Vacation: First Class (Developer Commentary)

''This is the Wikia page for Vacation: First Class (Developer Commentary). If you're looking for the mission, go to Vacation: First Class.''


 * "The phone is not only a crucial element for finding the defector and solving the puzzle of this level; we saw it as an opportunity to have some fun inventing characters and recording voiceovers. Most of the voices you hear are developers from Schell Games. And one of the passengers is having an interesting conversation in Polish, and might even send you a little something if you play your cards right."


 * "We iterated on the text in this newspaper at least a dozen times, from big changes in the puzzle to little tweaks in wording and image placement. Half of the changed were made in the brownbox stage- that is, when we prototype with cardboard. At one point there was math involving subtracting years from each other and... Turns out, people do not like doing math in VR. I think it's because you can't move your fingers and count on them well. While we still do have a little bit of math, it's much simpler now. And remember, Halloween is on the 31st."


 * "These are vada, served with a sambar, a kind of vegetarian soup. It's fried lentils, quite delicious. But you probably thought they were donuts, which is quite a common misconception. Either way, enjoy."


 * "There was a point in time where we had all your equipment in a secret agent briefcase, but it felt anticlimactic just having all your tools dumped in your lap, and a complex interaction of equipment sockets in an articulated physics object got awful really quick, so we cut the suitcase and decided to use a puzzle to reward your equipment instead."


 * "We wanted something to rival the Bear Archer from the last mission. Heh, who am I kidding? Nothing could ever rival the Bear Archer. But Spear Guy does come close. You never expect Spear Guy. His name is The Groom in our world and he's an infamous Indian assassin that wears traditional wedding garb, and ALWAYS gets his point across."


 * "Originally, the team wanted this level to be in a moving train, and since any kind of motion in VR needs to be handled carefully, it was one of the first things we prototyped. At first, our results were promising and people who were prone to VR sickness seemed to do fine. However, as we started adding more visual and audio feedback, the comfort level started reducing. When you think there's a world where we could have made this work, we knew it would be at the cost of delivering a fun level, and so we decided not to do it. Instead, we came up with the story of Doctor Zor stopping the train on a bridge in the middle of nowhere and sending assassins your way. "


 * "The train stopping sequence at the beginning of the level was initially just audio that we played before fading into the level. We were never fully satisfied with this introduction. Later in development, we evaluated introducing some motion to better sell the sequence. Moving the train posed a few challenges, especially since the level was not built to handle this. Instead, we decided to move the environment around you to fake the train's motion. We were able to do this very easily since the train was on a curved bridge and a simple rotation animation would do the trick. Finally, we wanted to make sure this didn't introduce discomfort for our players, and this is where the closed window shade came as a blessing. It helped keep the motion subtle and comfortable."