Category: Crowdfunding

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VR Talk Show ‘The Foo Show’ Is Crowdfunding Its First Season

VR Talk Show ‘The Foo Show’ Is Crowdfunding Its First Season

The former co-host of popular tech site Tested launched a Kickstarter project today, seeking $20 from backers in exchange for the promise of a Steam or Oculus code granting access to the first season of his VR talk show.

The Foo Show is an interactive show created by Will Smith set inside virtual environments created by its guests. In other words, Smith will have software creators come on the show to talk about their work while immersed inside the world they made, whether it be from a videogame or VR app. The whole exchange is recorded and you can revisit their interview later as if it is happening live in front of you. According to the Kickstarter page, here’s the plan for that first season:

For the first season of the show, we’re producing five episodes. We’ll release the first episode on Oculus Home and Steam in December, a few weeks after this Kickstarter closes. And if you haven’t bought a VR headset yet, Kickstarter backers will be able to watch the first season using our experimental non-VR client. After that, you’ll get two episodes of The FOO Show every month, until we complete this first season.

You can check out a preview of The Foo Show on Rift or Vive for free via Steam or Oculus Home. The plan is to ultimately sell the episodes on Steam and Oculus Home. The crowdfunding effort was around 1/5 of the way toward its $50,000 goal at the time of this writing, with three weeks of fundraising left. In case you are still scratching your head, Will Smith is not the actor. He’s the bearded guy whose open-mouthed look of awe inside a VR headset development kit is so associated with VR’s wow factor. I reached out to him on Twitter to get some more information about his long term plan.

“Our episodes don’t cost a ton of money to produce, so we only need a few thousand people paying for them to make them self-sustaining. We’re using Kickstarter to bypass the slow growth part of any new show,” he said. “If the pilot succeeds on Kickstarter, it will have a built in community when it launches next month that will put it on the path to sustainability. In short, if we make something compelling, people will keep buying it, and we’ll keep making episodes. If they don’t, we’ll kill it and move on to the next thing.”

The Kickstarter page linked above is chock full of information, so I suggest checking it out. At the very bottom of the page is a bit that made me laugh regarding risks and challenges:

We are a small team of three people, so illness or injury of one of the core team members could delay production. While we’re each extremely careful, we do spend lots of time in VR. If one of us is killed while in virtual reality, that team member’s subsequent death in the real world would significantly impact our schedule.

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VR Visual Novel ‘Angels and Demigods’ Hits Kickstarter

The first chapter of Angels and Demigods, 7 Keys Studios’ lightly gamified, anime-style “VR visual novel,” is out, and four more chapters are waiting on funding from a Kickstarter launched September 28. Available for Vive via Steam, Cardboard via Android and iOS, and desktop via Mac OS and Windows, chapter one aims to expand to Samsung Gear soon.

For all subsequent chapters, meanwhile, 7 Keys Studios aims to support all possible platforms, including PlayStation VR and Google’s Daydream, assuming the studio meets its funding goal of $31,111. With 30 days before closing, the project has plenty of time to attract donations, but it’ll need to start reeling them in if it’s to reach the goal. And with eight months to go before next May, the public has a while to wait before it sees any more Angels and Demigods.

Angels and Demigods Kickstarter

Funds will support the development of a very-far-future-based tale of human-engineered ubermensch (Angels) awoken by a quasi-religious order-cum-governmental body (The Chapel) ostensibly to defend this particular society’s homeworld—Saturn’s terraformed moon Enceladus—from mortal threats, like those that might come from the solar system’s other moon and planet-based societies.

The player-character experiences the story from the perspective of a newly awakened and nameless Angel tasked by the Chapel with locating and repatriating Ashley, an Angel whose awakening occurred either in error or as a result of something, perhaps a telepathic communication from another Angel, left unrevealed at the first chapter’s end. Angels are powerful, so the Chapel’s grimacing representatives can’t have one flying around willy-nilly, even for the meager three days that Angels can survive after hatching.

7 Keys Studios’ project bears a passing resemblance to Sequenced, in that both are among the VR graphic novel variety and whose outcomes the user determines through interaction. Sequenced, however, boasts a different style of animation and storytelling that mostly treats the viewer as an invisible observer; Angels and Demigods uniquely places viewers in a first-person view, which is particularly interesting given the graphic novel visual foundation.

Readers beware, your player-character can, and, I’ll wager, will, die a few times before he successfully concludes the chapter. Pick the wrong lines of dialogue—choosing between dialogue options by looking at and clicking them is the player-character’s exclusive means of interacting with his environment—and you’ll meet with one end or another. This is frustrating primarily because the game does not allow its user to skip dialogue (though the player can easily Save and Load games). Thus, dying forces the user to re-listen a meaty supply of lines before their player-character can die (or finally succeed!) again, which brings me to a secondary frustrator, namely the stilted voice-acting, about which I won’t complain anymore because I (a) actually enjoyed the experience and (b) appreciate that 7 Keys Studios built this thing on a budget.

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If a user is going to be frustrated by anything else (aside from Ashley’s all-purpose swimwear and every-big-eyed-anime-girl character model, or the fact that scenes remain entirely static through long stretches of dialogue, which, again, budget), it’ll likely be the superficially illogical sequence of conversation options one must select to not-die. I say “superficially” because I actually appreciated, to some degree, that I couldn’t take one tack (e.g., outright honesty or mendacity, loyalty to the Chapel or interest in Ashley) and hope to survive. Although I’ve yet to die in real life, I felt the narrative’s apparently illogical relation to action and consequence, especially as pertains to human interactions, mirrored my lived experience of the same, i.e., often when I say or do something to or for or in relation to someone else and expect a particular outcome, I discover that I’m really awkward and lack basic interpersonal skills. Jokes aside, I’m saying Yay to making contradictory statements, and generally being all over the place in terms of tone and message, in order to survive.

Give Angels and Demigods a shot and if you like it, consider pledging to the Kickstarter campaign to unravel more of the story.

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