Whether at the hands of petty criminals or supervillains, when the citizens of Gotham need help, Batman leaps from the shadows to save them. But who rescues Batman in his times of need? Camouflaj gameplay programmer and 2022 BS in Computer Science and Game Design alum Rhianna Pinkerton — that’s who. “This scenario happened quite a few times where certain interactions would keep breaking in cinematics, so they would get sent to the chopping block,” Pinkerton says of development on Camouflaj’s new Meta Quest 3 game, Batman: Arkham Shadow. “Every time I’d go, ‘No! You can’t take it out. This part is so cool! I’ll figure it out, I’m going to fix this.’”
Those imperiled Batman moments Pinkerton swooped in to help save from near death ended up contributing to an experience The Game Awards named the “Best AR/VR Game” of 2024 last December. With a number of reviewers proclaiming Batman: Arkham Shadow one of the best VR games since Half-Life: Alyx and a new high benchmark for the medium in general, Pinkerton set the bar high on a personal level as well — especially for her first professional game credit since graduating from DigiPen. “It’s unreal,” Pinkerton says of the game’s glowing reception, recently earning four nominations at the D.I.C.E. Awards and winning in the “Immersive Reality Game of the Year” category as well. “I was talking with [Camouflaj founder and studio head] Ryan Payton at our launch party and he told me, ‘Wow, Rhianna, what a first game.’”
Before Pinkerton picked up the cowl at Camouflaj, she was slicing up strawberries in an exploratory game development class during her sophomore year of high school. “We got to make Fruit Ninja for the Kinect,” Pinkerton says. “The class was so much fun! At that point I knew I wanted to work in games.” Despite her game development dreams, Pinkerton initially decided to pursue a general computer science degree at a college in Portland. A year and a half into her studies, she had a “quarter-life crisis” that changed her path. “I had a full-on breakdown realizing my program only had one game class, offered once every two years,” Pinkerton says. “I was like, ‘This isn’t enough games for me!’ I decided then that I really did want to work in games.”
With its specialized game development curriculum, Pinkerton decided to jump to DigiPen, where she thought she would be starting with plenty of computer science experience. “I remember having to retake physics and data structures my freshman year and thinking, ‘I already did that,’” Pinkerton says. “Taking them again at DigiPen, I realized I hadn’t really learned physics or data structures at all. The teaching at DigiPen was on another level. They covered so much more than my other college classes did.”
After partnering up to produce game team projects like Vectrix and Pogo Pirate, Pinkerton landed a gameplay programming internship at Camouflaj the summer before her senior year thanks to her proficiency in vector math and her anime fandom. “During the virtual interview, I had a lot of pictures of anime I liked on the wall behind me in my apartment, and I remember they were like, ‘Is that Attack on Titan?’” Pinkerton says. “We totally bonded over random nerdy stuff.”
I love Batman. It was so, so hard not to tell everyone I was going to be working on a Batman game when I found out.
Coming in without any experience in VR, Pinkerton says she was in for a few big surprises. “For one, they treated me like one of the team from the second I became an intern, which was amazing! But I was also like, ‘Guys, I don’t know what I’m doing yet,’” Pinkerton laughs. The other surprise was learning that the brand-new project she’d be working on — a project the studio had just started “white box” prototyping before she arrived — was a Batman VR game. Strapping her into a headset, the studio had Pinkerton throwing some punches in their early, very physical take on the Batman: Arkham series’ classic hand-to-hand combat.
Keeping her secret identity as a new Batman game developer under wraps was a struggle. “I love Batman. It was so, so hard not to tell everyone I was going to be working on a Batman game when I found out,” Pinkerton says. “I landed there at this perfect sweet spot right at the beginning of the development process — truly the best time to start as an intern.”
Just as her ability to bond over “nerdy stuff” quickly came into play as an intern on Batman: Arkham Shadow, so too did the vector math she tested for in her interview. As Pinkerton discovered, player interactions and movements that would be simple in a typical game were far more complex and challenging in virtual reality, requiring extensive tracking. “My first two months were just figuring out gestures, which was literally all vector math,” Pinkerton says. “If the player needs to nod their head, how do you define what a head nod is in math terms? If you need to shake an NPC’s hand, how do you make sure the player’s hand is in the right position for that so the collision works correctly? And then you need haptic feedback to tell the player they shook someone’s hand!”
By the end of her internship, Pinkerton had become an integral part of the Camouflaj team, developing the in-game dialogue system that would ultimately ship with the final product. Impressed, the studio extended a full-time job offer, which Pinkerton happily accepted after graduating a semester early at the beginning of 2022 thanks to her transfer credits. Her responsibilities grew as she took over work for the game’s “detective vision” investigation segments and numerous interactive cinematics, two features she, and the studio at large, did lots of homework on.
“Getting to do the ‘book club’ was so much fun,” Pinkerton says, referring to the studio-wide assignments to read the comics that Batman: Arkham Shadow’s storyline was based on, as well as to play one game from the larger Batman: Arkham series each month. “Playing those games as a gameplay engineer was so interesting, trying to figure out how specific features worked and how to take and adapt them for our VR game.”
Adapting the gameplay style of Rocksteady Studios’ long-running Batman: Arkham series — beloved for its trademark blend of free-flowing fisticuffs, stealth, and detective work — was an imposing challenge for the team. “It kind of felt like an uphill battle to win over Arkham fans,” Pinkerton says. “There was a lot of pushback when it was announced that it was going to be a VR game.”
Creating the VR version of Batman’s detective vision, a mode from previous Arkham games that enables players to see through walls and enemies while highlighting crime scene clues, took lots of careful consideration and research. “Pulling from previous games, we wanted it to feel like an authentic Arkham crime scene, but each game does investigations a little differently. We had to pick and choose from what we liked, and even beyond that, what would actually work in VR,” Pinkerton says. The studio found that the key was a balance between the old style and new ideas. While preserving the spirit of past Arkham titles, the team injected as much immersion and player interaction as possible into the formula. The approach led to lots of fun, natural-feeling adaptations. “To open detective vision, we did a gesture where you can put your hand up to your head and click a button,” Pinkerton says.
Prioritizing interaction was a huge part of Pinkerton’s work on the game’s cinematics as well. “We played a bunch of VR games to research this, and during VR cinematics, you’re often just sitting there twiddling your thumbs and watching,” Pinkerton says. “We had to come up with ways to keep the player engaged.” Rather than being a passive observer in Batman: Arkham Shadow, players are made to interact with objects, NPCs, and even violently interrogate enemies during cinematics, blurring the boundaries between cutscenes and gameplay.
After the game’s release, reviewers specifically praised Camouflaj’s uniquely interactive approach to VR cinematics, especially the brutal interrogation beatdowns Batman is made to deliver. “One struggle with a lot of our cinematics was that Batman can’t kill anyone,” Pinkerton says. “The whole theme of the game is exploring his brutal, rage-filled shadow side, but there’s this interesting line you can’t cross with Batman that we had to go right up to.”
Winning The Game Award was a big ‘Wow!’ moment — we weren’t expecting that.
When Batman: Arkham Shadow released, the pressure to win over a doubtful Arkham fan base evaporated. “I think we won!” Pinkerton laughs. “We were so happy that it was really well received, and winning The Game Award was a big ‘Wow!’ moment — we weren’t expecting that. We’re all so happy to be nominated in a non-VR category at the D.I.C.E. awards too. Only Half-Life: Alyx had done that before.”
It’s a remarkable achievement Pinkerton was able to make happen thanks in part to the many fellow DigiPen Dragons she works with at Camouflaj. “I literally had lunch with four of them today,” she smiles. “It was really cool to have so many DigiPen people there to help connect dots for you and make you feel more welcome.” Already a formidable development squad, Pinkerton and her fellow alumni may soon become a formidable crime-fighting squad as well. “Just yesterday, for shipping the game, Camouflaj gave us our own Batarangs,” Pinkerton says. “They’re pointy — they could actually hurt! Everyone in the office was like, ‘Uh, should we throw these?’”