Drums Rock, the arcade game about drumming while smashing demons to rock rhythms, delivers its most complete edition (and craziest news) with the launch of PS VR2! From the team at Garage51 Entertainment, We’re excited to share what we’ve accomplished with this technology that you can try at home on February 22nd. Rock it!
was in the process of developing drum rock A few months after receiving the PS VR2 dev kit. Back then, we were improving gameplay and battling record labels to get cool songs for games. We set out to test the functionality of the PS VR2 headset and the Sense controller.
I’ve tried countless VR headsets over the years, but I’ve found that the PS VR2 headset can do things here that no one has been able to do before. And that’s exactly what we did. We wanted to take risks and succeed. I went overboard instead of being afraid to try all these new features, and now I think it was the best decision.
You may not realize it, but we are huge fans of the musical rhythm genre. Drums Rock is an homage to everything we loved about the game that defined the genre. Maybe it’s just us, but have you ever memorized parts of a song and even played it without seeing it? There must be some lunatics who played guitar controllers with their mouths, like Jimi Hendrix. By the way, in Drums Rock, if you play without looking, your score will double!
eye tracking
After getting our hands on the PS VR2 devkit headset, eye tracking was the feature that surprised us the most, and we built gameplay mechanics around it, tweaked it, and found it really fun. . Please let me explain:
Below the streak marker are two switches, one for each eye. These switches are active when your eyes are closed or when you are not looking at the incoming note lane. It has a short cooldown period to prevent the player from blinking or glancing sideways at the note to trigger it. Activating the switch doubles his score. You can also reach x8 in combination with the no fail chain modifier. My personal favorite risk reward mechanic!
This all looks fine, but some of you may be asking yourself the following questions: How can I know I’m scoring twice as much if I close my eyes or don’t look at my notes? See? It pains me to admit that this question plagued me after the design concept was finalized, but thanks to game audio, the answer came much more quickly. We had to work with the sound design team to create effects that didn’t spoil the songs we love. To my relief, some reverb effects combined with volume controls were enough to give clear feedback while maintaining the essence of the music.
haptic feedback
Given all the work that went into eye tracking and playing drums and cymbals with drumsticks, you don’t think we forgot about haptic feedback, do you?
Imagine each drum, plate, and snare vibrating differently. The Sense controller’s haptic feedback allows you to reproduce these differences in-game. Left the option to adjust the strength of the feedback players receive.
headset vibration
By now you can see that the PS VR2 headset also includes feedback. We couldn’t pass up the opportunity to use it. Imagine the awe you feel when you are in a concert hall. You can feel the subwoofer vibrating the floor with each boom. Creating that tangible feeling was very important to this immersive experience.
To implement headset feedback in time with the music, we have special vibration map keys for each song. Each one is unique in order to keep them captivated and not to ignore this feeling.
We hope to reveal more, such as how the game runs at true 120fps and 4k resolution, or how we spoiled all the mechanics and tunes, but wait and see for yourself Better yet, you’re just a few days away from rock ‘n’ roll addiction with Drums Rock.
