Oculus Launch Pad Grads Megan Scott and Gerardo Hernandez Share the Development Process Behind ‘Hey Pops!’

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 grant recipients Megan Scott and Gerardo Hernandez spoke with us about their involvement with Launch Pad and how it helped shape their career and the development of Hey Pops!, a cooperative narrative VR experience where players step into the small town of Bluewoods, past and present, as siblings who work together to find the truth about their famous grandfather’s disappearance.

Simply, it was life-changing. We, Megan and Gerardo, both went into Launch Pad with the same goal: to tell a story in the multiplayer space. We didn’t know each other prior to OLP, and got connected through another member in our cohort. From there, the two of us set off to create a multiplayer story, Hey Pops!, having recently met. At the time, we were both doing contract work and balancing creating a prototype. Gerardo came down with Covid and was out for almost the whole last month, and Megan moved multiple times throughout production. We thought all these challenges would prevent us from finishing our project. We submitted the prototype with moments to spare, and then we waited.

A few weeks later, the launch pad group met up for Demo Day, where we got to pitch to each other and Oculus executives. That experience alone prepared us to apply for grants and understand others' interpretations of our experience. I, Megan, felt like our experience was the weakest one there, and felt defeated between sessions because I felt like ours didn’t compare to the others. On my birthday, Gerardo messaged me telling me to check my email, and to both of our utter disbelief, we got a grant. To this day, it still does not feel real.

Since then, the Oculus team has been extremely supportive and given us opportunities we wouldn’t have otherwise. Like starting our own little studio, Klexos Interactive. Our developers on the project got development kits through Oculus Start and gave them the ability to test what they were making. We built up a bigger team, and the whole experience is a night and day difference. It gave us a lot of validation and confidence as newer developers that what we were making was impactful to others. We learned that your game/experience does not have to be perfect for others to want to be invested in it. Currently, we’re applying to grants and finishing up our vertical slice. We hope to get the funds to complete Act I as soon as possible so we can release it for others to enjoy!

I, Gerardo, think we both subconsciously wanted to tell a specific story without really knowing it. As we designed Hey Pops! we learned more about each other and realized that mental and emotional health was important to both of us. We discovered the week we submitted our prototype that we both had lost significant people in our lives. From the beginning we wanted to tell a story that was cooperative, but really supportive in how it goes about doing that. VR as a medium was a great environment to talk about things that still seem taboo, to tell that story and to still have a fun and memorable experience.

We specifically designed Hey Pops! to be a cooperative experience. We want players to know that grief is not something they have to go through alone, and it looks different for everybody.

I, Megan, at the time was really missing going to the movies with friends. Being in the first year of covid, a lot of theaters were closed. I realized what I missed most was experiencing a story together. Like nudging your friend when a character makes a stupid joke or looking over to see that your friend is also crying during an emotional scene. It occurred to me that most stories in VR were for single player only. That was a major source of inspiration for me wanting to tell a multiplayer narrative in VR.

We have had our fair share of technical challenges. The sentence: Cooperative, narrative virtual reality game is enough for some to raise some eyebrows. It certainly made us! In Hey Pops!, players play as siblings, Harlee and Rylan, which is an integral part of our game, but also a difficult thing to get right. Networked audio, voice, animation, players and rigs has been an ongoing challenge to keep up and going. One of the first major issues was on submission day, we realized that multiplayer had stopped working half way through our prototype,and we got it fixed down to the wire.

For most of our team, working with source control was new. That became a great way for us all to learn together, but also left room for mistakes. We accidentally got our branches messed up, leaving us with three separate branches that we couldn’t get to merge because they were all “heads.” After a few days of debugging, we’re back on track and continuously learning from our mistakes. Being newer developers, we’ve had to learn to accept the fact that we’re going to make mistakes and be slowed down by them. We could let this hinder us, but instead we see it as an opportunity to grow and learn. They’re calling growing pains for a reason, right?

As we talked about the design for Hey Pops!, one of the most important factors was creating a safe space for players. For us that meant, creating a world that felt familiar and started the player in the game at daytime. We avoided spaces that felt cramped and intense color schemes. Hey Pops! Takes place in Bluewoods, a fictional small midwest town. Throughout the experience, users switch between the “real world” and memories of their grandfather who passed away a few years ago. We wanted players to have a safe place to escape to, so we went for a flat style look with the real world having warm tones and the memory world having cool tones. A flat style also allowed us to keep a cohesive look between the two worlds, while being able to be very colorful within the memories. The memories world has limited textures, and one main material, which was a design choice, but also one for optimization. The experience encourages exploration, not fear of what’s behind the corner. We hope that the art, music, and narrative all tie together for a unique experience that players remember.

For us, it’s realizing that you’re not alone on your journey on what you’ve experienced or are currently going through in life. Work and talk to people that come from different backgrounds. As we shared our idea for Hey Pops!, we were both taken back by how many people resonated with the story. Grief can be so isolating. Seeing how others around us have also experienced loss has provided great healing. The best stories are the ones that come from within you, based on your life (without oversharing) and people pay attention to that. Reaching a broader audience meant creating an experience that most people can relate to, whether that’s losing a pet or a parent or moving away from someone you love. Being inclusive means hearing out how others have experienced loss and what that looked like for them. We purposely have the lead characters processing grief very differently to show that everyone copes in their own way.

Our biggest ongoing challenge is: how do we tell a story to two players at the same time, but give them a parallel experience? At first, we were going to have voice overs for the characters you play as, but quickly discovered that it’s pretty annoying to have someone talk over you, especially if it’s your own character! So we pivoted, and are working on integrating dialogue through text while pushing A. This allows characters to go at their own pace, and continue talking to each other during the game. We’re immersing the players into our story, but the players are making their own stories within our game as t talk to each other. We didn’t want to interrupt that. That decision helped us figure out how to connect our gameplay with our story. It’s a balance, and ultimately we decided to learn more toward a narrative than an active game. We joke we’re an active narrative, but a passive game.

Details! Simple details go a long way and can be the difference between players understanding something. As developers it’s easy to get too close to your game causing you to miss the mark on explaining a design or idea. For example, colors. We knew we wanted warm, inviting, muted colors. However, we did not realize until we played tested that without a lot of contrast, our colorblind players would have a hard time playing our game. Simply increasing contrast between colors opens your game up to a lot more people.

We also learned that players like to throw things around, so we gave them more things to throw around! Players will throw anything that is in front of them it seems haha. We leaned into that and added interactable elements to most scenes.

We’re excited to leverage Oculus’ matchmaking and party system, so it’s easy to meet up with someone to dive into Hey Pops!

We’re also excited to explore hand tracking and voice commands. I mean how cool would it be to order virtual pancakes by telling a virtual waiter you’re ready for more?

We’re here with a grant and a little company, but we still are learning along the way! No one knows everything, and the community as a whole is learning together what is working in the space and what is not. It can be intimidating as a new dev, but the community is super welcoming. There are a lot of fantastic communities out there for devs that love to help out new devs, share resources, and just cheer each other on.

Know that your game or experience doesn’t need to be perfect for people to want to hear about it. Share your work and don’t wait until your game is done to talk about it!

We’d love to hear from you!

Follow our journey on Instagram @klexosinteractive

Say hi - klexosinteractive@gmail.com