Magic Leap
I joined Magic Leap in late summer 2015 as lead game designer to help design gameplay for their new spatial computing platform. I entered as an experienced game designer and exited as something different, something more.
During the five years I worked with the joint effort of Magic Leap and Weta Workshop, we defined the way to build content for the platform. I lead the development of the world's first long form action game for spatial computing; Dr. Grordbort's Invaders. A planet of dastardly robots use tele-portholes to invade Earth through the player's own walls, floors, and ceilings. The player is armed with one of Dr. Grordbort's infallible aether oscillators (a ray gun) and must use it to disrupt the robot invasion, along side their trusty robot companion, Gimble.
We tried to do too much at once and succeeded. I discovered how to tell a linear story, with dynamic action, in arbitrary spaces. The game has a minimum spatial requirement, yet can work in any typical room. We even account for furniture and other obstructions as our AI is able to navigate around your tables, chairs, beds, and sofas.
I discovered that making everything physical made the virtual become reality. It led us to tokenizing user interface so players didn't have to deal with contemporary measures of pop-ups and text based tutorials. Everything reacted to the player and gave our virtual objects true depth; the objects were really there.
I quickly realized that we had to design from first principles, and develop testing strategies for a medium that didn't publicly exist yet. Anytime I tried to incorporate common techniques from the games industry, it didn't seem to work quite correctly. This lead us to stripping back everything and designing for the experience. I solved issues no one had solved before.
I encouraged players to move, robots invaded the Earth, while Dr. Grordbort and Lord Cockswain would deliver holographic messages; all at human scale. Magic Leap is a wearable device, we have no control over our players, and no control where they are. We built solutions to incorporate movement and location. Rather than shun and avoid reality, I embraced it.
Something was missing though, and it was multiplayer. After shipping Dr. Grordbort's Invaders I begun investigating how to include more than one player in all of our products. I discovered something unique about spatial computing. For a human to believe a virtual object is real it needs four components; realtime rendering, rigid body physics, spatial audio, and another person to interact with the object. Adding people to the experience exponentially quantified it.
I helped developed a demo Grordbattle, a four player tea drinking and ray gun battle simulator. We were able to showcase Grordbattle to the public at the Game Developers Conference 2019 to critical acclaim. It was the first time anyone in the world was able to experience multiplayer spatial computing.
Multiplayer experiences became the baseline of the studio, and I was able to take our lessons from the Grordbattle demo and help develop a number of other incredible experiences, that will hopefully see the light of day in the future.
My time at Magic Leap ended in April 2020. It was an amazing journey, maybe even profound. I came out of it an extremely confident designer that can not only solve problems, but solve all the problems to get to where we need to be.
During the five years I worked with the joint effort of Magic Leap and Weta Workshop, we defined the way to build content for the platform. I lead the development of the world's first long form action game for spatial computing; Dr. Grordbort's Invaders. A planet of dastardly robots use tele-portholes to invade Earth through the player's own walls, floors, and ceilings. The player is armed with one of Dr. Grordbort's infallible aether oscillators (a ray gun) and must use it to disrupt the robot invasion, along side their trusty robot companion, Gimble.
We tried to do too much at once and succeeded. I discovered how to tell a linear story, with dynamic action, in arbitrary spaces. The game has a minimum spatial requirement, yet can work in any typical room. We even account for furniture and other obstructions as our AI is able to navigate around your tables, chairs, beds, and sofas.
I discovered that making everything physical made the virtual become reality. It led us to tokenizing user interface so players didn't have to deal with contemporary measures of pop-ups and text based tutorials. Everything reacted to the player and gave our virtual objects true depth; the objects were really there.
I quickly realized that we had to design from first principles, and develop testing strategies for a medium that didn't publicly exist yet. Anytime I tried to incorporate common techniques from the games industry, it didn't seem to work quite correctly. This lead us to stripping back everything and designing for the experience. I solved issues no one had solved before.
I encouraged players to move, robots invaded the Earth, while Dr. Grordbort and Lord Cockswain would deliver holographic messages; all at human scale. Magic Leap is a wearable device, we have no control over our players, and no control where they are. We built solutions to incorporate movement and location. Rather than shun and avoid reality, I embraced it.
Something was missing though, and it was multiplayer. After shipping Dr. Grordbort's Invaders I begun investigating how to include more than one player in all of our products. I discovered something unique about spatial computing. For a human to believe a virtual object is real it needs four components; realtime rendering, rigid body physics, spatial audio, and another person to interact with the object. Adding people to the experience exponentially quantified it.
I helped developed a demo Grordbattle, a four player tea drinking and ray gun battle simulator. We were able to showcase Grordbattle to the public at the Game Developers Conference 2019 to critical acclaim. It was the first time anyone in the world was able to experience multiplayer spatial computing.
Multiplayer experiences became the baseline of the studio, and I was able to take our lessons from the Grordbattle demo and help develop a number of other incredible experiences, that will hopefully see the light of day in the future.
My time at Magic Leap ended in April 2020. It was an amazing journey, maybe even profound. I came out of it an extremely confident designer that can not only solve problems, but solve all the problems to get to where we need to be.