Wayward Sky is a third person single player adventure game that focuses on atmosphere and storytelling through light puzzle solving designed to ease players into VR.
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“You are Bess, a young pilot flying with your father when you crash into a mysterious fortress that emerges out of the clouds,” the description for, a $19.99, explains. “Your father kidnapped and plane in ruins, you set out to explore the fortress and rescue him.”It’s story that is explained in the game’s opening minutes.
Creating a game for the PlayStation VR that would be had its own challenges. The game was built in the popular game engine Unity, which was often updated for better VR support.
Sony, for its part, was in the process of finalizing the PlayStation VR hardware itself.Wayward Sky was developed while every aspect of its construction, from the technology that powered it to the technology that determined how the player would view the game’s world, was in flux.“You’re just in a constant panic attack,” Ekanayake said, laughing.“This is my 20th year in game development, so I’ve been through a couple of hardware launches,” he continued. “They’re doing the best they can, we’re doing the best we can, and we know if you’re going to sign up for a launch, things are going to be worked on as they go. There are a lot of unknown known quantities, I guess.”PlayStation VR, as a platform that the public is now using, is.
Virtual reality in general is only a few years old. Ekanayake admits to knowing very little of how players would want to approach the game, so they tried to keep the puzzle design a bit on the easy side.“We don’t know how long people are going to be comfortable wearing a headset,” he said. “I had no idea. So we decided to err on the easy side of the puzzles, to get experience and so people can see the whole game and have a good three hours, essentially.
But being part of the world is the idea. I didn’t want anyone to get stuck on a puzzle and put the game down.”The PlayStation 4’s “social screen,” the widescreen image that’s shown on the television so other people can see what the player is doing through the head-mounted display, also changed a bit of the design. They found that people loved watching others play, and would try to solve the puzzles with them.
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Wayward Sky wasn’t meant to be a social game, but it became one almost as a pleasant side-effect of Sony’s VR technology. Uber EntertainmentBut just because the overall game is easy doesn’t mean it’s simple. “There’s some real hidden stuff I don’t think anyone has found,” Ekanayake said. I was delighted by a few of the hidden interactions I found as I played through the game with my kids. They had a great time yelling out things for me to try.But there’s only so much we can talk about in articles like this, or even in the mixed-reality trailer Ekanayake shot for the game. It shows a bit of the player’s scale within the world, and how they’ll play with some of the puzzles, but it pales in comparison to the act of actually putting on a headset.“It’s really hard to get across how magical VR is to people who have never put on a headset, still,” he said.
“I hope that changes now that PlayStation VR is widely out there. People think of VR like it’s just another screen, but the feeling of being able to touch things in the world using a motion controller while you’re in the space and feeling like you’re in the center of the world is really compelling when done right. I’m really excited to do more VR games.”.
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March 2023
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