I used snippets of my phone interview with Sprint Vector lead designer/project lead, Andrew Abedian, in my feature on the growing VR fitness craze, but during the full half hour interview we touched on a lot of other topics and dove deeper into the development and testing phase of Sprint Vector. Here I present to you, mostly uncut, the full transcript of our interview with this delightful dude.
Boo (B): Let me ask you this… are you a fitness guy? Are you fitness guys over there at Survios?
Andrew (A): So, we have a gym at Survios that a lot of people are using… I am not one of those people (laughs) I’m not a fitness guy… I probably should be. I will probably, over the course of the next year, actively try to be. In general, it’s not really a fitness angle that drove us to make Sprint Vector. However, that being said, over time we’ve obviously realized that Sprint Vector has a really big fitness application in a lot of ways.
B: Definitely. When you were making it. Did you have any idea it might become a fitness thing or did this come completely out of the blue and what was your reaction when you heard that or what was the reaction of your team?
A: So, when we first set out to make it we were really trying to solve this locomotion problem in VR. We had a prototype really far back that had climbing already in there, very physical aspects of climbing and when I played that back then over a period of, like, 30 minutes I was like, “Man, my arms are getting tired.”
B: (laughs)
A: Like, I’m not really doing whole lot but I’m getting tired. So really early (on) I kind of saw like this fitness aspect to it but as soon as we actually started making the full game and developing the fluid locomotion based off of the climbing, and a bunch of other research it started becoming very obvious because as we were doing these in house test runs through the map people would be like, “Okay, I got a minute down on this map, can you beat this?” And so other people would come in and be like, “Oh, I got 52 seconds.” 51 seconds. 47 seconds. All these people started, like, racing and that’s kind of how it naturally developed into a racing game. But every single person who came out of it now, because they were trying to beat somebody, they were exhausted. So this was a pretty unifying moment where we were like, “There’s some pretty heavy fitness potential here because everyone’s sweating, everyone’s huffing and puffing but they’re all having fun and they barely even know that they’re doing exercise. They’re just so zoned into the gameplay that they’re not even registering that their arms are starting to get a bit swollen.”
B: When we spoke with Grab Games, the developers of Knockout League, they mentioned that they had to be cognizant of how much they asked of the player physically, was that something you also were considering?
A: Yes. Very early on we started setting up these maximum exertion ranges, like, okay I’m not going to expect the player to break off their arm…
B: I hope not!
A: …to try and move fast. I’m gonna put a limiter on it so it becomes more about technique than raw force. I think we probably could’ve pushed things even farther because as the game came out and people started playing it, they didn’t immediately register that entire technique appeal to it. They just thought, “Oh, my arms go fast, I go fast. So if I got faster with my arms, then I will do better in the game.” Very purposefully we tried to put in a speedometer, we tried to go through our tutorials and let people know like, “Hey, it’s really more about this technique… and it’s still going to get you exhausted particularly if you play it for a serious amount of time. We just tried to mitigate this exhaustion effect on players so that they could have like five or six races at a time and not just tap out after two. Which honestly what did happen a lot during internal testing was that particularly when you’re racing up to eight players head to head, you just get so in the zone. You’re in VR and you see this person next to you and you just get this reptilian response where you just want to pump your arms faster even though you shouldnt.
B: (laughs)
A: You really shouldn’t (laughs). I feel like we could have gone even farther with that message because ultimately we would like people to be playing our game longer. That being said there was a significant amount of effort put in to make sure it’s not just about blowing out your arms every race.
B: Yeah. Especially considering that the focus is almost entirely on your arms and not your legs, for instance.
A: It depends on how you play it. There’s a couple people here, myself included, that start leaning into their turns. We have a squatting motion depending on what’s going on. When I really get into it, I feel like I have skates on me so I’ll simulate the momentum on my own body and suddenly I can feel my calfs start tensing up. Sometimes there’s a really bad reaction where they’re constantly tense (laughs)
B: Have you seen some of these insane course runs that the VR community are doing?
A: Oh yeah. We’re constantly checking our Discord, checking reddit and finding clips on the internet. It’s just… it’s amazing because for one, when we were creating the smooth locomotion like when I was working with Alex, I very specifically wanted to make sure that the player who mastered the system would felt like they were fully in control. That they were still genuinely on these, like, hover skates and everything but they had the ability to do anything and it was very much an empowering moment to feel like a superhero, to fly and jump off something, land on a dot and then careen off of that on to something else. It’s amazing to see players get to that point in a relatively short amount of timed start applying it during races and particularly the challenge levels.
The challenge levels were designed, in a way, to be broken. We even set it up in a way that we have a time trial that leads to a collection mode that leads to, like, a hardcore mode. So in the time trial you get used to the map, in the collection mode you explore the map and then hardcore mode allows you to pump so much faster that you just break the map. A lot of people caught onto that and when we do weekly challenges we always see the perfect runs through the maps and people in this community are constantly comparing notes to one up each other by like fractions of seconds at this point. We’re down to millisecond differences. (laughs)
B: (laughs) You had mentioned earlier that courses were made to be broken and that it’s not just about how fast physically you can pump your arms, like, we’re not doing the Power Pad where you had to get your feet to go really quickly.
A: No, no ,no. (laughs)
B: When I did the courses I felt like there was a little of that Mario Kart magic. Did you think about that at all?
A: Oh definitely. From the beginning… we knew from pretty early on that we were gonna do this eight player head to head with powerups. So obviously the go to of that is Mario Kart. And in the back of our heads when we were making these levels we were like, “Okay, what would Mario Kart do?” At the same time, Sprint Vector courses have a level of verticality to them that Mario Kart levels don’t. Mario Kart levels are very much, “I’m planarly going around these tracks, very smooth. There might be some obstacles that are trying to kill me but generally speaking I don’t have to deal with a whole lot.
Sprint Vector courses have a level of verticality to them that Mario Kart levels don’t
In Sprint Vector we have that same kind of track course design, however now you have to climb you have jump over things, you can get affected and pushed off the course. We really wanted to push shortcuts in a way such that nearly every section of the map had about three ways to approach it, if not more, depending on what it is. So this creates a situation where if we’re playing with a higher ceiling of players and they’re all really good, they’re trying to predict where each other are going and, like, blocking off paths with mines or missiles and trying to outdo each other. So there’s really, like, a mental game going on at the same time as the physical game.
B: Yeah. Mind and Body workout.
A: Exactly. It was definitely a huge focus for us to give that kart racer feel.
B: Do you have any stories from when you were making this thing either in development or when you brought home to the family? Are you any good at it? Because I’m terrible (laughs.)
A: (laughs) I think over time I’ve gotten less and less good as I’m not playing as much. Mainly because I have to go versus our QA department and they’re playing all the time. It’s almost impossible to beat somebody who is putting hours and hours of work into their skillset everyday but at the same time it’s very encouraging because they got so good that it started showing us the potential for our own gameplay and tuning and track design. We would ask them like, “hey, what do you think about this weapon? Is it too powerful? Is it not good enough?” And we’d make all these changes… I mean, general QA iteration.
The QA department would also do races and I would be part of those races and we had an entire tournament breakdown and it ended up being me versus the QA league (nervous laughter) and those are really top level guys. It just got so intense because (my opponent) had already gone through all these people and was really tired and I just made one shitty mistake (boisterous laughter) and it just completely cost me the match. It was amazing because like everybody started cheering and it was very much a spectator feel and it was like oh my god can I catch up. He just barely won over me.
The other more adulty version of that story is that we had another race during one of our parties where both of us were very drunk, absurdly drunk and apparently we finished at the exact same second and this was before we had milliseconds in
B: Yeah (laughs)
A: He was just buzzed out of his mind and he was “Yay, I win!” I was just drooling. So those are my two favorite stories.
B: Do you recommend drinking while playing Sprint Vector?
A: I do not recommend that. You should only be in VR under responsible conditions. I am a fool for doing that. (Laughs) It was very fun though. 
B: It’s a great game and you should be very proud of the work you’ve done.
A: Thank you. The team is very happy with how everything has come along. Especially the way people picked up on it. We had a lot of concerns that some people would have a harder time with it because it definitely has a learning curve and it’s just so new. There’s really nothing like it. You literally have learn how to walk
B: Sort of like skiing.
A: And that’s too much for some people but, like, people who have stuck along for the ride, the feedback we get from them has just been like, “Wow this is such an incredibly rewarding physical experience that I feel like not only am I having fun playing this game but it’s also shaping me. I’m getting thinner…” People have already found ways of tracking their sessions using FitBit. They’re muscles are definitely developing over time. So it’s kind of amazing to make something like that in a similar fashion to like Dance Dance Revolution, where people can just have fun but get fit at the same time.
B: Personally I like that it’s mostly low impact.
A: Swinging our arms is something we already do as humans. So it doesn’t feel like you’re fighting your body. It can be a rhythmic groove that you just kind of get into. When you’re in the middle of it, the thick of it and you get shot by rocket and you start scrambling you can start getting a little bit more unnatural with your movements in there but generally we’ve found it’s a nice way to do core exercises, cardio, etc. Just get your heart rate up.
B: Did you learn from the climbing mechanics in other VR games?
A: We did. We tried to learn from those systems but for Sprint Vector they aren’t exact carbon copies, first and foremost before anything fitness related it was about trying to solve motion sickness and make sure we provide the most comfortable experience possible. And then over course we just crank everything up to the extreme to essentially show off. (laughs)
B: Yes, Yes you did. (laughs) Now that you’ve seen the potential in the fitness category do you think Survios or you personally will be heading up any projects with that in mind?
A: The philosophy at Survios is that we are creating active VR content. What that really means for us is that (our games) need to get the body involved. They need to be a one to one feel of, like, you are really in there. I think staying true to that principle through out all of our products means that regardless of what we really create, you’re going to be so physically attached the action that you’re actually doing in game that you’re going to end up having a workout. Sprint Vector was not developed as fitness game. It was developed as a really good VR title that shows active principles that engage players and solve locomotion. Fitness was just a side effect of all that. In the same way, we’re creating things like, Creed: Rise to Glory, which we announced at the Game Developer’s Conference.
B: Yes.
A: That game physically is much more fitness intensive, I mean, it’s literally boxing (laughs.)
B: (laughs)
A: The first time I tried it out I came out of it I was like, “Okay, that’s not too bad.” and then in ten minutes my back was hurting. I was throwing really heavy punches, I was getting in there. But that’s really the beauty of it. Because we’re holding true to the active VR principle, the more the body is engaged the more the mind can just let go and just accept virtual reality as the space they’re in.
B: Thank you, Andrew.
A: Thank you! Come out and see us if you’re around for E3.
