HiGame

he VR game scene is heating up, and it’s not just about AAA titles, as we’re finding in our new series on developing for VR. Hot off the heels of our interview with No Goblin’s Dan Teasdale, I had the pleasure of speaking to an indie developer named Samantha Kalman. She’s been making games for years, and now she’s decided to take on the challenge of making multiple new VR games on her own.

Thanks to her fascinating background in both the creative and technical aspects of game development, hearing Kalman’s thoughts on VR lends a new perspective — not just a better understanding of what VR is now, but a hopeful vision of what VR can become. If you still classify yourself as a VR skeptic, Samantha’s infectious passion might just change your mind.

Samantha Kalman interview

Grant Brunner: Can you tell us about who you are and your experience in gamedev?
Samantha Kalman: Sure. I’m Samantha Kalman. I started making games as a hobby in my early twenties when I discovered [the Unity game engine] which was at version 1.0 at the time. I was working in software testing when I found it and started doing hobby stuff. I became QA director of Unity when it was very, very small — fewer than ten people. Followed through with Unity up until 3.0 — released that as part of the team.
And then I became an indie developer full time. I tried a couple of times to make it work. I made a game called Sen, which is a music game that’s up on Kongregate.com. That made me no money, so I went and got a job at Amazon where I was a design technologist, which is basically a designer who writes code, on the Amazon Fire Phone. I was there for a year and a half working closely with the user experience and the 3D presentation of the device. And then tried again with indie games.
I felt like Sen was an unrealized idea — like unfinished business. I returned to this idea of “how do you make a game that helps people make music?” So, I spent the next couple of years making Sentris, and that’s out, and it kinda did it. Since that has been finished, I’ve been going into a lot of VR experiments. You know, just playing with a couple of different projects and ideas with the platforms.
GB: You’ve publicly discussed two of your current projects: Project Red and Unwinding. Can you give us an overview of what those are?
SK: Yeah, so, they’re two projects, and they’re pretty different. Unwinding is an experiment for me to do what’s called ground-up game design. Where as Sentris was top-down — I sort of had a goal, and I was aiming toward that. Unwinding is a ground-up where I’m trying to play with mechanics, and learn about what’s interesting in VR. And sort of build toward an undefined goal and see what kind of fun and challenging experiences can emerge in the meantime. Both projects share a similarity of creating a feeling of existing in an impossible space. So, Unwinding is kind of like a space metaphor. Like, there’s kind of a planet thing and then you are solving puzzles maybe within the planet — very abstract puzzles.
Project Red is more of a world building experiment. I love the look of Rez, and wanted to build something Rez-like that has a sense of impossibility. But in “Red” it’s really about the motion — the sensation of moving through space. Kind of being surrounded, and maybe even being overwhelmed by geometry and how close it is to you. There’s some light Metroidvania mechanics on the table for that game.



GB: All I’ve seen of these projects are your blog posts and screenshots from the early stages of development, and they’re both very abstract in appearance. Do the games take place in first-person, or is it so abstract that you’re not even really a person — you’re an abstract form as a camera in the game world?
SK: Yeah, it’s a good question. I think that all VR games are inherently first-person — even ones where you’re controlling an avatar. The really incredible thing about VR is that you are a person who is wearing this thing that is providing you a lens into the world. It’s like picking up a pair of binoculars, and looking at the world far away. But you’re picking up a pair of goggles, and you’re looking into a different world. This is one of the most incredible things about the medium: to be looking first-person into a world.
When the iPhone came out, people were like “Oh, when we start developing games from the ground-up for a touch screen, that’s going to be a game-changer.” I think that for VR, building a game from the ground-up means acknowledging that the person playing it is a person. It’s almost like a fourth wall thing, but it’s not exactly. I think it’s important to acknowledge that there are people stepping inside these worlds.

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