Photo Op: ‘Umurangi Generation VR’ Launches on Meta Quest Today

The world is on fire—maybe it’s ending. Your job is to document it.

Umurangi Generation VR releases on Meta Quest today. Explore the dystopian city of Tauranga Aotearoa from behind the lens of your trusty DSLR camera. You’re a courier for the Tauranga Express, and your job is to photograph the city’s landmarks and its inhabitants, earning cash and unlocking new equipment. But as you do so, you’ll inevitably learn more about the various crises that beset the city and what they might mean for the future—if there is one.

We sat down with Director Naphtali Faulkner to discuss the meaning and themes behind Umurangi Generation, the game’s “Slap Stick” turning method and the ongoing evolution of VR as a medium, the appeal of “glitch photography,” and more.

Read on for a great discussion with and keen insights from Faulkner, and be sure to check out Umurangi Generation VR in the Meta Quest Store.

Naphtali Faulkner: Umurangi Generation is a photography game that is all about creativity. I initially came up with the idea while teaching my cousin how to use a DSLR camera.

But to go further into the core concept, I should tell you a little bit about what the name means and why I chose it. I am Maori and wanted to make a game about a lot of the discussions we have regarding our place in contemporary society. While many believe the “colonial period” of New Zealand has ended, many of the problems for us remain, or have evolved into worse things. So the idea was to make something which did not walk away from that.

I also thought that the game should not resemble anything you would see in an educational setting. This is because when Indigenous Games are commissioned, they are usually dorky edutainment, which is really for the benefit of the education system, not the Indigenous people. The idea of an irreverent punk aesthetic with lots of things school boards would ban seemed like a good idea.

Umurangi is a word which means “Red Sky.” It is the kind of sky which you may see for a few minutes at sunset when the sun is just low enough. Some translations of the word could be seen as “Oven Sky,” if you imagine the red-hot flame of an oven. The point of this name was for a few reasons—first being that the sky in most cases is blue, not red, and so the idea of a Red Sky being “normal” is a hint that something is not quite right. The second being that a Red Sky Generation or “Sunset Generation” is this idea that the last generation of young people to see the sun set and the world end will be in our future at some point.

When you play the game it will all make sense.

NF: I have been a fan of VR for quite a while, but only had access to the original PlayStation VR for a very long time. That got me thinking what I would do if I were ever in the position to bring Umurangi Generation to VR.

A few years later I was connected with some people at Meta, and I saw a huge opportunity to make it a reality (no pun intended). I think VR is quite possibly the most interesting and also most difficult medium to work with in video games—because it’s the most innovative. If you play non-VR games, you know how a player is supposed to move in an environment. You know how a camera is supposed to work. But in VR? There are problems which have not been solved, and things have not necessarily become stagnant.

With Umurangi Generation, I wanted to contribute to this experimentation process and give back to the VR community by trying some things which haven't been tried yet. You can see this in the form of "Slap Stick" which is a turning method I invented based on Jibb Smart’s flick stick. The idea is that you hold the stick in a direction (slap) and then release it to immediately turn and face that direction. If you think about it, it actually makes a lot of sense to play games like this. When you turn around in real life you don't think "I am going to shuffle around for 3 seconds and then stop." Your brain knows where you want to turn.

I think if players try this method, they may find that it’s great for VR movement. It’s very, very comfortable for newbies and pros—it just requires your brain to rewire 20 years of video game thinking.

There is a lot of experimentation in Umurangi Generation, and I think if it pushes VR a little bit more in the direction of being easy to use for everyone, then that's good.

NF: Taking a photo in VR is very different because all the rules get simultaneously rewritten, broken, and thrown out, all at the same time. A creative game like this is perfect for the medium, but also hasn't really been done.

I’ve heard that many Photo Modes in games were actually made with the cynical intention of marketing. They were invented with the intention of the photos being tiny ads for the game which would be posted on social media by players—hence the limited control of angle and subject.

Umurangi Generation was a breath of fresh air for the photography genre in games because it threw away the conventions around how those games usually are scored and instead let the player be the judge. If you take a bad photo in Umurangi Generation—well, you made the sandwich, my man.

Part of this is just trusting that players will take good photos and you need to be as hands off as possible. VR, as we all know, is a place where there is a very thin line between “hands off” and “Oh my god, this thing is broken.” Players give you a lot of wiggle room in VR though because the medium is still finding its feet.

I think about how even the concept of “What should your hands do when you press them against something in VR?” is still not really something that developers and the community have decided on. On one hand, it is kind of immersion-breaking to see your hand phase through something. On the other, it breaks immersion when your hand doesn't remain synced with your hands in real life.

I bring this up because there is a subsection of Umurangi Generation photographers we nicknamed “glitch photography,” which we kept in because it was interesting to see what they made. An example would be going out of bounds and then taking a photo when the models are only half loaded in. We found it so interesting, we actually gave them an easier way to break the game by letting them no-clip. I can't wait to see what players end up doing in VR.

In terms of how we had to adjust the approach—the entire game needed to be reworked for VR. Now, this is partially because the original game was beginner code and not optimized. We’re talking a game which used 18,000 draw calls in a scene and needed to get down to an acceptable 200 for VR. I jokingly said to one of the Meta engineers once that I felt the game could now run on paper if I tried.

The gameplay was another challenge because VR changes how players connect with the world. It was challenging, making a VR game where you’re doing something creative. Walking around is kind-of a boring mechanic on its own.

The moment where I breathed a sigh of relief was when I took the first selfie in-game. Since you’re using a DSLR camera and not a phone you have to kind-of guess where you’re going to be in the photo—anyone who grew up before 2008 will remember doing this.

Umurangi Generation is also rebalanced for VR so it shines instantly. This meant giving the player late-game items early, as well as swapping out items that could potentially cause motion sickness—you could do jet boot powered backflips in the original—with ones which made sense for VR.

NF: I've many ideas of games to make next. I want to shift gears into making one game a year for one kind of console, moving forward—because we often hear this discussion of “sustainability” in the games industry but never really think about it in terms of the artistic load of not making anything new for four years.

NF: There is something I think about often with the possibility of what video games can do as an art medium. When you watch a film, you are a passive observer. When you play a game you are an active participant. When you play a VR game you are not only an active participant but also miming and acting out the game’s actions.

I think with VR you have this incredible artistic possibility of communicating an idea with the player acting it out. I've seen survival games in VR which kind of blow the traditional survival genre to smithereens because they’ve successfully done away with the spreadsheet-style crafting model and instead made players do the action of survival. If you think about what this means for the future of video games, it’s a moment where the consequences of what you make should become more of a persistent thought which is present in the entire design.

I would also like to tell the VR player base to never shut up. Please continue explaining what you want to see. Tell developers what is wrong, tell them what kind of things the VR space needs. You are the lifeblood of this experiment. If you think that comparing and contrasting different approaches is nitpicking, kill that thought. The more the players express what they feel, the more developers can try and figure it out.

In fact, if you are a player who wants to wield this hammer and shape this space, there has never been a better time for new ways of thinking to come in and fix this industry. Game development has become easier and easier to learn. You have the dev tools on your face right now.

Umurangi Generation VR is available now on the Meta Quest Store.