Survios, the studio behind Raw Data (2017) and Sprint Vector (2018), debuted a new single player VR game this year on the GDC expo floor, an upcoming arcade boxing title that puts you in the shoes of Adonis Creed, son of Apollo Creed and protegé of Rocky Balboa.
It’s hard not to stop and gawk at people playing Creed: Rise to Glory in pair of actual boxing rings on the expo floor. While a small crowd of curious onlookers formed around the side-by-side rings, we got a chance to record a first look of the game in action.
The demo first puts you in the gym with a lifelike Sylvester Stallone where you train with heavy bags and punching dummies, each their own minigame. Later you’re tossed into the ring to experience the game’s unique desync mechanic which not only slows down your in-game boxing gloves as you lose stamina, but can knock you completely out of your body if you get staggered or even knocked out.
Survios hasn’t announced which platform the arcade boxer will hit when it arrives later this year, although we’ve seen it demoed both on Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.
Survios, the studio behind Raw Data (2017) and Sprint Vector (2018), showed off Electronauts at GDC this year, their upcoming VR music creation app for HTC Vive and Oculus Rift that makes DJ’ing so easy that even the least musically talented person can do it.
While it hasn’t substantively changed since we saw it first at CES in January, it’s the first time Electronauts has been put on display in a public venue.
The app lets you easily mix music and create something actually listenable because every interaction in Electronauts is quantized, meaning every time you activate an instrument or loop a track, it automatically clicks on beat. Using your in-game selector wands to toss out ‘beat grenades’ or jam on samples using an orb-like drum kit – well, that’s something only available in virtual reality. Check out our hands-on with Electronauts to learn more.
Electronauts is still slated to release sometime in 2018. There’s already a Steam page, and Survios is currently entertaining applications for their ‘Creator Beta’ which will launch soon for Vive and Rift owners.
Getting started in the videogame business can seem like a daunting prospect, even more so when it comes to figuring out virtual reality (VR). But those first steps don’t necessarily need to be as difficult as they may seem thanks to videogame development engines like Unreal Engine. Epic Games’ popular middleware is used by teams, both amateur and professional alike, to build the latest VR experiences (Robo Recall, Ace Combat 7, ARK Park, Moss) and getting started is free. So over at Intel’s Developer Zone the company has put together a quick guide on VR development using Unreal Engine.
The ‘How To Get Started in VR with Unreal Engine‘ guide doesn’t look at Unreal Engine as a whole – it’s way too big for a brief guide. Instead it focuses on one particular mode that Epic Games has been developing over the last couple of years, the VR Editor. The idea goes that while creating VR content on a normal 2D screen is difficult, being able to put yourself in the actual virtual world you’re creating can make the whole process that little bit easier, especially for newcomers.
It makes more sense that visualising a virtual world and where things go can be helped by being in it, donning a headset and then seeing what works and what doesn’t. With Unreal Engine’s marketplace and strong community it’s also straight forward to find and use assets – some free some paid – to help bring your creation to life.
Now if you are developing content for VR the guide does surmise that you’ll have a head-mounted display (HMD) of some sort – otherwise what’s the point – with the instructions based on the HTC Vive, although headsets like Oculus Rift can also be used. Once you’ve got Unreal Engine downloaded and installed – an easy free process – plus your headset is all up and running, Intel then goes through the basics of building your first scene.
After that you’re on your own – well not quite, there’s plenty of other literature online – with Intel wisely suggesting a look at Unreal Engine’s visual scripting system “blueprints.”
Another week begins in the world of all things immersive. March is rapidly coming to an end, with us pushing ever further into Spring (at least for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere). Last week the team were, for the most part, kept very busy in San Fransisco thanks to all that was going on at the Game Developer Conference, better known as GDC. The 2018 edition brought with it the usual array of news relating to virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), although as we wait for the next generation of headsets and the first from the main players to be in the standalone category perhaps not as much major news as might’ve been expected.
To catch up on everything from GDC you can of course click here and find everything under the site tag. No doubt there’ll be plenty of interviews and follow-up features in the weeks to come as well. Before we hurtle into another week, one dominated by another American event, this one hosted by the team at NVIDIA we do have one further Oculus Go launch title to take more of a look at.
Anshar Online is set to be the next evolution of the popular Anshar Wars. With the title’s next iteration coming to Oculus Go it will bring with it a single-player campaign as well as its multiplayer side. That multiplayer will be able to be enjoyed with not just fellow Oculus Go owners but with friends from around the world who have Samsung Gear VR or Oculus Rift thanks to cross-play. A number of screenshots for Anshar Online were released by Oculus during the conference and you can now see those below.
VRFocus will bring you more VR and AR news throughout the day.
Upcoming co-operative virtual reality (VR) videogame Downward Spiral: Horus Station has been at the Game Developer Conference (GDC) this week and VRFocus grabbed some new gameplay.
Developed by 3rd Eye Studios, Downward Spiral: Horus Station is a zero-gravity space adventure, which lures players through a lost vessel abandoned by its crew. With a focus on environmental storytelling players will need to explore the vast locations in order to uncover the truth of what has happened while accompanied by a electronic, ambient soundtrack. The main draw of Downward Spiral: Horus Station is the support for single or co-operative play, allowing two players to explore the station as a duo and work together to overcome challenges.
Downward Spiral: Horus Station will also include additional modes including a eight-player player-versus-player (PVP) and play-versus-environment (PVE) multiplayer modes such as Deathmatch, Horde and Survivor. Additionally players who would rather not have to deal with any combat can do so by picking an option that allows them to enjoy the story without any combat.
VRFocus’ Editor Kevin Joyce previewed Downward Spiral: Horus Station at GDC 2018 saying: “3rd Eye Studios is aiming for eight chapters lasting over an hour each, combining puzzle, exploration and combat challenges into a varied space-based VR experience. What was seen in this initial chapter holds promise, but just as Downward Spiral Prologue before it leaves the player wishing for more depth: the mechanics of movement and combat seem disparate from the world, not cohesive in the way that the aforementioned BioShock cleverly made you believe in its world through mise-en-scene. An empty shell to move around within does not make a compelling experience, and so the hope is that the team find new and intuitive ways to make the best out of this inviting setting with the interesting mechanics they have created.”
Downward Spiral: Horus Station is currently in development for PlayStation 4 and PC with support for PlayStation VR, Oculus Touch, HTC Vive and Windows Mixed Reality (MR). It is set to release in Spring 2018 but there is a prologue available to purchase right now via Steam. You can see over fifteen minutes of gameplay below.
For more on Downward Spiral: Horus Station in the future, keep reading VRFocus.
Over the last year, Oculus’ public hardware ambitions have mostly centered around their upcoming standalone headsets (Oculus Go and Santa Cruz), with little to say about what’s next for the company’s PC VR headset, the Rift. Addressing a small but growing anxiety among their Rift user base—that Oculus is shifting focus away from PC VR in its efforts to push mobile VR—the company affirmed at GDC that its commitment to the PC VR ecosystem hasn’t changed, and the company believes PC will lead the VR industry for the next decade.
Speaking during a session at GDC 2018 this week, Oculus’ Head of Content, Jason Rubin, addressed the company’s commitment to PC VR as one of the very first topics covered.
“I want to be really really clear here: PC is vital to the VR business. We think PC will lead the industry for the next decade or more,” he said. “There’s so much more we’re going to be able to do with VR, and PC is where we figure that out. So Oculus is investing just as much in PC as ever. We’re in all three categories [PC, mobile, and standalone], and plan to stay there.”
Jason Rubin speaks at the podium alongside a panel of Oculus colleagues | Image courtesy Oculus
Where the company has been visibly investing in the future of PC VR is in their ongoing funding of Oculus exclusive titles.
“What we think consumers want, and what’s going to work, is AAA content. And we’re going to invest in that.” Rubin continued, saying that, now that VR is growing, Oculus Studios is focusing on funding fewer, larger titles than in the past. The company believes that big budget content will draw players into the Oculus ecosystem, and then smaller developers will benefit from the larger addressable audience.
At GDC this year, I had a chance to step into Beat Saber, an upcoming rhythm game from Czech Republic-based indie studio Hyperbolic Magnetism that tasks you with slicing flying cubes with lightsabers to electronic dance music. If that sounds cool to you, then you’re in luck. It is cool – but more than that, it’s also ridiculously well executed.
It’s a deceptively simple concept; blocks appear about a 20 meters away marked with colored directional arrows. The color of the arrow corresponds with the color of your lightsaber, so you have to slice the right block in the right direction, and do it on the beat (more or less). The tutorial level I played before actually getting into the gameplay was about as short as that description.
In case you missed the teaser that went viral earlier this year, garnering 1.5 million views so far, here it is:
Obstacles are tactically placed to get you moving. A combo-breaking glass wall will periodically slide into view, sometimes making you move to the left or right, and sometimes making you duck for cover for fear of losing your precious combo multiplier. Blocks bearing an ‘X’ force you to not only be accurate in your slices, but move your sabers to safe positions so you don’t accidentally hit them.
Slicing a few blocks isn’t that difficult. The challenge comes in economizing your movements so you can whip through a dense patch of blocks, slicing downwards and resetting for a quick left and right swipe.
Without knowing it, I was dancing – not as great as, say, Kent Bye from Voices of VR Podcast (seen below),but I was unexpectedly moving my feet, getting into the rhythm of the game and having a blast. Even though the game doesn’t give out points for style, Beat Saber created an immediate need for me to be stylish.
Some of this can be chalked up to the game’s haptics, which create a satisfying buzz in your controller when you touch anything with your sabers. I found myself artfully dragging my lightsabers against the glass barriers while slicing down blocks, and feeling the rumble of what my brain plausibly accepted as an energy beam slicing through anything and everything. This little addition helped be feel like the swords were really there, and gave me an instant mental model of their size and reach.
The impossible, twisting architectures swaying ahead of me and neon lightshow blazing in the background are an exclamation point at the end of every interaction I had with Beat Saber. Despite the outside optics of spazz-dancing (who cares anyway), I felt cool.
Coming to Early Access in April to SteamVR-compatible headsets, Beat Saber will arrive with 10 songs, each with 5 levels of difficulty. Developer Ján Ilavský told Road to VR that there’s a possibility of also releasing a level editor in the future that could allow you to place blocks and barriers yourself. Music, for now, is created by video game composer Jaroslav Beck, although Ilavský was adamant that the studio was actively reaching out to other artists to fill out exclusive, purpose-built music for the game moving forward.
The Beat Saber website features the PlayStation VR logo, indicating future support, although Hyperbolic Magnetism hasn’t officially spoken about when PSVR support will arrive.
Based on Klaus Teuber’s popular board game Settlers of Catan (1995), the VR version of Catan is available now on Oculus Rift and Gear VR, and will be a launch title for Oculus Go. The game features cross-play multiplayer, and is said to be coming to more VR platforms in the future.
Described as “true to the classic but optimized for virtual reality,” Catan VR was developed by VR studio Experiment 7 in partnership with Klaus Teuber and his sons Guido and Benjamin, along with the Catan and Asmodee Digital teams. The board game takes place in a virtual room with views of the island of Catan itself through the windows.
Speaking to Gamesbeat last year, Experiment 7 managing director Demetri Detsaridis explained how VR offers a different experience to other digital versions of the game. “When you have the entire field of view in front of you – and Catan is on a big table – the pieces get to be larger than life,” he said. “The ‘screen’ is enormous. You can do cool things like have sheep run around or have water flow or have wheat blowing in the breeze without it looking like you’re peering into the inner workings of a wristwatch.”
Image courtesy Experiment 7
Classic Catan AI opponents are available for single player, and the game supports cross-platform multiplayer with friend invites and matchmaking. For now, the game is playable on Oculus Rift and Gear VR, and will form part of the launch line-up for the Oculus Go. The game was playable at GDC 2018 this week, with Rift and Go devices at the same table, as seen during Tested‘s Oculus Go video. Additional platforms are said to be on the cards, but Experiment 7’s previous titles have not jumped beyond Rift and Gear VR yet, despite Dungeon Chess (2017) being confirmed for PSVR many months ago.
Image courtesy Experiment 7
Originally due to launch in late 2017, Catan VR is the third release from Experiment 7, who specialise in bringing board and tabletop games into their ‘Magic Table’ platform, an immersive environment designed for ‘social presence’ that supports cross-platform multiplayer. The team’s long-term goal is to attract other developers to the Magic Table platform. Their first game Magic Table Chess (2016) introduced the concept, followed by the Dungeons & Dragons-themed Dungeon Chess.
“The first time I saw Catan on the Magic Table, I was fascinated by what VR has to offer,” said Teuber. “The game I made in our living room with my family 25 years ago in Virtual Reality? It’s incredible. I never imagined actually stepping into the world of Catan when we first started making cut-outs and dreaming about exploring new lands.”
Kat VR, a China-based company known for their crowdfunded Kat Walk VR treadmill, are hitting Kickstarter again soon with a new design that promises to accommodate smaller spaces.
The company says their new Kat Walk Mini has “a much smaller footprint that can fit in any room whilst maintaining the open, non-restrictive design that allows for full range of movement for your arms and legs.”
Besides being smaller and lighter than the 2015-era Kat Walk, the new ‘mini’ design replaces the older wireless foot sensors with a laser sensor array set into the baseplate of the device, which is said to feature lower latency and provide more responsive input. Kat Walk Mini also features a redesigned guide bar system that pivots in place as you turn your body to face the desired direction. A “high strain shock-absorbing material” is used in the treadmill’s base, although we’re not sure how it differs from the original unit’s surface, or if that will require the user to user to don special low-friction shoes.
The original Kat Walk completed its first successful crowdfunding campaign nearly 3 years ago, garnering $150,000 from backers. The unit is a fairly large and heavy piece of kit though that, despite starting at an early bird price of $600, looked to appeal to mostly arcades and prosumers based on its fairly cumbersome size. Seeing a smaller, and decidedly more consumer-friendly version that incorporates some of the same freedom of movement is an interesting prospect to say the least.
“We decided to go back to our roots, to the same community that supported us initially, and that is why our next product will be launching on Kickstarter very soon. Since the product is still a prototype, we encourage the community’s involvement and feedback during the development process of KAT WALK mini,” the company told Road to VR
Kat VR is still staying tight-lipped on the specifics, as there’s still no official launch date or pricing structure yet for the Kat Walk Mini Kickstarter. We’re hoping for ‘soon’ and ‘not terribly expensive’.
One of the big launch titles for HTC Vive almost two years ago was indie developer Owlchemy Labs’ humorous interactive experience Job Simulator. A lot has happened since then, with the studio being bought by Google and releasing equally popular follow up Rick and Morty: A Virtual Rick-ality. The team are continuing to do what they know best with their next title Vacation Simulator, where after a hard days work it’s time to relax on the beach.
Vacation Simulator takes the core mechanic of Job Simulator, a fun, comedic videogame that’s all about interacting with the environment, and expands upon that principle. Set on a lush beach resort filled with robots to wave at and talk to, the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2018 demo offered a single open location to explore rather than the fixed individual areas found in Job Simulator.
There’s no free locomotion, rather fixed teleportation points to jump to (around six in total), each with its own activity to engage in. One of the first that VRFocus came across was also one of the best, a sandcastle builder using a selection of predefined building blocks. Free to create, the mini-game also featured challenges denoted on a 2D board, with vertical, right and front facing diagrams of a particular sandcastle to build, awarding a trophy if successful.
Other points of interest included a barbecue section to complete burger and sandwich orders, there’s a robot on the beach that wants a selection of butterflies collected, or you could engage in some light-hearted sea football, trying to get balls past a goalie by throwing them. For the limber there was also the possibility to look beneath the waves, unfortunately there was no option to go any deeper in the demo so hopefully that’ll be available in the fully released version.
And no beach would be complete without a rustic surf shack, here you can change outfits, trying on some nice garish sunglasses and hats. After the wardrobe selection is complete then its time for a selfie to share with friends, taken with a massive child sized instant camera located in the backpack.
Demoed with Oculus Rift, Vacation Simulator will continue Owlchemy Labs’ multiplatform support, with versions for HTC Vive and PlayStation VR. Ideally suited to standing roomscale, the experience should support seated gameplay as well – this is supposed to be relaxing after all!
Vacation Simulator feels very much like a Job Simulator 2.0, rehoused and repackaged in a new, brighter skin. There are always going to be similarities with its predecessor, so Vacation Simulator needs to have enough of its own personality to stand apart – like a bratty teenager trying to show their parents how modern technology works. From this introduction the videogame certainly looks like its going to continue the studio’s strong lineage, with Owlchemy Labs promising a bigger experience with more of a storyline for the single-player title, and plenty more to do. If you were a fan of the developer’s other virtual reality (VR) titles then Vacation Simulator should be a 2018 title to look forward to.
That said, we had annoucements from 
