with no reason. It was an interesting phenomenon we encountered in VR. However, since it is still possible to climb fast in the game, we added vignetting to reduce the player's peripheral vision. Peripheral vision helps us humans estimate the speed we are at. Reducing access to this information helps us achieve a tunnel effect and you lose the sense of speed. This is particularly useful for us since the player is physical standing still but is moving at relatively high speeds in game.

Feedback we got for improvement was that some players felt that the floating boxes in the sky was weird. Our initial visualization was that people flailing the arms around as they fall down. Hence the boxes were positioned to help mimic that movement. But it was a little too far fetched. Later, we drew inspiration from Mirror's Edge.

Red interactable objects

We found that Mirror's Edge applied colour theory through making all parkour objects in their scene red. These red objects stand out and shows a clear route, making it intuitive for players to know where to go.

We replaced the yellow floating boxes with a few 3D objects that are climbable into the scene. Although they were mostly basic 3D shapes, they turned out pretty well!

Climbing route

We hope that with the climbing mechanic in, we can enable players to be a better monkey!