Mixed reality gaming presents new design challenges for developers, and we spoke with Creature to learn more about Starship Home.
It's been nearly one year since Quest 3 launched, and while it's gone a long way in pushing the idea, mixed reality remains a highly experimental field. We've seen some strong examples making the case for MR gaming, like Demeo and the upcoming Laser Dance. However, much of the early wave of MR modes feel like add-ons for VR games that never intended to use this.
It's one reason why a narrative-driven experience like Starship Home makes such an immediate impression, and our recent review noted how utilizing your entire play space creates a "more dynamic and believable environment." Starship Home turns your living room into a spaceship as you journey across different worlds to collect and befriend alien plants.
Before last week's launch on Quest 3, we interviewed Creature CEO and creative director Doug North Cook to learn more. North Cook searched for a concept that would only make sense in mixed reality, and the inspiration came just as he was trying to relax:
"I was at a metal music festival in the UK, staying at a hotel with a spa, and I was getting a massage. During the massage, I was just like, "Oh my God. Don't try to turn the room into a game." We turned the room into a spaceship. It just kept spiraling from there, and I was like, "I have to get off of this massage table, and I have to get back to my notebook."
After outlining Starship Home's basic structure, North Cook had a pitch deck ready just five days later. Full production kicked off in January 2023, and Creature stuck to the pitch deck they initially showed Meta.
"It's exactly the game that we built. We actually built the whole thing, and all of those core features that I outlined that night, which is amazing to me and a testament to our team."
To achieve this, North Cook had team slots prepared for a group of people he believed could build something of this ambition. Between Ashley Pinnick and Patrick Hackett (Tilt Brush), Mark Schramm (Superhot VR), Chris Hanney (Space Pirate Trainer), and more, this group eventually became Creature.
"My perspective was that the only way to solve mixed reality for the first time was to bring together a group of people that had solved VR in the early first wave of titles... everyone except for one person agreed to work on the project if I could get the funding. I pitched it to Meta the next week, and they funded it."
So what exactly can mixed reality do for a game like Starship Home that you can't do in a completely virtual environment? North Cook points to how game objects interact with the room volume itself in "interesting and impactful" ways.
"A core part of the game is that you're collecting specimens of alien plant life, and then you put them in these little pots. We went through so many iterations of these pots, but what we realized early on is that every object has to be contextless. It has to be able to live anywhere in any environment. It has to be able to sit on a surface, and it also has to be able to not sit on a surface. Both of those things have to be compelling. They have to be able to transition between states in seamless ways."
North Cook calls these plant pots a great example of this in action. Letting them go mid-air sees them hovering to the ground while placing them near a surface sees little feet emerge from the bottom of the pot. Each plant is also aware of other game objects in the space.
He describes this level of illusion as "so profoundly compelling" that user testing saw players often rearrange their physical rooms to give plants more room to breathe.
"Whatever room you are in is now a starship, and all of the objects in that room are now on the starship. The paintings that are hanging on your wall now hang on the wall of the starship. That's where there's an incredible amount of magic; it's so different from playing a VR game. That's what we've found that we think is really exciting."
Creature believes another key difference compared to VR design is that MR is about "making your home a place where adventures happen." North Cook states this creates a sense of memory and place about your experiences in said room, offering "more delightful" memories than seeing zombies enter your living room.
Another challenge comes from designing to accommodate different room layouts. North Cook considers this "one of the more complicated parts" of developing for MR, saying you could play Starship Home anywhere from a kitchen to a gymnasium. He contrasts this with the procedurally generated approach Laser Dance employs, but North Cook and Schramm found an approach early on.
"It was almost a joke between Mark and me, where we were like, 'What if the starship gets delivered to you in a box, and you have to unpack it?" That's the opening scene of the game. You get a phone call on your controllers, it's this delivery guy who's got a package for you. This little beacon spawns in front of you, and we ask you to place it somewhere on an open floor surface.'
You're then tasked with placing the ship's core components directly across your room, adding various windows, objects, an airlock, and the command console. These starship parts are reconfigurable while playing, and this helped Creature build a "narrative framework" to determine the best locations for these set pieces.
"It's so hard to understand the player's room with the incredibly limited information we get from the system. Because what we get is a rough 3D mesh. That's all, nothing else. That's the most reliable source of information that we have. Where the box spawns from, we use that like a central anchor point because we know that the player can reach it, and it's most likely unobstructed."
Another challenge with MR design is that you can't just "leave" your room. North Cook explained locomotion in MR is "functionally very difficult" such that when Creature explored locomotion options early on, planetary traversal became "very physically uncomfortable." While Astra gets around this with a Star Trek-like teleporter that transports you to fully VR environments, Starship Home takes a different approach.
"What we landed on was that you send a little lander down to the planet's surface, and then you're operating the lander from a feed sent back to you in the ship. You're almost playing something that feels a little bit like Pokemon Snap, where you're just capturing information, and then you're bringing a plant back from the surface."
Starship Home is available now for the Meta Quest 3 family.
