Office (Developer Commentary)

The Office is a space in IEYTD1 where the Agent receives training, stores souvenirs, and relaxes between missions. Here is a transcript of the developer commentary found in the Office.

* "This is a commentary bubble. The button you just pressed toggles them on and off. They are now on in all of the puzzles, as well as this room. They contain interesting developer tidbits, for instance: the timeframe of the artstyle we were going for was late 50s, early 60s. You know, the prime spy era. Of course, we needed to fudge the technology here and there. For instance, Zor's retina scanner was conceived of in 1935, but the first working one wasn't until the early 80s- but this button and this radio are period-specific."

* "Another thing we wanted to keep in mind was close interactions versus far interactions. Sometimes far interactions can set up a grand scale of things, but really it's the close interactions that work the best in VR. Freezing things and being able to look all around them is really cool. Being up close and personal is more fun in VR."

* "One of the problems we had to solve in I Expect You To Die was objects getting hidden behind other objects in a level. Players would constantly lose objects behind desks and chairs while solving the puzzle. Using physics raycast against every object in the seed to determine if the player can see it wasn't a viable solution due to performance concerns. Instead, we came up with an approximation called Hidden Wall Items. A Hidden Wall Item is essentially a configured wall item that does two things when an object falls into it. First, it applies a special extra shader to the objects so they can be seen through other objects, and then it puts the object on a separate physics layer, which allows the player to highlight and pick up objects through other objects."

* "The I Expect You To Die you're playing now is the end result of many, many iterations. This villainous librarian was the antagonist in one of those iterations. And speaking of iterations, we completed many of them with the help from our playtesters. Early in development, we'd have coworkers try prototypes, or even cardboard mockups of puzzles. Then we would bring naive players into our offices to playtest the game in whitebox form- that is, all the art would be untextured, simple forms, mostly cubes. Then later, we'd continue almost daily in-house testing, as well as sending the game out to 3rd-party testing facilities. Among other more targeted questions, we'd always ask these 5; "What was your favorite or best moment or interaction?", "What was your least favorite or most frustrating moment?", "Was there anything you wanted to do that the game didn't support?", "If you could wave a magic wand and add, remove, or change anything, what would it be?", and "When did you feel most clever?" By tracking these answers, we could focus in on how to make our game as great as possible."

* "I Expect You To Die currently supports many control schemes, and while that broadens the potential playerbase, it also comes with significant challenges. The tools behind our tutorial system are quite robust so that we could create different slide orderings and focus on different aspects for each control schemes. Try the different controllers and you'll see what I mean."

* "We went through many names for what we now call Souvenirs. They were additional adjectives, they were spy achievements, mementos, no matter what their name, they're fun to play with. Enjoy collecting them all!"

* "For texture memory and drawcall reasons, there are only 4 unique book covers in the office. But you can be sure that all are standard issue for EOD agents."

* "One thing that we kept in mind as we were designing puzzles was "can items be used for more than one purpose?" For instance, the bottle is fun to play around with. You can pop the cork, release the champagne, have a little moment of celebration, but you can also break the bottle and use the shards of glass to cut the wires on the bomb. Is it the multitool or the uni-tasker? Whenever possible, we go for the multitool."

* "You have to be careful when you're conducting playtests in VR, to make sure you guests aren't too immersed. We've had a half dozen or so people fall right out of their chairs, they're reaching for things. That's why we put a nice, soft rug underneath our playtesting chair, to protect both the hardware and people's knees."

* "Oh, hey. This is the commentary note I made way back when to prototype commentary notes. Congrats on finding it I guess? On I Expect You To Die, we designers would often write really hacky code in order to test ideas before tech went through and made less janky final versions. Commentary notes were no different."