Half-Life – Alyx character
The Half-Life character Alex presents three of the movement options, which will let you move through the ambient typically, shift teleport, or blink teleport. Two teleportation styles are similar functionally, but one of them will take you to your destination immediately. The movement systems are a matter of a newer deep dive video from the Valve.
The developers of the Valve show off some prototypes as well as some problems that they had to deal with, which are unique to the VR games such as the height of the player. Valve had decided that the character wanted to demonstrate the height of the player in the game. Also, there is a real implication to this.
Greg Coomer from Valve said that they would get hard to reproduce the bugs from the players banging their heads on the low hanging pipes since they were not able to teleport through particular areas. Later, they understood all those errors were coming from their taller colleagues.
Before this version of Alyx, players had to duck if there was any obstacle or barrier in the path. Valve found that players didn’t focus on those obstacles, rather they concentrated on the goal. So, the solution was to make a minimum body size while teleporting, thereby making the players the same height while moving from A point to B point.
Valve observed the concentration of the players carefully. Players mostly focused on the destination, and players had higher expectations about their abilities. Coomer said that playtesters would gladly tell them, yes, and they could attain the spot by pressing through a gap, catapulting over an object, or sliding under an obstacle.
Testers would scan under the gaps and around the corners, and can try to figure out the ways to get in the maps. So Valve had to ensure that the final position of the player’s body was a valid one, and there was a clearer path for them to go there.
