I love online multiplayer games and I find myself preferring playing a social online game than single-player ones, but again, this is just me. I love knowing that the person whom I just beat (or lost to), there is a real person behind its in-game avatar. This makes competitive and cooperative games into a great social experience. When I do a raid with 6 friends, we coordinate together to try to solve problems, we laugh, we get angry, sad, salty, etc. Multiplayer games trigger so many different emotions, that when I get online to play, I expect a really great ride and of course I get to meet new people from all over the world.
OK, that all is great, but now with the Magic Leap One headset is out, I wonder what type of multiplayer gameplay experience we get to play. This is definitely a brand new platform that opens up a whole new world of creative gameplay ideas. Looking at AR, we’ve seen that only lately we’ve seen ARKit 2.0 enabling local multiplayer capabilities. Having said that, there are many people who come home and want to play with other people online, some of them are maybe on the other side of the planet. I want to be able to come home and be able to socialize and play with other Magic Leap One users without having those users physically coming to my house to play.
To know what type of multiplayer online experiences you can build, you need to be familiar with the Magic Leap capabilities and the Lumin SDK and the runtime environment, collision physics, hand gestures, head pose data, eye tracking, image tracking, occlusion capabilities and other features that are brand new and can help you deliver more immersive MR gaming experiences.
The hand recognition feature is probably one of the features that I think will be amazing in online multiplayer Mixed Reality games, including voice interaction, which since I bought the PS4, I just can’t play without it (when applicable).
Multiplayer 1-vs-1 games like a table tennis game or a fighting game are something that I don’t think will be complicated to do. However, in order to enjoy such a multiplayer game, you need to see your opponent’s avatar. If there is a fixed size of the table, I think it will be possible to code the play so it’s relative to the table (a certain shared pivot point) rather than aligning the location to the second player, which has its own location in its current location where he’s at. Using AR Cloud, there will be an option to play relative to the current location of a certain player using shared information about the space where the other user is playing at. It will be interesting, how these 3rd party platforms will be able to integrate with Magic Leap in order to provide more advanced multi-user capabilities.
Let’s take it further and imagine a multi-user gaming experience for the Magic Leap One and try to imagine what a, let’s say 10 users online multiplayer game can be like.
Now, it doesn’t mean that if we have 10 users concurrently playing together it means that we need to see their avatars, nor that their avatars should look human-like. For example, However, if the game plays in a certain scene, it has to be consistent. In Mixed Reality, you want the real world to be your level, and because of that, you can’t make the other users see the same physical space. Each player has its own space. For example, having a racing game where players can race on the ceiling, walls, and floor of a certain place, this cannot happen, because each player sees its own environment. If you project a different virtually rendered environment from another player, you ruin the immersion entirely and that game becomes a virtual reality game, not a mixed reality one.
This means that shared gameplay experience might take place in a pre-sized and shaped level. The question is whether the player will be represented in first-person or whether third-person. I think that most of the MR games will be played in third-person, so the player will be represented as a virtual entity on a shared common virtual level. Then both players can sit or stand around a surface of their choice, each one in its own home and play together. It’s similar to the AR multiplayer Jumpball.io. The developer might add an option to see the hands of the users interacting with his in-game character using the hand tracking feature and shared it with other users.
We might also see social games similar to Ubisoft’s Werewolves Within. You can see the other players sitting or standing around you and positioned automatically based on your location. In this type of game, it really doesn’t matter to make the characters in a seated or standing position at the same exact space, along there are around you in the same order. So for example, in a Werwolves Within MR game for Magic Leap (this game doesn’t exist as of the time of writing), Player 1 will sit next to me on the couch, his avatar I mean, and for another player that player will be standing right next to him. The hand motions and eye-movement will be shared among player in order to provide a more immersive social experience.
So if you develop a mixed reality game like that one that I’ve described above, you can make a multi-user social game that dynamically pre-locate players avatars and still maintain a good experience. In the original game, standing is a feature in the game, but in my version, we might drop it and no make a difference between standing and seated posture. Anyway, it was just an idea for inspiration.
I see a huge potential for social multiplayer games and experience in mixed reality. It will be an amazing feeling wearing the headset and knowing that you are going to interact with other online people in mixed reality. It is an amazing experience in virtual reality, but I also see a great potential in mixed reality as well. There are differences of course and limitations that developers need to be aware of prior to designing such experience.
When helping to design the game Space Blastards, I thought it will be an amazing idea to be able to fight against monsters together in the same physical space. Now, I just repeat, I am talking about online multiplayer games here, not local multiplayer ones.
Now Space Blastards is kind of similar to Dr. Grorbort’s Invaders game for Magic Leap One. However, Dr. Grorbort’s Invaders is a single player game where you fight robots coming out from portals that spawn on different locations and surfaces. Now how can this game be played with other players online?
Well, I thought about it before because I thought about it when working with the developer about Space Blastards. The thing is that the game’s level is completely different than how a second player sees it. They both exist in completely different spaces. One option to do it is to ignore surfaces and positions the enemies coming out from a certain location in the 3D space. Then the two players can be fighting side by side and even see each other’s avatar as they play. This of course ruin some of the scene scanning benefits, including occlusion and the ability to position enemies on surfaces, open portals on a surface, etc. So the game will turn out to be less of a mixed reality game, and more like an AR game. I think this can be done, but again, not with some sort of an impact on the gameplay experience itself.
If I am a developer and think about developing an online multiplayer game for Mixed Reality, I obviously want to take advantage of all if not most of the platform’s capability. I want to make something unique that no one has done before, something that will be recognized as a great MR game will attract many users and one that is seen as a game that fully utilizes the Magic Leap One’s incredible MR capabilities. When you look at it this way, you can see why many developers will probably opt to develop a single-player game or a local multiplayer game, rather than an online multiplayer one. AR (ARCore and ARKit) is exactly in that same place. All of the online multiplayer experiences are either subject to a pre-defined constraint level design or aiming at a local shared multiplayer experience using the latest ARKit 2.0 and ARCore 1.5.
As for right now, it seems that if you want to develop that type of online multiplayer game, you are restricted to a certain design. I think in the future where MR and VR will be in a single headset, one player can join another players scene (if the platform supports it) and see it as a virtual one instead of a mixed reality one. Speaking of which, this opens up a room for cross MR/VR games, but this will require some sort of rendering or video projection of the original AR scene, using AR cloud technology, so the VR player will get to see that actual space. From what I’ve read, AR Cloud providers do not support it. However, if an option like that would exist, it would open up an option for great crossplay with VR players and help push MR faster forward. Right now, it seems like a fantasy and I don’t think this option will be available anytime soon.
I do see developers developing games where two players can play together, each one has its own UI with how he or she interacts with the game. Making both players playing together doesn’t mean that they both need to have the same type of interaction. For example, one player can try to fight a robot invasion, while the other player is in the next room trying to clear things up under a limited amount of time, if the level is not cleared, that extra enemies will invade the other player’s room. In this type of game, both players play simultaneously but not at the same place. Another option is to have the second player being a commander with a UI command panel that is positioned on the table and providing remote support for the other player. This can be changed and one player can decide to be the commander while the other one is the fighter.
I’ve seen how developers work to deliver a unique experience in virtual reality, and Mixed Reality developers will need to adapt to this new medium as well. I’ve seen great online multiplayer games in VR and I know how fun it can be. I just want to bring this topic so it can be discussed and to make sure (remote) online multiplayer games will find their ways into Magic Leap One or any other future MR headsets one way or another. AR lacks many of these types of games. I think that in some ways, these game can even help the platform accumulate more early adopter. Many people see a great social gaming experience and want to be a part of it. Which that great feeling of belonging will make them want to buy into a specific platform and become part of that social experience.
As I know myself, I will spend many hours thinking over the available possibilities of the Magic Leap One and its ability to deliver great online social gaming experiences. However, I need to start by getting familiar with the SDK. I don’t want to find myself playing cooperative puzzle games on a table. I will do my homework and hopefully get some interesting information and some inspiring insights. Of course I will share everything with you and hopefully, this will inspire you in your next mixed reality development adventure.