About a year ago, a small team of us were trying several Virtual Reality (VR) experiments. If you’ve seen our April Fools’ Day video, then you’ve spotted some gameplay of our Titan prototype.

Titan is an asymmetric multiplayer game for the Oculus Rift in which one player controls a giant rock monster with the VR headset and two other players use a TV or monitor and control small robots with Xbox controllers. The titan’s goal is to stomp the robots or totally destroy the nearby city, while the two robot players need to shoot the titan’s vulnerable back. The VR player is isolated with the headset and headphones, while the two robot players need to coordinate their movements because when the robots deploy to shoot they can’t move.

The isolation of the VR headset plus headphones immediately struck me as an opportunity for a competitive game since people only feet away could effectively conceal communication from the person in the headset. Based on that, our goal was to create a game that encouraged asymmetric gameplay between one person in VR and other players on a split screen.

Only one headset is needed for the titan but others can join on a regular screen. So, we created an arena with a titan-sized character looking down on buildings and two tiny characters driving robot suits trying to take down the titan. To get a sense of the gameplay, you can watch more prototype footage here.

We often struggled with the sense of scale for both sides of the playing field, as well as movement speed. In different iterations, the smaller players reporting either feeling completely powerless, or they would report no sense of fear or apprehension from being around the titan.

During one of our sprints, we hooked up the rotation of the titan’s head to the rotation of the player’s head. When the titan scanned the environment, its head would rotate around like a predator. Then, it would lock its gaze on one of the smaller players. That player would freeze. And it was awesome.

All of our playtesters loved that moment of terror knowing that not only has it seen you, but now it’s coming right for you. The smaller players were so small and their cameras were tilted up to exaggerate the size of the titan so that they knew they couldn’t face it head on. The titan could close the distance far faster than the small players could get away so they would have to dash to a hole or some obscuring feature of the terrain to hide. But if the titan saw you, you never felt safe; that was the core of it.

That gaze lock stayed at the forefront of our minds because it encapsulated the kind of spike in the interest curve that fit our intended gameplay. As we iterated to find a natural movement scheme for the titan, it was vital to maintain a scheme that could hit that moment. It ultimately became a pillar for the prototype: If the titan looks at you, you should feel vulnerable. Movement speed, camera angle, and animation transitions all followed suit from that pillar.

Think about the moments in your experience. What kind of moment signals the climax in action? How do you want your players to respond to that inciting incident?