Operation: Winter Break (Developer Commentary)

''This is the Wikia page for Operation: Winter Break (Developer Commentary). If you're looking for the mission, go to Operation: Winter Break.''


 * "Early on, we had your friend, the Support Agent, being captured and held beneath the trapdoor in this room. You could throw him items, and if you didn't need them to escape, he'd throw them back out of the hole. It was fun because throwing something in a hole and having a person off-screen throw it back to you was surprising, and the randomness felt pretty good. However, it was also frustrating, and narrowed the player's focus, so they tended to get stuck. Rather than caring about their own goals, they only cared about what the person in the hole needed next. Ultimately, we went with the mix of parallel and serial tasks we have now."


 * "'Bear Archer' was one of the first phrases that stuck with me from the beginning of development on this level. It seemed that, no matter what happened in design, we would end up with the bear as a key character in the scene that you interact with. There was also some discussion at one point of making the bear speak to you, where his mouth would open and that is where the voice would come from that you hear instead of the computer system on the desk, but that was thrown out early on. I'm glad at the end he's still as entertaining as he can be, and quite scary if you don't know how to survive bomb arrows."


 * "The whitebox phase for this level solves organizing a core set of features for weeks, and this placement juggling went on, even into the phase when final art was being implemented. We knew we wanted to include scenery, like floor-to-ceiling windows and a fireplace and skylight, but layouts that look great in whitebox can feel terrible in VR. During rapid whiteboxing, we normally test out the scenes with low-fidelity bake lighting. The downside with this is that it's very hard to feel what this scene will actually look like. To solve this, we started whiteboxing with real-time lights and a deferred rendering pipeline, testing that out in VR. When we were satisfied with the results, we folded back into forward rendering with bake lights. I'm sure our tech artists got goosebumps somewhere with me using 'VR' and 'deferred rendering' in the same sentence."


 * "One other aspect that we found really fun was wearables. For instance, we see a lot of people have fun putting the cigar in their mouth, lighting it, moving their head around. Of course, the hat as well. Surprisingly, many people's first action was to grab the hat off the rack and put it on. They end up wearing it the whole level- even if they die, the next time they start, they'll put it back on their head. Are you one of those people?"


 * "This level once had a nuclear missile in a silo outside instead of a gravity machine. Through a long series of events, we moved the missile itself to Operation: Squeaky Clean and went with no gravity here because it allowed the machine to be closer- and frankly, no gravity in VR is pretty rad."


 * "Zero gravity is super fun in VR, and while a whole space station level never manifested itself, this machine is clearly the next best thing. Some players may expect the first laser, but no one ever expects the second."


 * "Get to de choppa!"