Category: cloudhead games

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Aldin Dynamics Announces Partnership Program for Analysis Tool Ghostline

Aldin Dynamics, the Icelandic virtual reality (VR) company behind Waltz of the Wizard, has announced a partnership programme for its VR experience analysis tool Ghostline. In the first phase of its programme the studio has already collaborated with Cloudhead Games and SUPERHOT. 

Ghostline was first announced back in September 2015, designed specifically for VR experience analysis and design optimization. Studio’s can use the tools to focus development efforts and offer invaluable insights into the complex relationship between user behavior, content design and VR system setups.

Ghostline_Audience

As well as the partnership programme, Aldin Dynamics has released Ghostline insights for its VR experience Waltz of the Wizard on HTC Vive. With an ‘overwhelmingly positive’ feedback score on Steam, the studio reports its seen over 300,000 sessions from over 100,000 players since its initial release in May 2016. Other stats include the average play time sits at 19 minutes, 37 percent of players were from the US representing the largest audience, China had the largest room-scale play areas while Japan had the smallest, and Waltz of the Wizard saw a 284 percent download spike between November to December 2016.

For developers interested in Ghostline Aldin invites VR industry professionals to sign up to the Ghostline Early Access newsletter for further information.

Select partners will be joining the private program in 2017, and for further updates, keep reading VRFocus.

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Motion Capture Acting Within VR? Cloudhead Games Explains In Latest Dev Diary

Motion capture for TV, film and videogame projects is not a new technology, and by this point you will have no doubt seen many a person clad in black with what look like ping pong balls attached to them. In the same vein you’ll have likely seen people using facial recognition technology, and actors performing their roles with a face full of blue dots to record the facial movements.

The Gallery – Episode 2: Heart of the Emberstone

For virtual reality (VR) it all becomes a little bit more tricky. However, unlike standard motion capture it also provides an additional and intriguing solution: What if the actor was able to perform their roles as a character within the digital space itself? It’s something that Cloudhead Games are already doing as they discuss the process in their latest behind the scenes video discussing work on the next title in their VR videogame series The Gallery.

In the video representatives from the studio discuss how the actors are able to react to the digital environment. How, thanks to what is essentially an in-VR teleprompter, they are able to make changes to the script “on the fly”. How it all affects VR audio and how it affects the composition and the way a scene is acted at all.

“[The actors] actually end up acting more like theatre actors, because the player could be far away.” Producer and Audio Director Joel Green explains at one point. “Anybody, no matter where they are, is still going to get the empotional effect of the scene.”

The Gallery – Episode 2: Heart of the Emberstone is due out 2017 and is the sequel to 2016’s The Gallery – Episode 1: Call of the Starseed. You can read VRFocus‘ review of the latter here.

VRFocus will bring you more updates on The Gallery series as they are made available.

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Latest Dev Diary for The Gallery: Episode 2 – Heart of the Emberstone Focuses on a Strange New Alien World

Latest Dev Diary for The Gallery: Episode 2 – Heart of the Emberstone Focuses on a Strange New Alien World

The Gallery: Episode 1 – Call of the Starseed [Review: 9/10] was one of our favorite VR games in 2016. In fact, it even took home the honors of being named the Best Narrative of the year. We know that Episode 2 will be called Heart of the Emberstone and the currently running series of developer diary videos are poised to divulge additional information over time. But as of now, we didn’t know much about the episode itself and what it’s all about — that is, until now.

Thanks to the second entry in the developer diary series, Cloudhead Games has peeled back a few of the layers on the strange new alien world that players are set to explore. At the end of Call of the Starseed, things end as players don a strange gauntlet on their hand and emerge through what appears to be a portal, or spaceship of some kind. It’s an epic cliffhanger. Watch the latest diary below:

We’ve spoken to Cloudhead previously about how they’re building The Gallery into an epic  sci-fi property remniscent of the IPs that inspired it and that tradition is continuing in Episode 2. Denny Unger, CEO and Creative Director at Cloudhead, specially cites The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth as heavy inspirations.

“When the player gets to Ember, that’s when they start to understand the mystery of The Starseed, what it’s function is, and what your part is playing in the story of The Starseed,” explains Mike Wilson, Narrative Director.

Then Jonathan Hackett, Art Lead on the project, continues by detailing that, “When the player gets to Ember, that’s when they start to understand the mystery of The Starseed, what it’s function is, and what your part is playing in the story of The Starseed.”

Unfortunately we still know only precious little about the world itself, but the art work shown in the video and the mentions of creatures such as the pesky Wizgogs are enough to sufficiently pique our interest.

“One of the things that sets Heart of the Emberstone apart is that we’ve designed a kind of open world game flow in VR,” says Unger. “It might be the first time in VR that anyone’s attacked it from this kind of perspective…it’s a completely different ‘game feel’ than Episode 1.”

We still don’t know a release date for Episode 2, but hopefully the ramp up of behind-the-scenes footage and dev diaries is pointing to sooner rather than later.

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Cloudhead Charts The Road To ‘The Gallery’ Episode 2 With Dev Diary Series

Cloudhead Charts The Road To ‘The Gallery’ Episode 2 With Dev Diary Series

Easily one of our most anticipated releases next year is the second episode of Cloudhead Games’ The Gallery series, Heart of the Emberstone.

Cloudhead hasn’t given us a window for the next installment’s release, sadly, but it looks like it’s ramping up to a bigger reveal with the launch of a new developer diary series. There’s no footage of the next entry in this first installment, but the studio does discuss its development and how they’re building upon the first episode. Apparently you can expect this episode to be closer to fantastical 80’s adventure movies like Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal.

Expect to see much more about the direction Cloudhead is going in with Episode 2 in later entries into the series. Hopefully we’ll get a first look at gameplay, too.

The Gallery is a fully room-scale mystery series in which the protagonist searches for his missing sister. It takes advantage of the Vive’s position-tracked controls and was one of the first games to feature a teleportation system, now commonly used in room-scale VR experiences.

The first episode, Call of the Starseed [Review: 9/10], is one of the games you’ll get for free when you pick up the HTC Vive, and it recently came to Oculus Touch too, with a PlayStation VR version still expected. You can find deals for it on both Rift and Vive in ongoing winter sales.

We liked the initial episode a lot. In his review, David Jagneaux stated that the game was short, but “those precious 2 hours you spend inside the game are some of the best you’ll find in VR on any platform. With The Gallery, Cloudhead uses simple, old-fashioned, awe-inducing beauty and immersion that hooks you instead of any cheap tricks or gimmicks and I’m absolutely dying to dive back in.”

Bring on Episode 2.

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Impressions on Valve’s New VR Controller Prototype from Cloudhead’s Denny Unger

denny_headshot-200x200Valve premiered a prototype of a new type of VR input controller at Steam Dev Days in order to get some preliminary feedback from developers. They’ve created a capacitive-touch controller that is attached to your hand so that you can open and close your hands to mimic the feeling of grabbing a tangible object. They used a modified scene from The Gallery, Episode 1 demo to show off this new controller, and I had a chance to Cloudhead Games President & Creative Director Denny Unger about it at the VR on the Lot conference. We talked about the Valve’s new input controller prototype, the growing ecosystem of lighthouse-tracked peripherals, his thoughts on the future of non-linear narrative, and an update about The Gallery, which recently won best narrative VR experience at the Proto Awards and has surpassed $1 million in sales.

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