Author: David Jagneaux

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‘Rangi’ is a VR Puzzle Game from Ex-Ubisoft Devs That Lets You Explore Mythical Africa

‘Rangi’ is a VR Puzzle Game from Ex-Ubisoft Devs That Lets You Explore Mythical Africa

In the fervor of the holiday season surrounding the release of PlayStation VR and Google Daydream, followed by the Oculus Touch controllers and the never-ending onslaught of new games and experiences on the Steam marketplace, it’s easy to forget about Samsung’s Gear VR. At CES 2017 it was quietly announced that they’d sold over 5 million headsets to date, purportedly putting them at the top of the food chain in terms of sheer market penetration, along with a surprisingly deep and diverse library of content.

Early adopters of PC-based VR and industry enthusiasts might be focused on more powerful alternatives, but the Samsung Gear VR appears to be the little headset that could and it keeps on pushing. That’s why stylish, new releases on the device, such as Rangi, should not fly under your radar.

Rangi is a visually beautiful upcoming puzzle/adventure title in development by Funsoft, published by Digigo. At first glance, it looks a bit reminiscent of other mobile VR titles such as Land’s End or Esper, with a unique mythical African twist.

From a gameplay perspective, you spend your time solving puzzles by interacting with objects such as ruins and exploring a detailed ancient environment. You can tell from the trailer above that solutions often involve lining up runes and lines to connect currents of energy, which all feeds back into the central narrative of the game’s world.

The development team is located in Casablanca, Morocco and is actually made up of several ex-members of Ubisoft Casablanca. “We sought to create in Rangi a strong relationship between the puzzle-based gameplay and African tribal art,” said Fabien Delpech, Creative Director at Funsoft in a prepared statement. “The level design entices players to interact with a multitude of elements within the environment, which makes the VR experience even more meaningful. Rangi is a truly unique mobile game due to it drawing inspiration from African music, folklore, and art, and we know that gamers will love playing it as much as we’re enjoying creating it.”

From what I’ve seen so far, the narrative is rather esoteric and cryptic in its delivery, insisting on a decidedly obscure presentation, which all lends itself well to the established setting. The music utilizes the 3D audio of the Gear VR very well to create an encompassing all-around you feeling.

The lack of position tracking continues to make the Gear VR feel inferior to the PS VR, Vive, and Rift, but that’s not Rangi‘s fault. It just so happens that the game delivers a rich world with such great visual individuality that you’ll often find yourself wanting to lean in and get a closer look even though you can’t.

Despite it all, Rangi isn’t going to be a game for everyone. It leans heavily on its stylized visuals, entrancing music, and thought-provoking gameplay to provide a deep and rewarding puzzle experience, but it’s far from the next great narrative masterpiece from what I’ve seen. Fans of the excellent Land’s End and challenging Esper series will feel right at home and should certainly keep their eyes on Rangi as it continues development.

Funsoft is planning to release Rangi for Gear VR early this year in 2017. You can find more information on the official website.

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How ‘Rec Room’ From Against Gravity Embraces The Idea of ‘Structured Social VR’

How ‘Rec Room’ From Against Gravity Embraces The Idea of ‘Structured Social VR’

The conquest for social VR dominance is a highly contested race among a mixture of tech giants and startup indie companies. Many of the first platforms to hit the scene, such as vTime and AtlspaceVR have made names for themselves in their wide accessibility across devices and flexibility of uses for the VR community, while others take a more centralized focus on providing fun and engaging activities for players to enjoy. Rec Room falls into that second category.

You can play Rec Room on both the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift with Touch for free right now and if Nick Fajt, CEO and Co-Founder of Against Gravity, the developers behind Rec Room, has any thing to say about it, the free-to-play status will likely remain forever. It’s a key part of their community building strategy.

“Monetization isn’t an immediate concern for us, we’re really just exploring what social VR looks like right now,” Fajt explained to UploadVR in an interview. “We focus on what the community wants and asks for. You can easily imagine some in-app payment strategies focused on customization and personalization that we could pursue later on, kind of like DOTA or League of Legends — skins, customization options, that sort of stuff.”

Even without a way to make income from the game yet, the studio has garnered critical acclaim and adoration from fans. Their approach to designing the game around what the community is most interested in has led to things like the creation of private rooms you can invite people into with white boards and other props, as well as the streamlining of Rec Room’s core features.

“A huge part of the way Rec Room is developed is that we don’t really have a cast in stone one year product plan,” Fajt said. “We treat it as a learning machine. We look at what people do and what they say they want to do and use that as a North Star for what we develop next. A lot of the things we make are things we’ve heard from the community that people want to see or to make better. You can see what we did with paintball as an example: launching with 1 map, then adding more weapons and more maps. We want to do that in the other games as well.”

A significant factor that contributes to Rec Room being so special is how they’ve managed to identify and represent aspects of traditionally flat menu-based interfaces of screen-based games within VR. Instead of looking at a main menu, you’re standing in your dorm room. From here, you can adjust options, customize your appearance, and get ready before heading out. Instead of a multiplayer lobby, there’s the main locker room area where other players are found chatting, goofing off, and having a good time. Each game has a dedicated entry door. You access your friend’s list and other menu items by looking at your watch. Everything feels both intuitive and natural given the conceit of the game world.

“Our focus has been on interactions that can only happen in VR,” Fajt said. “That’s an area that we really love. We’re enamored with the Vive and Rift’s capabilities with 6 degrees of freedom tracking. We’ve embraced what you could call ‘structured social VR’ where you meet in a room with a context already there. That really helps people break the ice. Even the locker room has toys and ‘social lubricators’ that make people feel more comfortable approaching a stranger.”

Instead of randomly messaging a user from a chat box or addressing them by their potentially confusing or overly long username, you can just walk up and wave. Shake hands to send a friend invite automatically. Knock down a high-five and watch the visual effects pop all around you. Breaking down those barriers of social anxiety is one of the best and most powerful things that VR can do for people and it’s an area where Rec Room truly excels.

“Rec Room is something for pople ages 13 and up, we want people that are above that age range, but we do like to welcome people of various ethnicities, backgrounds, genders, etc — that has been a big focus for us,” Fajt said. “We didn’t want something that felt like a strictly ‘conventional gamer’ aesthetic. We wanted a nice variety in there for a lot of different people. Paintball is a bit more competitive, whereas something like charades is more of a social game with talking and a higher bandwidth of communication happening than in paintball. Disc golf is something in the middle, higher activity than charades, but welcomes social chatter too.”

Right now, as many have said, this is the Wild West of VR. Big companies like Facebook are still in the process of fully developing their social VR solutions and tons of challengers are entering the arena. Rec Room has earned its niche in the months since it launches, creating a fun and diverse play space available to Rift and Vive users totally free of charge.

“Right now, with all of the people that are interacting in Rec Room in the first year of VR, it reminds me of the early ICQ internet days,” Fajt admitted.  There aren’t a ton of people online and you may not have IRL friends there yet, but we’re all making meaningful connections with people we meet in VR. We’re just trying to create platform to help support that.”

Rec Room is available for free on Oculus Home and Steam right now.

What types of updates and new games do you want to see next? Let us know down in the comments!

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Valve’s Gabe Newell Is Hosting a Live Reddit AMA On Tuesday Jan. 17th

Valve’s Gabe Newell Is Hosting a Live Reddit AMA On Tuesday Jan. 17th

If you’ve ever wanted to ask Gabe Newell, co-founder and president of Valve Corporation, a question — then tomorrow may be your lucky day. We first noted the news reported by PCGamer, that the date and time were revealed through screenshots of email communication both Reddit moderator Jedi Burrell from The_Gaben subreddit and Steam moderator R3TR1X had with Newell. The AMA is happening at The_Gaben subreddit tomorrow, Tuesday, January 17th, at 3PM PST. The confirmation thread is right here.

For those unaware, a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) is when someone hosts a thread on the site, along with confirmation they are who they say they are, allowing users to login and ask them any questions they want. When you’re Newell, an industry icon that’s commanded a massive fan following, a relatively large turnout is expected. In fact, when AMAs get very popular, it’s often difficult for the hosts to keep up with the constant barrage of questions. Newell will likely have to pick and choose which ones he answers.

Newell has long been a champion of the VR industry. Valve as a company co-created the Vive with HTC, using its Steam marketplace as the go-to source of content for the budding piece of consumer technology. In August of last year during the DOTA 2 International Championships, the co-founder and president stated that he had been spending ‘most of’ his time with the VR team. While we are still waiting on that big killer app (such as VR iterations for Half-Life, Left4Dead, Portal, or something original) from the PC gaming powerhouse, Valve’s (and as a result the Vive’s) contributions to VR as an industry have been wide and far-reaching thus far.

You can check into the Reddit AMA thread  tomorrow, Tuesday, January 17th, at 3PM PST over on The_Gaben subreddit. Exact details such as which topics he’d like to discuss or how long it will last are unknown but as is the case with these sorts of things most of the time, it’ll likely be open season once the internet descends upon the thread.

Do you plan on tuning in tomorrow? Which types of questions do you want to be see answered? Let us know in the comments below!

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