Little Witch Academia VR Broom Racing Director Reveals How They Overcame Motion-Sickness in VR

During Anime Expo 2019, UNIVRS provided more information about their upcoming VR game Little Witch Academia VR Broom Racing, coming in 2020.

During the panel, Director Junichi Yamamoto, Producer CEO Keigo Fujikawa, and Producer Naoya Koji discussed the game’s development and how they approached VR technology. Through the power of VR, players will be able to meet the characters of Little Witch Academia in this new title. To do this, the developer will allow players to create their own character and enroll as a student at Luna Nova Magical Academy. The game will incorporate team racing, meaning that players will race with another character so that players will never be alone during a race. During gameplay, the developer decided to connect two brooms through magic so that your partner is next to you the entire time. The partners available in the game currently are Akko, Sucy, and Lotte, but through the game’s Kickstarter more character can be added, it’s all dependent on budget.

With that said, the game has hit some speed bumps along the way during development and it relates to the VR technology itself. One of the biggest challenges has to deal with motion sickness, which is something that many VR developers deal with. If they don’t address this problem, players will experience some discomfort during gameplay. Teleporting is something that other titles have used in the past. However, they felt that this makes the player feel trapped. So they didn’t go with this approach and instead they set out to solve motion sickness in a new way and Little Witch Academia VR Broom Racing will be the first title that the developer will focus this tech on.

Through its development, the company has tried many iterations of their tech but still got sick. However, they finally found the answer and it deals with making the player move while in VR which frees their mind and makes motion sickness a thing of the past. The developer is excited to share this experience with the player and freely fly without throwing up in the process.

During gameplay, players will race, use Magic Energy, be able to increase speed as they fly, and attack other racers while being conscious of their stamina. The developers stated the game is made simple and fun and compared it to Mario Kart.

Little Witch Academia VR Broom Racing is in development for PSVR, Steam, and Oculus.

If this is something that sounds interesting to you, the game is currently on Kickstarter.