OR: In a July 2018 interview with GameCrate, Polyarc co-founder and art director Chris Alderson briefly talked about having to balance how saturated the VR market is and the cost of game development with the gameplay length and the story that is going to be told. Could you talk a bit more about this balancing act that Polyarc had to make with Moss, and specifically what compromises exist in Moss as a result?
LD: That question has a lot of layers. There’s a lot to that. In the business side of things, we decided that we wanted to make Polyarc scale to the industry. As the market grew, we wanted to grow alongside it. So when we started, roughly four-and-a-half years ago, we didn’t want to overextend ourselves. The VR market was still relatively small [and] only a fraction of the overall gaming population was engaging in VR content. It’s a business decision not to hire too fast, not to invest too heavily into the studio [and] team because the returns just aren’t there.
But with recent hardware releases that have removed the barriers of being tethered to a console or PC, cost, and not needing higher-end PCs to run that, the number of people who are playing are growing. And that’s something we’re really excited about and are adapting to. But, because we’re a small nimble team at a startup, there were compromises that went into the game.
Like, there was no game length to balloon the story length or puzzles. The things we wanted to do, but with money and time constraints, we had to scale and deliver a product that we were proud of. That includes the overall experience, the polish and quality. I would like to think we delivered on that, but there are things that we had to take out. But as the market grew, we were able to bring a few of the ideas back into the game that we had left on the table with the addition of the Twilight Garden update. Just added a significant amount of gameplay, story, and puzzles to Moss. So there’s definitely a balancing act. With a new market, and the new experiences that are out there, we wanted to scale appropriately to that growing demand.
We also wanted to create content that the audience demanded at the time. When we first released Moss, there were a lot of smaller, quick-play games – a lot of tech demos that were out there. And I’m not knocking the quality of those, because there’s a lot of experimentation and exploration that was taking place, but there wasn’t a lot of long-form gameplay that was taking place- several hours that went into a game and an experience. Not a lot of replayability.
So we decided to scale our game to an experience to where you put on an headset, you can play ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty-five minutes and have a really good experience. And then [you] take the headset off and come back to the game when you wanted to continue on the adventure. So, while there were constraints and there were challenges, there was an opportunity to focus down on exactly the quality and the level of polish that we wanted to deliver to our audience. And that’s what we were able to do- hone it down and not spread ourselves too thin – but really go deep on the different areas that we wanted to from story to narrative to character development to social interactions and the bond you create with Quill. And that allowed us to do that without saturating us too thin in game development.
OR: Near the top of the interview, you mentioned that the co-founders of Polyarc first encountered VR over at Valve. Yet, Moss came out first for the PlayStation VR [and] with Vive and Oculus support coming afterwards. Why did Polyarc make that decision?
LD: It was really a business decision, and our ability to scale a small team. PlayStation VR has the largest market share of headsets that are out there, so looking at it from a business perspective, we want to get our game into as many headsets and as many hands as possible. So looking towards the company that had the largest headset market share was almost a no brainer to get there. But PlayStation has also been a phenomenal partner for us since almost the beginning. And when we pitched them early on, they were huge advocates of what we were looking to do and the values that we were looking to bring to the VR industry- from business to marketing support. They’ve been a true partner with us. So, knowing all that, and moving forward, we wanted to kind of focus on one headset release at launch. And PlayStation was a no brainer.
But as a development studio, because it was such a new market that we were putting out [in], we didn’t want to spread ourselves too thin and release on multiple headsets at the same time. For one, that level of quality control- we wanted to be able to focus down on one platform and get the game out and deliver a quality experience that the players deserve. So we just decided to go on one headset at launch.
But from there, once we launched, the team quickly turned to bring it to Oculus and Windows Extra Reality, I believe, within five to six months after launch. [This] allowed us to reach a larger market, which our goal was- to deliver a great experience across all fully-tracked heads-and-hands devices. That’s what our goal was. But again, resources. So we weren’t able to do that at launch.
And that concludes Part One of our two-part interview! Please return Friday to see the conclusion of our interview as we talk more about how Moss’ puzzles were developed, the development of the Twilight Garden DLC, what lies in the future for both Polyarc Games and for the Moss franchise, and more.
Update: You can check out Part Two of our Moss interview here!
Also, please check out our review for Moss here!
Have you picked up Moss? What do you think about it?
Let us know in the comments below!
You can buy Moss now for PlayStation VR, Oculus Quest/Oculus Rift S, Vive, and on Steam.
