Crystal Raiders VR releases out of Steam Early Access

Author: VRKiwi

The VR adventure platformer game Crystal Raiders releases out of Steam Early Access on December 10 for the price of 14,99 €/$. The full release will bring a set of new features to finalize the early access period. We also had an interview with the devs, placed below in writing.

New features in the full launch update
 

Overall key features on full release

Enter the castle full of treasures and dangers. Choose your weapon to fight, avoid traps and solve puzzles to survive all the way through to find the lost dwarven artefacts, and help the dwarves to repair the machine to save their homeworld.
 

 

Could you tell us about the inspiration for your title and what inspired you to create Crystal Raiders?

We felt that there were too many zombie shooters in VR and we wanted to make a nonviolent game that would be suitable for younger audiences and families. Something that Nintendo did for consoles back in the day. Therefore, we made a choice to have co-op, enemies that wouldn’t have blood (crystals), players turn to chickens and do not die, and we chose vibrant and light art style. 

Could you tell us a bit about the core gameplay and the source of inspiration in designing it?

The player is an adventurer looking for riches in an abandoned castle, he’s part of the raiders that get hired to go to dangerous areas and retrieve certain items or gold for themselves. King hired the player to find an artifact, piece by piece the player has to collect all parts and bring them to the dwarf jeweler, so he can rebuild energy-generating artifact. But we tried to keep the story funny and not too serious.

The gameplay itself is a typical platformer but in VR, you can jump, shoot a bow, a gun or use a hammer. There are different upgrades to the weapons, that change gameplay quite a lot. You can say that inspiration came from a mix of Skylanders, Mario, Zelda, Lara Croft, and Indiana Jones games.

But we didn’t want the game to be too complex for a younger audience, so traps and puzzles are not that complex–oriented to have more fun. We also decided to make a game without teleportation due to gameplay experience, and we accepted the risk that it would not be for everyone, non-experienced VR players get dizzy due to running and jumping in VR, but teleportation is a trick that ruins the way you play this kind of game.

Were there any important themes or messages you wanted to get across in your game?

We have raiders who do things for money, we have dwarves who poisoned their environment by burning coal, and now are looking for clean energy, we have ancient technology that can create that energy and with it brings power to whoever has the artifact. So, we will see where it leads the Dwarven king later. It’s a situation that can be compared to the current situation of humanity considering global warming and pollution when you think about it, and the game story sends this message in a funny and relaxed way.

What was the main inspiration for the art direction in Crystal Raiders?

We were looking for a light and fun vibe and hand-painted textures. Inspiration came from games like Sea of Thieves, World of Warcraft, older Nintendo games like Zelda and Super Mario.

 

What was the main inspiration for the sound and music direction in your game?

Honestly, the sound followed the general visual feel of the game. We outsourced audio guys after we had playable levels and graphics already, and while looking at that, they made music and audio effects. Dwarven blabbing just came as a choice after testing many options and trying to keep the game without recorded speech. 

What lessons did you learn while developing your game to Steam VR? 

There are so many VR devices supported by Steam, and each of them has small nuances and needs tweaks. Multiplayer increases the complexity of the game a lot. Development is just half of a job; publishing is another half. 


Any best practices you can share with other developers?

Controllers on Quest 2 for example are lerped by Oculus software, while lighthouse controllers are not, this changes the way people feel and experience the game a lot. Releasing on Index has to be different than on Vive. So in the end we needed all devices to understand why people complain about one thing or another.  Another reason to have all devices is support. VR is still a young technology, many people experience problems with setting their VR devices, this really ruins the experience, this especially happens for new users. 

LOD system is incorrect for VR in Unity engine, each device calculates LODs separately based on its FOV. We made a certain script to take this into account and set up LODs based on 100 FOV devices.

We used texture arrays to minimize material count. Most of the environment objects use single material and because of this process, we were able to bake objects in larger batches. Also using object pooling when it’s possible to reduce the new instance count.

We made levels from separate objects and then baked them into a couple larger using the Unity plugin “Mesh baker”, this helped us with flexibility in the engine and kept draw calls manageable. One level would be baked to 50-60 objects instead of thousands.

Plan iterations carefully, QA in every step and use autotests, if you leave 1 week for testing before release, most likely 3 days into that week developers will still be adding fixes.

We used Unity collab at the beginning and changed to Bitbucket with Large file support. Because with a project size of 100Gb Collab with takes ages to sync files, and it didn’t have branching.

Making 3d assets for VR seemed very challenging too because players can get really close to everything. Planes and normal maps become very obvious sometimes, so it becomes a different challenge to sell your ideas compared to non-VR experiences.



Did you run into any major technical challenges? If so, how did you overcome those challenges?

Since VR renders to 2 cameras + monitor it uses way more resources, on top of that we need stable 90 FPS for people not to feel dizzy, this makes VR development much more like mobile development than PC development. In the beginning, we were carried away with graphics and effects, late we had to optimize a lot. Bake meshes and shadows, add quality settings for slower PCs, use texture arrays to decrease batching and draw calls. 

What was the most important learning(s) or most interesting take-aways from players who play tested the game?

We have got a lot of valuable feedback and implemented lots of changes after viewing and reading the playtest results. It is very useful to get recorded videos of the gameplay during the playtest, so you can get feedback for exact places.

Some take-aways of players who playtested the game:
 “The Art style is amazing, and the graphics are sweet!”, “It just felt like a good fun, good game”. “I really enjoyed the game based on the fun with other players”.
“Level design shines in the coop, as the team can split and go on every different route that ends on the same final path.”
“In VR you feel lonely if there is not enough action, but it is quite fast becoming an overwhelming amount of action [in Crystal Raiders] – really fun if you manage to beat these bombs”.



What advice would you give to a developer looking to start building for VR?

Keep it simple, profile a lot, build and test incrementally, have a separate person for QA, give a game to players who never played your game, QA guys tend to become too good.

Is there anything else you’d like to share with the readers?

After several years of development which we started as a team of 4 and at one point had 15 people, it is very exciting to finally launch a game. We hope people will find it fun to play.

Crystal Raiders VR on Steam
(Full URL: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1270380)

Crystal Raiders official Discord discord.gg/2DY2s6T

About Nieko (developers)
NIEKO is a VR studio with a passion for VR games and experiences. We are a team of 25 and have been working in the field for over 10 years and started to specialize in VR with the first Oculus DK2 Kit. We develop our own virtual reality games: Crystal Raiders VR, and “Neolithic”. Also, we provide game art services for publishers and game developers. We are proud for working on Supercell project Everdale, providing 3D art and concept art services. Learn more at Niekoplay.com.

About VRKiwi (publisher)
We are the leading VR game publisher in Finland. Our first game Cave Digger VR was released on Steam in 2018, followed by updates and other platform expansions. Since then, we have released many VR games as both publisher-only and developer-publisher. Even though we are the largest local VR publisher nowadays, we are proud of our indie roots. More about us on VRKiwi | Indie VR Game Publisher & Development Studio and in our press kit. Thank you for your interest, and happy gaming!