Oculus Launch Pad Grad Cody Kicklighter Shares the Development Process Behind ‘Noro & the Cosmic Coast’

Each year, Oculus Launch Pad supports promising VR content creators from diverse backgrounds as they iterate on their unique ideas and bring them to market.

In this edition in our Oculus Launch Pad Q&A series, 2020 Launch Pad grant recipient Cody Kicklighter spoke with us about his involvement with Launch Pad and how it helped shape his career and the development of Noro & the Cosmic Coast, a story-driven puzzle game with elements of strategy, resource management, and role-playing.

Thank you! Launch Pad has been a great experience and the support from Oculus has been amazing. The program has provided great learning opportunities from incredibly talented individuals in the industry, the chance to connect with other devs who are also passionate about VR, and invaluable feedback from the team at Oculus.

It has certainly been a long road with many challenges, and the very first one was just finding the right project to work on. One of my initial criteria for design was that the game could easily be scaled up or down so that the project would get finished one way or the other - grant or no grant. This ensured that the dev time spent during the program would not be wasted and that the project chosen would have the required passion behind it. I know there are many ways that Launch Pad devs go about selecting a project but this was a helpful mindset for me.

The first bit of inspiration came during the Launch Pad boot camp, where one of the most discussed themes was diversity and ways that it could be expressed. I had been thinking about an idea for a little adventure puzzle game in which unique creatures with different needs and skills work together to solve problems for each other. I thought this gameplay could be a good way to explore the power and utility of diversity in a simple and tangible way.

I had also just read about a seed bank in the arctic, known as the ‘doomsday vault’, which stores hundreds of thousands of types of seeds. This got me thinking about the vast ecological diversity that sustains life and that the theme of power through diversity could be expressed on several levels of gameplay. Problem solving in Noro requires a diverse community of creatures as well as a diverse ecosystem.

Personal inspiration came from being a fairly new father at the time. My common desire to do good in the world now had a new hyper-personal focus of building a better world for my daughter - a platitude I was just feeling the significance of. Noro became about a father who needs to provide and receive help from the cosmos in order to help his little girl. But it’s not my story, it’s a story about anyone who goes into the unknown out of love for someone else.

One technical challenge I think many Launch Pad teams can relate to is getting your project running at peak performance on Quest. It can be tricky and time consuming to find all the best ways to improve your frame rate.

One big step is using texture atlases, and a helpful tool for Noro was developing a workflow for shifting UVs that fit the project’s needs. Many meshes need their UVs shifted during play either so that their textures can be changed, or so they can be duplicated and used multiple times with different textures, but without adding draw calls. Developing this workflow early on saved time and, of course, draw calls.

Noro’s visual aesthetic first and foremost wants to be welcoming. The game introduces several unique mechanics up front and there was some concern that this could be uninviting or even intimidating for certain players. The music and story also convey a certain amount of melancholy that is meant to be peripheral rather than central to the feel. For these reasons, the visuals were steered towards being comforting and familiar, with the strongest inspirations being some of the games that give the same warm feelings.

Jason VendenBerghe, the VP Director of Game Design at Level Ex Inc., said in his 2013 GDC talk “the job of the designer is to develop accurate empathy [for all players]” and to fill in our “empathy blindspots.” He also says it is the designers responsibility that players “set the controller down satisfied, regardless of who [they] are.”

That is obviously an intensely tall order and a skill most of us will spend our entire lives learning. But I think it is also a valuable north star and is at the root of all practical advice on this topic. Consciously overcoming your own personal bias and learning about the audience you are designing for is step one.

A very obvious, yet sometimes surprisingly difficult, example of this is just listening to your play testers and putting weight into negative feedback. I’ve seen many designers, including myself, make the mistake of subconsciously or even consciously thinking of negative feedback as somehow being incorrect, maybe because the play testers just didn’t understand a certain aspect of the game. Ignoring this feedback often only delays much needed improvements and the fact is, if there is a gap between the game and a certain player base, it’s usually only going to be closed when the game moves towards them.

It was important for Noro to have design mechanics that served and reinforced its themes and narrative. However, many times the best mechanic for expressing a theme is not as user friendly or simply as fun as an alternative. There’s also the risk of creating ludonarrative dissonance if your gameplay does not align with the story being told. For example, in games there can be a thin line between feeling as though you are working with a character for your mutual benefit and using that character as a tool for your own gain. It is a challenging process to find a design that accomplishes everything or, at the very least, finds an optimal balance.

For Noro, I think one big key has been to simplify, again and again. Trying to meet all of the experiential and thematic targets made it tempting to add too much complexity at times. One early play tester said what they expected was something simple and fun, but what they got felt like Civ 4. Oops! Every simplification since then lead to testers reporting more fun and has seemingly distilled the themes rather than diluted them.

There were some surprising insights that came from play testers who either rarely play games or are non-gamers. This group is a tertiary audience for Noro, with the idea being that this could be a good game for VR-curious non-gamers living in households that have a Quest.

This group, understandably, has had more difficulty learning certain aspects of the game. What was interesting is that they reported many of these misunderstandings as being rooted in their perception of how video games or VR games typically work. One example is that several play testers didn’t realize they could control more than one creature, even after they were instructed how to do so. They simply thought all games featured only one controllable character and the leap to controlling more than one threw them for a loop.

This group was also less likely to experiment with the mechanics and if there was something they didn’t immediately understand they would often say something along the lines of “I don’t get this part - sorry I’m just really bad at games.” It’s a bummer when your game accidentally causes someone to apologize for their abilities. While non-gamers are not Noro’s primary audience, it would be amazing if they feel welcomed to play - no apologies necessary.

This helped highlight certain areas of onboarding that needed extra attention and it became a target to create an onboarding experience that accommodates non-gamers. This is obviously very useful since if they can be onboarded easily, there’s a great chance gamers will be as well.

I’m very excited to implement hand tracking and controller-free interactions. All of the interactions in the game were designed from the beginning with that implementation in mind. Noro supports play in any position, including seated or lying down. Removing the need for controllers will hopefully make the experience more frictionless.

Think about player comfort. I’ve experienced a lot of really cool demos that were a lot of fun but unfortunately also came with significant discomfort. Users can, of course, become nauseous if you're not careful with movement, but they can also become sore and tired if your experience has them throwing something with force 10 times a minute. Similarly, their neck and back may hurt after 10 minutes if they are constantly hunched over, looking down. Of course, the younger your target age group is, the less you have to worry about bad backs and sore shoulders.

Feel free to reach out to me! I love connecting with anyone in the community, especially if you're a small dev looking for help or are in need of play testing. I can be easily found on LinkedIn.

And I’d just like to thank Oculus again for all the support!