Our series Inside XR Design highlights examples of great XR design. Today we’re looking at shotguns in several different VR games to learn what makes them feel great in the player’s hand. In doing so, we’ll uncover the secret to making anything feel great in VR.
You can find the complete video below, or continue reading for an adapted text version.
Ok, we’re jumping right into this… if I asked you ‘what’s your favorite shotgun in VR?’ you can probably picture it in your head pretty quickly. But could you tell me exactly what makes that shotgun feel so great?
Well, that’s kind of a trick question, because the answer is like 50 different little details that all add up to how a shotgun ultimately feels in the player’s hands.
So today we’re going to look at some of my favorite shotguns in VR and dissect all those little details to talk about how they contribute to that feeling. And by the end of this… I’m going to make the case that if we can understand what makes a shotgun feel great in VR, we can figure out how to make anything feel great in VR.
Arizona Sunshine 2 – Sunshine Shorty
Let’s kick things off with one of my favorite shotguns in all of VR. That would be the sawed-off pump-action shotgun in Arizona Sunshine 2—lets call it the Sunshine Shorty.
Just look at this thing go. It’s incredibly satisfying to use. But why?
Well first of all, it’s pump action. You just can’t beat a pump-action shotgun in VR. Two-handed interactions in VR are always interesting, and making the player perform such a visceral and well-recognized gesture is always gonna make them feel like a bad-ass. Pumping a shotgun to load the next round is a clear extension of the ‘Instructed Motion’ concept I introduced in the previous episode, and an example of how such movements can infuse players with emotion.
The way the Sunshine Shorty reloads has a great little detail too. In many VR games you can reload a weapon just by touching the magazine or shell to the right place on a gun, but in Arizona Sunshine, you need to actually slide the shell into the weapon. The developers made this feel great by adding a custom hand-pose to show the player pushing the shell into the gun.
This little detail adds a lot to the feel of the weapon, because it changes reloading from just touching one thing to another into performing a gesture that captures more of the fantasy of sliding rounds into a shotgun. And importantly, it’s still feels good without being tedious. You might say the interaction is generous to the player… you don’t need to get the motion or position perfectly right in order for it to work.
But the motions themselves are only part of what makes using the shotgun satisfying. Providing feedback to the player intention is critical as well, and the easiest way to do this is with great sound and haptics.
And getting the sounds right is everything.
Let’s listen to how much less satisfying it is to use the Sunshine Shorty with weak sounds vs. strong ones:
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Sounds make such a difference.
For a shotgun, getting the pump-action sound just right is crucial. As someone who’s fired real shotguns, I wouldn’t say the Sunshine Shorty’s pumping sound is particularly realistic, but remember, the goal is to convey the feeling of pumping a shotgun, not simply playing back a perfect replication of a sound. In the case of this shotgun, its got just the right amount of crunch, clack, and metallic sounds to give a very satisfying feeling every time you pump it.
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And though I can’t show you haptics on video, haptics can be almost as beneficial as audio itself, because it ties specific weapon sound effects to different locations on the weapon. For instance, when you pump the gun you should feel a haptic rumble in the pump hand, but not the trigger hand.
And again, both sounds and haptics are about giving the player feedback when they do something. When a player pumps the gun you’re conveying that they did something right by giving them the feedback of a sound effect and a haptic rumble.
Another piece of feedback is seeing the shotgun shell ejected from the gun after pumping it. This further reiterates the player has interacted with the shotgun in a valid way.
And there’s a great little detail the developers added here. On most real-life shotguns, the shell ejection port is on the side of the weapon so the shell is ejected away from the wielder. But the Sunshine Shorty has an ejection port on the top of the shotgun, just to make the feedback of ejecting the shell even more visible for players. I love it.
There’s one huge thing we haven’t talked about yet about what makes this shotgun feel great in VR. That would be the things the player actually shoots the gun at. You could do literally everything perfectly about the gun itself—the sounds, effects, tuning etc—but if the player pulls the trigger and the enemy just slowly lays down, that’s absolutely not gonna feel good.
Arizona Sunshine 2 might even go a bit over the top with the visual impact and sound effects when shooting zombies, but damn it feels great. The key is that the effect on the target correctly matches the sound and recoil of the weapon. Since the shotgun sounds powerful when it shoots, to deliver the feedback of that expectation, the target you’re shooting at needs to be satisfyingly impacted.
So the Sunshine Shorty feels great for all the reasons we talked about. But we can also learn a lot by noticing where things could be better. If I could just snap my fingers and make it so, these are the improvements I’d wanna to see with this gun:
First: Having an animated transition in hand poses between holding the shell and sliding it into the gun would make reloading look smoother visually.
Second: While the gun operates realistically in terms of pumping and loading, visually if we look into the chamber we can see the next shell from the gun isn’t actually loaded into the barrel. It just sits there until the chamber closes and then essentially appears in the barrel to be ejected after the shot.
And Third: Unless you’re counting while reloading, there’s no clear way to know when the shotgun is completely full of shells. That often means you’ll go to put another shell in the gun but end up throwing it on the ground instead because it can’t fit. This happened to me all the time when playing the game. Giving players an audio cue to indicate when the gun is almost full and then completely full is a subtle way to avoid this—and you’ll see exactly that with the next shotgun we talk about.
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Half-Life: Alyx – Combine Shotgun
The next shotgun we’re looking at is the utterly unique shotgun from Half-Life: Alyx. This shotgun feels excellent, but I gotta start off right at the top and say the only major thing it’s missing for me is that it’s not pump-action!
Granted, the developers of the game clearly made it a priority to avoid two-handed weapons, which is why we ended up with this crazy pistol-like, breach-loaded, automatic shotgun. There’s really nothing else like it.
It might not be pump-action, but the way Valve did the chambering with the little flip-out lever still feels great.
And we can see this shotgun is great for so many of the same reasons we talked about with the Sunshine Shorty.
But I want to call out one of those things that was missing with the Sunshine Shorty. In Half-Life: Alyx, when you reload the shotgun, you get a unique sound when the gun is completely full of shells. Players quickly learn this noise means they can’t put anymore shells in the gun, which stops them from trying and accidentally throwing their shells on the ground.
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Alyx also has a custom hand pose to show the player pushing the shells into the gun, but it has hand-pose transitions as well, making the whole thing look smoother overall.
It’s also worth pointing out how great the recoil feels on the Alyx shotgun. Not only does the recoil animation strike a great balance between conveying the action of firing and the weight of this big metal weapon, we also get some sectionary motion with the slide kicking back which further sells that this is a real, working object.
And I have to say, the Alyx shotgun might have the best firing sound of any shotgun in VR. Listen to this thing. Again, this isn’t a realistic sound, but it sounds deliciously powerful and matches the deadliness of the weapon and the impact on the target.
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Not only does this shotgun have an incredibly unique design and killer sounds, it’s clear that Valve also thought carefully about exactly how it should work. This is evident in the fact that Alyx pulls out two shotgun shells every time. This cuts down the number of gestures needed to reload the gun from seven to just four. That means the player gets the benefit of having seven rounds in the chamber, but without needing to load seven individual shells into the gun. Valve added this clever little detail to support the pacing of combat they were aiming for.
There’s also multiple ways to close the breach after opening it—you can push it with your hand from several different areas or you can flick it closed which always feels awesome.
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BONELAB — FAB Shotgun
Now moving on to the FAB shotgun in Bonelab. The model of this thing is just beautiful. It’s fairly short but also has a really long pump grip which gives it a totally unique look.
This shotgun all around is pretty solid, but I think it has the best shell loading sound effect of any that I’ve heard. Again, it’s not a highly realistic noise, but it really effectively communicates the fantasy of sliding a shell into the gun.
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The pump sound is pretty solid too (but I think I still prefer the pump of the Sunshine Shorty).
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This shotgun also has the best muzzle flash I’ve seen. It has these extra trails that project out from the muzzle which gives it some extra depth.
What’s more, Bonelab has a slow motion mode that you can use at any time. And if there’s one thing that feels cooler than using a pump action shotgun in VR, it’s using a pump action shotgun in VR in slow motion. The sound effects and the muzzle flash really play well to the slow motion feature and hammer down on that action-movie feeling.
Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, Ch. 2 — One-handed Reloads
Speaking of action movies, I want to give a quick shout-out to the shotgun in Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners. It’s completely impractical but this is the only shotgun among those that we talked about which you can cock with one hand… a move straight out of any number of action movies.
And again, this is all about delivering a fantasy to players, so why not?
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Hotdogs, Horseshoes, and Hand Grenades — ALL the Shotguns
Ok we talked about four really fun VR shotguns so far. But it would be insane to talk about shotguns in VR without mentioning Hotdogs, Horseshoes, and Hand Grenades. This game is basically a gun range simulator at its core.
If you are a VR developer—and especially if you don’t have real-world experience with guns—you owe it to yourself to jump into this game and play around. The game is a literal library of guns, all of which operate realistically.
Not only is this a great way to get a starting point for how you might want a weapon to work in VR, the game also has a number of incredibly unique shotguns you just don’t see anywhere else.
These are all the shotguns in the game. Yes just the shotguns.
There’s so many cool options that other VR games haven’t explored yet,
Like just look at this sawed-off revolver shotgun.
And you know I love a pump-action shorty—this one has a magazine!
Or how about a drum-fed two-round burst?
And I don’t even know what the hell this thing is… but what’s stopping you from exploring all these unique options?
Hotdogs, Horseshoes, and Hand Grenades is your ticket to heaps of inspiration for making the next awesome shotgun—or any gun—in VR.
Feedback Makes the Experience
Ok so we talked a lot about shotguns and what makes them feel great in VR. But I promised you that if we could figure out what it is that makes shotguns feel great, we can figure out how to make anything feel great in VR.
So the core takeaway here is feedback. Feedback comes in a million forms, but it’s always an immediate response to some action from the player.
This could be sound, it could be light, it could be haptics, animations… whatever it is, feedback is the game constantly telling the player: yes, you did something valid in this world.
If you want something to feel great in VR, start thinking about where you can add feedback.
You can make something as boring as a literal bottle feel great in VR by adding feedback.
Examples include:
- A small sound effect when the player grabs or releases the bottle
- A sound effect when the bottle hits the ground after being dropped
- A sound effect when the bottle is shaken to imply what’s inside
- A sound effect if the bottle is dragged against a surface
- A animation to show the bottle’s effect when impacting other objects, like breaking glass
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You can do this exercise with literally any object in VR, and you’ll find that the more feedback you add, the better the thing will feel when players interact with it.
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That’s not to say that you’re gonna d this for every single item in the game. What you want to think about is what are the items that are most important. And usually that comes down to: ‘what items are going to be held by the player for the most amount of time over the course of the game?’.
Literally just go down the list—one, two, three four—of the items the player is going to interact with the most, and start asking yourself: are there additional opportunities to add feedback to the various interactions players can have with them.
The game Fujii really drives this idea home for me. It feels like anything in the game you touch has some way to give you interesting feedback.
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Either with sounds, animations, or haptics. And as a result, this game just feels so freaking good all around.
Everything you interact with feels reactive. It makes the whole simulation feel… alive.
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Once you start to see opportunities to add feedback… you’ll be able to make anything feel great in VR.
Enjoyed this breakdown? Check out the rest of our Inside XR Design series and our Insights & Artwork series.
And if you’re still reading, how about dropping a comment to let us know which game or app you think we should cover next?