Thomas Van Bouwel is the one-man developer behind Cubism, one the best puzzle games available on the Oculus Quest. Van Bouwel now works full time on Cubism and is developing a set of DLC levels for the game, but five years ago he was working in a completely different industry with no experience in the world of VR.
“My background is actually not in computer science or game development at all. I actually come from a background in architecture,” says Van Bouwel, speaking to me in VR from UploadVR’s virtual studio. “I was a practicing architect for several years, until I made the switch. It was architecture that actually led me to move into VR. I was really fascinated by what VR could do for the design process and how it could make the design and architecture a lot more human-centered. Instead of looking at a plan for a building from top-down, you look at a building from a human perspective while you design it.”
Van Bouwel was always fascinated with the ways that immersive technologies and game engines could be used within an architectural context, and ended up investigating further during his university studies. In his third year, Van Bouwel gave a presentation of a 3D architecture model displayed in the PC game Crysis, imported using CryEngine. He found that from showing his friends and family the model in-game, he received a lot more feedback compared to showing them plans or scale models. “That was when it first clicked. Like, ‘Oh, these sort of immersive technologies can be very useful for the design process.'”
After working as an architect for several years, Van Bouwel decided to quit his job in 2016 and started learning how to develop for VR. He attended hackathons, went to game jams and landed a job at an enterprise VR startup, InsiteVR (now known as Resolve), within a year and a half. While he had a Vive headset at home, the job gave him access to a variety of different headsets, including an early Quest prototype — the Santa Cruz — in 2017.
It was around then that Van Bouwel came up with a new concept for a VR puzzle game. Working in his free time, he soon created the first build of what would become Cubism — an intuitive, deceptively simple puzzle game where the user must place different shaped blocks together to fit into a larger wireframe shape.
“It sort of really came out of that fascination with minimal design in mobile games and what that could mean in VR games,” says Van Bouwel. Minimalist mobile games like Mini Metro, Hitman Go and Lara Croft Go were big inspirations. “These games can use a very simple look and a very simple input scheme, but then can have a lot of depth to them. And more importantly, [they are] games that are really well scoped for small teams.”
“A big part of choosing to work on Cubism was that it felt like it was small enough in scope that I could work on it in my spare time. At the time I was working at that startup, which I really enjoyed working at. So I knew that if I was going to work on a project on the side, it better be something small and something that was manageable.”
Cubism’s puzzles are a riff on the classic wooden block puzzles that have been around for many years. In real life, the end shape is usually restricted to something quite memorable and solid — a rectangle or a cube. With Cubism, the shapes of the pieces and the wireframes vary wildly in both difficulty and design, no longer held back by gravity pulling at physical blocks.
The real beauty of Cubism is in its simplistic, clean design — the architectural influence is very clear. The entire game can be played with just the controllers and the triggers. If you’re using an Oculus Quest, you don’t even need controllers — you can just use your hands. This game-wide policy of simplicity and accessibility means that almost anyone, even those inexperienced with VR, can pick up the game and play it. “I put a lot of effort into that actually. The game came from being in a stage where it was a lot harder to use and learn.”
Earlier versions of Cubism mapped several actions to different controller buttons. This wasn’t initially a problem, as only experienced gamers and other VR developers were doing the playtesting. “I was missing a lot of UX issues early on, because if people are comfortable with VR or they’re comfortable with playing games in general, they learn these controller mappings pretty quickly. But if people aren’t, it’s really a roadblock for them.”
The UX issues became more apparent when Van Bouwel took his builds on the road to a wider audience. “Putting those people in the game and seeing them sort of struggle with the control scheme, that really sort of flipped the switch for me. Like, I really need to simplify this.”
“From that point on, I did everything I could to make the whole game playable with just the triggers, which required a few redesigns.” Small changes — allowing the triggers to be used for all actions, placing a menu indicator beneath the puzzle — made the game much more accessible to the uninitiated. “From the start of the game to solving the first puzzle, that became a really fast process. People could get started with their first puzzle within like 10 or 15 seconds of starting the game.”
“That was always a goal of mine — to make sure that it was something that was approachable,” he says. “I think that’s part of the appeal of VR too, right? That it should be more intuitive.”
Cubism released last year, and while the game is available on both PC VR and Quest, it shines on the latter. Not only is it among the best puzzle games for the system, but since launch Van Bouwel has also added hand tracking and 120Hz support, which both elevate the game to an impressive new level. It’s also one of the best showcases of the Quest’s cutting-edge VR technology and features.
Now, approaching a year since release, Van Bouwel is designing and playtesting a set of 30 new DLC levels for the game.
“DLC seemed to be like the best way to give people more puzzles to play,” he says. “It’s still a work in progress, but hopefully [the DLC levels] are going to have a bit of a different look from the main campaign to differentiate them. But they will play very similar to the puzzles in the main campaign.”
“And much like the campaign, there’s going to be a song that’s sort of tied to the puzzles, specific to the DLC.”
Sound is another big part of Cubism’s design. In the main campaign, each different puzzle piece has an associated piano note. When you solve a puzzle, each of the notes will play together to form a chord. If you combine all the chords from each level together, it forms a song. “The main campaign is basically this big song that you unlock as you play it. And the DLC will have a song of its own that you unlock as you play the puzzles as well.”
But how does Van Bouwel approach designing a Cubism level, both in terms of its form factor and its difficulty?
“Usually, it starts with a shape,” he says. “Then I start filling it in with pieces.”
“I try to make the puzzles in such a way that you can approach them with some reason, so that you don’t just have to trial and error your way through it. There are like certain tricks that I know I can design for — maybe there’s one or two pieces that can only go in several spots of the puzzle, so it gives a starting point.”
Likewise, on the other end of the scale, certain elements will bring complexity. “If there’s a limited number of symmetries in the puzzle shape or in the piece shape, then it becomes a lot harder to sort of do these mental rotations when you’re placing the pieces into the puzzle.” Despite this, playtesting puzzles is essential, which is why Van Bouwel has been running a series of weekly playtests with Cubism fans over the last six weeks as he works on the new levels.
Beyond the DLC, a local editor might be on the cards eventually, allowing players to create their own levels and share them online via sideloading, similar in process to installing custom Beat Saber levels. In terms of adding multiplayer modes or leaderboards, Van Bouwel isn’t too bullish. “It’s something that I’ve sort of consciously shied away from in this game. Part of the design of the game is to be a relaxing game and a relaxing experience. I wouldn’t want any of the mechanics to pressure you into needing to find a solution.”
When it comes to future projects beyond Cubism, Van Bouwel has nothing official to announce just yet. “It’s a bit early,” he says. “I do have some ideas of next projects that I would want to work on, but [they are] ideas without any execution… I’m looking forward to [when] I have time to prototype these new ideas. Hopefully then I have something that I’ll be happy to share.”
Cubism is available on Oculus Quest and PC VR now, with extra DLC currently in development.
Cubism is one of the best puzzle games available on Quest, with excellent native VR design and an excellent showcase of hand tracking capabilities on Oculus Quest. We’re sitting down with Cubism’s developer, Thomas Van Bouwel, to talk about developing the game, plans for DLC and more.
The interview is set to take place later today, Wednesday the 16th of June at 2:00pm PST, on our YouTube channel. It will be broadcast live from our virtual studio in VR, where we also host our podcast, The VR Download.
If you manage to join us for the interview livestream, please leave your questions in the chat and we’ll try to get to as many as possible. If you miss it live, you can still check out the recorded broadcast at the same link below.
Cubism launched just under a year ago, but has consistently rolled out a series of impressive updates and new features for Quest since then. Its implementation of hand tracking is absolutely sublime and one of the best showcases of the technology on the system. You can also pair hand tracking with the recently added 120Hz support as well, which rounds Cubism out as one of the best titles to showcase most of the Quest’s cutting edge features all at once.
Last month, Van Bouwel announced that a series of DLC levels were in the works for Cubism and signs-ups were open for those who wanted to help playtest new levels. I was able to join the playtesting group and gave some of the new puzzles a try over the past six weeks. I’ll be discussing the approach taken in designing these DLC levels and the original campaign with Van Bouwel in our interview today, going over the process from start to finish and how the upcoming levels might differ to the existing campaign.
Let us know if you’re looking forward to Cubism DLC and be sure to leave your questions in the chat during the live broadcast.
A little more than one year after launch, Supernatural is changing lives with its subscription-based fitness program on Oculus Quest.
If you’re looking for a “daily source of inspiration and motivation” and curious about the broader impact of VR as a technology, you might think about checking out the Official Supernatural Community on Facebook. The group has more than 13,000 members with updates streaming in at all hours from people talking about their fitness journeys in VR. They share what’s going on their lives, their progress, the music and the workouts, and generally encourage one another with support and tips.
A key part of Supernatural is its focus on coaches in virtual reality who talk members through new workouts every day. Leanne Pedante is the Head of Fitness at Supernatural and her encouraging voice has been driving “champions” to finish their Supernatural workouts strong and proud. We’re going to be joined by Pedante in our virtual studio this week for a live broadcast interview talking about exercise in VR. Has Pedante been noticed out in the physical world by Supernatural players who “met” her virtually? Does she have any advice for people to keep up with their workouts? Do you have your own questions?
Tune in on Wednesday, June 9 at 11 am Pacific time for our live discussion with Pedante from our virtual studio. We should be able to monitor live comments, so no matter if you’re a member of the Supernatural community already, or entirely new to VR and thinking about getting a headset for exercise, leave a question or comment and we might talk about it on the show.
You can subscribe to our channel and set a reminder for the interview with the video below, or check back on this page at 11 am Pacific time on June 9.
We spoke with several VR game designers and developers about the important (and difficulty) of creating believable and immersive hands in VR.
The Importance of Believable VR Hands
VR hands are a strange thing to ‘get to grips with’ so to speak. Not only do they allow you to interact with the virtual world in front of you but they allow you to become part of it. As you shape yourself to fit into that world, it does the same to fit around you. In real life, you have limited strength and ability but VR gives you that rare opportunity to be better than real life; it lets you become an action hero.
“It was pretty clear right off the bat that it was important,” Kerry Davis, a Valve programmer that worked on Half-Life: Alyx, said in an interview “Even if you didn’t have a full-body avatar yet, to at least have hands so that you could sort of connect with the world and actually participate. We all have an innate desire to control the world we inhabit. As a VR user, you don’t simply want to sit back and let the story happen—you want this organic control over the world. “People really wanted to have hands.”
Half-Life: Alyx’s design encapsulates this. There’s this visceral sense of control you have covering your mouth when you come across Jeff or even that satisfying click you get from loading up ammo. Tristan Reidford, a Valve artist who also worked on Alyx, learned this previously when working on the Aperture Robot Repair Demo that shipped as part of The Lab.
“We didn’t have hands in that… we simulated the controller… that satisfied people’s desires to have representation,” Reidford said.
The most fascinating thing about VR hands is the spectacle itself, the representation of you. When using a controller, you can disconnect and understand that certain buttons equal certain actions. The uncanny valley nature of movement in VR makes it just close enough to true immersion to become distracting when it’s not.
The uncanny valley in this case represents that physical and mental border between what your eyes see in the headset lens and what you feel around you. As VR gets closer to real life, it also gets further away. There’s something distinctly recognizable, yet alien-feeling about this imitation of real life. VR is at its best when it’s immersive and compelling but not trying to lie to you. It offers you a fantasy and, in the case of Half-Life: Alyx, that alien feeling comes from somewhere else: Xen
“Now you don’t need as much of an abstraction so you can almost get an exact representation of reality,” Davis said. “It turns out it’s almost harder to do in VR.”
The complicated nature of emulating some sense of real-life movement means you often have to trivialize or exaggerate that movement. “In VR, your interactions are so close that your brain wants to fall back to actions you’ve known since you were a toddler,” Davis said.“We still have to put this interface layer in there and say we’re defining what the constraints of this virtual world are.”
You are constrained in two senses when in VR. There are the constraints of your movement—such as how far you can move in your actual room and how much you can lunge forward before colliding head-first into your dresser—and the constraints of the tech itself. There is this wonderful creativity that springs from necessity when creating games atop necessary limitations.
Oftentimes, a world has to be made less organic and genuine to feel real, as paradoxical as that sounds. The swinging of a sword feels natural but you don’t have to undergo a year of training before you can use it in VR. It throws a little bit of ‘real life’ out the window to provide a more fun and, ironically, more immersive experience.
Limitless Limitations
Over at Streamline Media, a small group working on their first real VR title. “Due to resolution issues they (the team) often went back to using just larger gestures and bigger levers,” Stefan Baier, COO at Streamline Media, said. “Smaller hand gestures didn’t reliably scale and made it not work well with the dev work we were doing for PS4 where you don’t have that input.”
When working with it, PSVR often has to be at the bottom of the barrel, technologically speaking. This means that whilst hand gestures are held back in some sense, the choice to fit certain actions in are made purely for the player experience. When you can’t show off the tech or provide hyper-realistic details, you only provide what’s necessary. A streamlined control system allows for more natural movement, even if it’s constrained.
“We are always limited by the hardware…Especially with these fairly new technologies…tracking will massively improve”, Christof Lutteroth, a senior lecturer in the department of computer science at Bath University, said. “There’s nothing fundamental that will prevent us from simply tracking our hands. It’s just a computational problem that’s harder to solve.”
Ultimately, we are always held back by the tech but this doesn’t mean we should stop and accept it as it is.
“From what I’ve seen…It’s definitely a big step forward. However, it’s still very rudimentary,” Lutteroth said when talking about the Oculus Quest’s finger tracking. “When you come to hand tracking, there’s quite a lot of error involved with machine learning… That’s very often data-driven.”Due to the varied nature of human fingers (that’s before mentioning those with disabilities) hand tracking technology is dominated by research into what an average hand is. Unfortunately, with the way that research works, it often gets caught up in implicit biases.
One very highly publicized case of these forms of bias is Microsoft’s AI chatbot, Tay. It was designed to pick up on speech and emulate it to make Tay’s speech sound authentic. Within a day, it was virulently bigoted. This is an interesting microcosm of how these biases set in. If the people you test are racist, your chat bot will be. If the people you test have all ten fingers, your hand designs will be.
This is why Davis and Reidford were so outspoken in our interview about the power of playtesting. Reidford spoke of finger tracking and the unique hurdles in making your movement feel both organic, yet slick.
“There’s this sliding scale where, on one side, it’s fully finger tacking and then, on the other side, 100% animation,” Reidford said. ”We had to find the balance there… as soon you put the player under any kind of duress…They just want to slam a new magazine in.”
Surpassing Limitations
There’s creativity to just existing in VR. Davis mentioned that testers told him “‘Yeah, I’m playing this. I don’t feel powerful… I feel like my normal everyday self… that’s not why I go into games,’” Davis said. “‘I go into games to feel powerful and skilled.’” Even though it emulates your actions, VR is so captivating due to its ability to emulate the wonderful and powerful. That uncanny valley is less prevalent when the situation itself is one that you choose to put yourself into. When you’re aware of your world and place yourself in there, you can forget all about the gear you’re wearing.
A fantastic example of this is Half-Life: Alyx’s gravity gloves. “In Half-Life: Alyx it was about having the hands feel so natural you don’t really think about them anymore,” Reidford said.
You hold your hands up, grab an item and pull it towards you, and hope it lands. As long as you’re close to where you should be, it will always land. The same design philosophy is at work with the doors in Alyx. They don’t function like a normal door. You put your hand up to the doorknob and your character just turns it automatically.
“The player can still turn the handle themselves if they want to but they don’t have to, all they have to do is reach out, make a fist, and the door is open,” Reidford said. “Over time, it looks so correct and it’s what they expect to happen that the player actually believes that they’ve done it. They think that they reached out and turned the handle themselves when really they didn’t. The game did it for them”
The genius of Half-Life: Alyx is that this notion of feeling like “the action hero” is deployed so effectively without making you overpowered. You can simultaneously get crushed by creatures, cower away from Jeff, and giggle at the falling physics of a head crab—yet you still get out there, load your weapon, and take down the bad guys. This is a testament to VR as a whole. There’s a spectacle to it that can only be accessed via your hands. From its early days and crude movements to the beginning signs of significant hand tracking, there’s this bustling sense of creativity that keeps pushing the industry forward.
When you stare into the dark lenses of a VR headset and find yourself staring back, you look around your environment, look down at your hands, then squeeze closed your fists and you become something grander than the every day. You become your own version of an action hero.
Diego Marcos is one of the most important figures in WebXR’s story so far.
At Mozilla he helped kickstart the WebVR standard, which then became WebXR.
He co-created A-Frame, an open source library to create VR experiences on the web, and remains its lead developer, maintainer, community manager. Marcos now works at Supermedium, a company he co-founded in 2018, developing WebXR showcases and a new kind of browser for VR headsets.
We sat down with Diego in our virtual studio to talk about all of the above, and the future of WebXR as an approach to immersive content in general:
https://youtu.be/wLNpec9gnhc
“I’m Diego Marcos main maintainer of A-frame, a framework to develop VR experiences on the web. So anyone that has any web development knowledge, the idea is that they can pick it up and start developing VR and AR content in the same way that they are used to developing web applications.
I used to work at Mozilla. I was part of the team that started the WebVR initiative. For those that don’t know, what is called now WebXR used to be called WebVR. That was the first API and standard that we developed at Mozilla. When we released it, other companies jumped in and joined the initiative like Samsung and Microsoft and Oculus and the scope of the API grew to incorporate AR use cases also.
WebXR is this set of APIs that the browsers implement in order to add VR and AR capabilities to the websites. Within that team I was working more on the front end and tools part of it and an A-frame was/is one of those initiatives to enable and to empower all web developers out there to start developing AR and VR content.“
Talk us through that year where WebVR came out of Mozilla. What was the initial feeling there and how did that progress to browsers?
“It was early 2014. I was working on FirefoxOS. If you remember, FirefoxOS was an operating system for smartphones that was built on web technologies – everything from the developer APIs to the front end of the browser, all the first party applications.
I was part of the mindset of that time: so we have this cool stack of technologies, what other spaces can we apply the same philosophy of openness, not walled gardens, like open ecosystems and open standards? At the time I was very interested in VR in my spare time. I had that first DK1 and then a DK2, and one of the very first kind of Vive developer kits. And I was tinkering on the side with VR. With a couple of colleagues – Josh Carpenter, Kevin Ngo, Casey Yee – we had matching interests and we decided to start prototyping some things and to sell the idea within Mozilla and the idea got momentum and then we formed the team, to fully focus on VR. And one of the things that came up from that was the first draft of the WebVR API.“
FirefoxOS on smartphones – an OS that’s built up from the ground for web content – some people have said this idea would seem like it would work quite well in VR. Do you see that happening? Have you heard of anything in that sense, sort of going away from installing apps and having all these fragmented systems into a headset that you boot into WebXR and you browse around and an open web?
“So there’s several, several schools of thoughts in that space. One is that the web always has a space in any platform – it doesn’t compete, but complements native. The web is very well suited for that kind of bite-sized content. The kind of content that you would actually have a hard time convincing someone to install an app, because it’s got fast consumption. Let’s say you want to read a quick article about something and it comes with some VR piece of content that illustrates the information. So you will then install an app to consume just one article? So WebXR is for those use cases. You can just share that article via a link. You just click a link and immediately without downloading anything you are inside the experience, consuming that information.
On the other hand, the FirefoxOS approach was like more of a holistic approach. It’s like, OK we have these very set of cool standards and APIs: we could actually build the whole system and platform using web technologies. So far we haven’t seen that in the VR and AR space, but I think there’s potential for someone to offer a different approach. Instead of building another kind of closed ecosystem, walled garden, they could approach building a headset based on standards and open technologies.
The first approach, the web complementing the native, ecosystem is materializing already because in the Oculus Quest we have an amazing browser. The Oculus folks are doing an excellent job at pushing the web forward and have a top implementation of the APIs and a top browser for people to access that content.
The holistic approach we haven’t seen it yet, and I would love someone to tackle it.“
If we look at the VR ecosystem today, WebXR seems to still be stuck in that kind of bite-sized content showcase. Why do you think that is? And what do you think needs to happen until we start seeing some of the most popular VR experiences be built on WebXR?
“That’s a question that doesn’t have a single answer. It’s complex. First of all, WebXR is still very young. We’ve been talking for many years about it, but it was not until early 2020 that actual browsers started to ship the final API. So it’s still very, very young. And since VR and AR has been focused on games, there’s a lot of inertia and the industry is built on certain workflows and certain tools that people learn over the years. When you develop for the web, it requires some retraining. People have to retrain and learn new tools and new patterns to develop content.
The second thing is monetization. The gaming focus of VR also implies the way to make money – you develop your video game, you put it on a store and you charge some money for that piece of content. This doesn’t apply as well on the web. If you see the way that people make money on the web today, either you have advertisements or you have some sort of subscription model – those are not that common in the video game space.
What I’m convinced is that it’s not that technology problem anymore. Because we have the standard, the final WebXR standard shipping in browsers. So all the technology pieces are there, it’s more of a problem of educating and for people to learn how to take advantage of the potential of the web. I think it’s going to happen, but as always in technology, things always take a bit longer. Especially if you’re an early adopter and you feel ‘I’ve been here for five years’, but when you see things at a global scale, people are starting to learn. Most people are still surprised that you can actually consume AR & VR through the browser. Most people are still not aware of that.“
That monetization issue is something we’ve certainly heard from developers when asking them their thoughts on this. Do you think the Web Payments API is going to change that? What I’ve always wondered and hoped for is that we’d see the Oculus Browser adopt that API, such that if I go to purchase something in the Oculus browser, it’ll bring up that same pin code as when I’m purchasing a native app.
“Yep. They are in a position to actually solve it because they have control of the platform underneath and also the browser – they could tie at both ends. I guess in those ecosystems, like Android or iOS or Oculus Quest, there’s always this tension between native and web, what cases would prioritize the web over native, or the other way around. I imagine there’s tons of internal discussions around it.“
It feels like there are parallels to when modern smartphones launched. At the start of the iPhone you had this native SDK and there was kind of lip service to support for web apps, but often Apple prioritized bringing features to native first and made web apps second-class citizens. Do you worry that Facebook will go down the same path, in that they have a financial disincentive to make the web work when they’re making all this money from the native store?
“This is just my guesses, I don’t have any internal knowledge: Apple, their roots are full control of everything right? From the bottom to the top, like from the hardware to the software. For them, the web feels like something foreign. They don’t speak the web language. But I have high hopes about Facebook because Facebook is the epitome of web success, right?
So Facebook truly understands, it has the web in its DNA. And hopefully they will be able to figure out and introspect: oh, actually, do I be awesome, right!?“
Do you think WebXR needs Unity and Unreal to add WebXR export, or do you think that the existing web development tools are sufficient, that they can create this ecosystem without support of these big engines?
“People that are involved in native development with Unity and Unreal, those people are in their own kind of bubble and they don’t care that much about the web. It’s mostly people that are already on the web that see the potential in those new technologies, like WebGL and WebXR and say: now I have this whole new world for me to create new stuff, right. It was not possible before.
This is our goal with A-frame, the goal was not that much as convincing people that do native to come to the web, but enabling people that are already on the web, know the value of the web and know how to use the web, enabling these people to create VR and AR content.
The support of native engines would be super welcome, and that would be very easy for some people that don’t participate in the web to enter the space, but I don’t think is required.“
Can you talk about, both from a development perspective and an end-user perspective, some of the advantages for VR apps that are on the web rather than native apps?
“The advantage of the web is immediacy, right? You can just share a piece of content via a link and you click and immediately you are consuming that piece of content. That’s an advantage from the user’s point of view, that immediacy and not having to install the content in order to consume it.
From the developer’s point of view, it’s that full control of your own work. So you don’t have to ask for permission and you don’t have to pass a curation process or approval process to get your application out there. And you can just publish and based on its own merit, users will tell if your content is good or not.
That’s really needed because we don’t know yet what the killer app of VR and AR is yet. Oculus doesn’t know, people that curate the store don’t know. I don’t know. When the web was born, we didn’t know. No-one anticipated Twitter or Facebook or anything. We need as many people as possible developing stuff, trying out ideas and see what happens.
Also from the point of view of developers, you don’t have a gateway , as I mentioned before, to make money, that’s the downside. But on the upside, it’s your business. Nobody is going to take 30% or 20% or 15% of your revenue. And things will last forever, right? You can visit websites made in the ’90s that still work. If I publish an app today on iOS, in three years if I don’t update that app it won’t work anymore. So it has this property of archival, because web standards, once they ship the browsers don’t remove APIs. So anything that works today is going to work in 10 years.“
That’s a really great point because we’ve already seen so many in the industry notice that this Oculus Go and Gear VR and Daydream content, is already lost to history. And that was only just a few years ago. What may make WebXR the preferred way to make VR apps is that you have this kind of separation of the content and the engine. The browser is the engine that is a living thing. If someone releases a native VR app they’re using the version of Unity or Unreal that was in their day and 10 years later, the fundamental technology of it will be outdated.
“Even experiments I was doing in 2014, I can just grab the code. Obviously there was a bit of churn there, WebVR was not still standard, but with a few tweaks here and there I can make it work in an afternoon. It has a ton of value!“
You talked about one of the big challenges here being bringing developers on board. What do you think is missing in the current web and WebXR development ecosystem? What tools or frameworks or ideas or tutorials do you think are the missing pieces that we really need to move into the next phase of the WebXR ecosystem?
“That’s a good question. With A-frame we are trying to solve that issue. There’s millions of web developers out there that don’t have the skillsets, or are not even aware that they can develop AR and VR content. And our goal is to educate and provide tools to these people that resonate with their workflow. Our background is also as web developers so we understand that mindset. We understand those ways of doing things and it’s much needed.
If we want this space to flourish, we need to onboard as many web developers as possible. So we need more and more tools that resonate with them, not trying to convince as much native developers, because they already have a workflow that works for them and they love their tools. And those are amazing. This is a matter of enabling existing people that already love the web that are not aware or don’t know how to develop VR and AR content. If we only convince like 5% of that audience of millions of developers, the space will bloom!“
In the longer term do you think native developers could be brought in too as the advantages of this decoupling of the engine and the content is becomes more apparent over time?I don’t think the general audience are going to enjoy downloading apps to join their friends and an experience, and I think if people can deliver these kinds of rich experiences where getting to your friend and an entirely different experience is just one tap away… do you see that displacing native engines in the long-term?
“Indeed as there’s the potential to displace native engines. I would love native developers to come to the web. It was like a more a practical way of approaching because it’s much easier. With A-frame I go and talk to a web developer. It’s like, oh you like to use Node or Webpack or React or Angular. You like all those tools so I can give you an engine to develop VR and AR content, it can integrate with the tools that you already know. It’s a much easier path to onboard those people versus going to native developers and saying, okay leave all your toolsets on the side. I’m going to teach you these all new things.
It’s a much harder task to convince native developers, but eventually if, WebXR flourishes, the value of it will become obvious for them. And I’m convinced they will see the value as we make progress.“
Over time, do you see A-Frame focusing in on this just-above-WebXR level in the stack functionality, or do you see higher level things over time that do more and more for the developer?
“Yeah I think we need both. We see this less and less now, but at the beginning most of the web developers jumping into AR wanted to do a video on 360° photos. That was the main use case. And they were demanding, all I want to do is do like a tour of 360° video or pictures. And for these people it would have been very convenient to have these high level tools. Visually oh I have all these 360° pictures bonded together and link those pictures in this way and add a little bit of text here and there and having high-level tools for them to build those tours would have been very useful and convenient for them.
It’s a bit premature because those categories of content are still not super defined in VR. Sometimes the value of the experience is in the nuances of the interaction model. In those cases you want to have a lot of control, and to have a lot of control you need tools that allow you to customize those interactions in a very detailed way. So you will also need category of low level tools that allow you to open the box and customize the way you want. With A-Frame we’re trying to tackle this middle ground. So it’s very approachable and you can get something going in a minute, like put like a 360° video or a 360° panorama, you can do it in a minute and you can publish that in a minute and share it with your friends via Twitter in a simple link. But at the same time, you can actually open the box and look inside and deepen your knowledge.“
Did you see that kind of ability to modify and change bring all these different frameworks together being a really important in WebXR’s future?
“So I learned how to develop and program using the web. And I think most people started in the same way, right? You see a website you like, you wonder: oh, how is this made? And in the web you always had the ability to open the developer tools that come built-in with a browser.
I know this is a CSS property that changes the color of this button, and you can also inspect the JavaScript and figure things out, how things are built. And there’s a lot of value in learning from others. And you have some ability to access the insides and learn how it’s built. It’s not a black box as an engine can be.“
How important do you think it is that any WebXR application by its nature has access to the existing web of 2D content. We always hear people wondering where the metaverse is, and there’s this kind of core assumption that it’s going to be this one native app that provides everything in one. But isn’t it arguable that the web already is this and that the metaverse will simply be the extension of the web into these new platforms – and as long as you have multitasking in WebXR, an environment where I can bring up a 2D browser tab here and Discord there, isn’t that the metaverse? Do you see that as the metaverse it itself?
“The web is already the metaverse, we just have to make it 3D. That is what we used to say at Mozilla.
VR and AR is another kind of media, and the web already does text and does images and does video and audio. But now I can do also VR and AR. So yeah, it’s a multimedia environment and it’s up to the browser. This is why we started Supermedium, the company, that was our goal. OK, we have 2D browsers it’s clear what a 2D browser is, we settle on those UI patterns. We have a window with a URL bar on the top and maybe some tabs, and you can switch between different open websites.
But we don’t know if that pattern translates to VR. And if we get rid of the frame on the window, how can we access the web and different pieces of the web, in VR and AR? We haven’t discovered how it’s going to happen. But yeah, what you were saying is the technology is already there, it’s a matter of someone to put those pieces together in a way that makes sense.
And I think native applications, they will have far much harder time to replicate all that functionality because they will have to reinvent the wheel, right? They will have to figure out all the things that the world has figured out already over 30 years, they will have to reinvent not only those pieces, but also convince developers and content producers to adopt this new way of doing things and convince them that this is better than the actual web.
In the WebXR experiences I’ve tried performance is equal to native apps, but there is this perception out there that WebXR is still slow. How do you fight that perception? What do you think the path forward there is to get sort of consumer and developer trust in the performance of the web?
At Mozilla we always struggled with that kind of perception that in many cases is a myth. Once the opinion has settled in people’s head it’s very hard to convince them otherwise to change their minds. There’s tons of metrics and statistics and profiling of browsers and applications showing them all actually works.
But at some point we decided we are wasting our time. The better way to convince people is to show. If you’re able to show a piece of content that performs well and users enjoy, that’s undeniable, right? That was our goal with Moon Rider – try to get the most beloved piece of content out there, Beat Saber, and try to replicate this piece of content with web technologies, just as a proof, as a tangible proof that the web is ready to deliver compelling content. If you are willing to put some time to profile, to tune the performance in the same way that you see in the apps that are published on the store.
You don’t see the experimentations that people do on native because they are very hard to share. Those are hidden. So you don’t see all the things that don’t perform. You don’t see the things that are full of bugs back because people don’t share them, but those things are exposed on the web. Because as soon as you feel some pride of something, when it’s something you made, you’re going to tweet about it and people are going to click on it and they are going to see.
Moon Rider was out there for 18 months and it has like three or four thousand daily active users and more than 16 minutes average session – people love it and people use it.“
What are your thoughts on the future of WebXR, A-Frame, and and the entire web ecosystem going into the spatial computing age?
“I’m super excited. A couple of years ago I was getting impatient, because it seemed like we started the first version of the standard in 2014 and we were in late 2019 and I was thinking: oh it’s been five years and the standard has not yet shipped. I was kind of getting a bit antsy.
But once the standard shipped, everything fell into place. We have this done there. We saw Quest and the Oculus folks that are doing amazing with the browser also shipping the new standard and everything kind of clicked. And you see new headsets that like Magic Leap also has had a very nice good effort trying to push the web to develop content. And you have the HoloLens folks doing an excellent job also incorporating the WebXR APIs in their browser. Everything is clicking right now and it’s a matter of volume. As more headsets and devices get released and as more people get onboard using VR and AR headsets, I think the web is ready. It’s just waiting for someone to take advantage of it, and for the potential to manifest for everybody.
I’m super super optimistic. And this only happened like since 12, 15 months ago. Because I truly think like I used to say, you have to wait till we finish the standard. You have to wait till all the browsers ship. But those things are done already, and it’s there. The web is your oyster now. So I’m super, super happy and super pumped about what’s coming.
Now the next frontier is AR. The Google folks, they are doing an excellent job at incorporating AR features into the WebXR standard. And we see some initial moves and some interest from Apple in the standard, and also some rumors that maybe they might enter the space. I’m super pumped about what’s going to happen there too.“
Do you think the industry needs Apple to really support WebXR in full, or do you think it’s fine if Apple remains with its stance of native-first?
“I think Apple entering this space is going to grow the pie, both for native and the web. This is going to make people to really take seriously AR and VR and is going to raise all the boats, right? Like both native and web. And for those companies that are invested or are investing in VR and WebXR right now, but it’s more like an experiment, may justify going full on once Apple enters the space and matures the industry. I think the web is gonna flourish with it regardless of how seriously Apple takes it.
People criticize Apple a lot, how Apple approaches the web. I’m mostly a Windows user, but when I’m using Mac I’m always surprised how good Safari on desktop is compared to alternatives. You cannot claim that Apple doesn’t care about the web. They kind of always take different paths or put the web on a second plane, because the way they make money doesn’t align that much with the web, but eventually they always come around and they put something out there that is really, really good.“
Diego, it was an honor to have you in the studio. The future of WebXR seems bright.
Today DOOM 3 VR Edition launches on PSVR for $20. We sat down for a chat with Ken Thain, Executive Producer from Archiact to talk about what it was like working with id Software to bring this iconic FPS into VR officially.
David Jagneaux, Senior Editor at UploadVR: Okay so, just checking here: the official title is DOOM 3 VR Edition, is that right?
Ken Thain, Executive Producer at Archiact: It’s a VR edition because we were very particular. It’s not a port. It’s not we threw stereoscopic view on a DOOM game…When we were working with it, they [id Software] were actually quite passionate about the idea that it’s not just a port, let’s make this an adaptation, let’s make this a remaster for VR because we both recognized that Doom 3 is a fantastic game for VR just based on the fact that out of the DOOM franchise, it’s a bit more of a slower first-person shooter.
We as well recognize the possibility within VR and so we consider it an adaptation or remastering because we redid so much. We redid the weapons, we redid the audio, and we can talk about it later, but the VFX: the audio, uprezzing the graphics, uprezzing the weapons, a new diegetic UI. We did so much to it to make sure that it felt like it was for VR from the ground up and I have to say it came out really, really well.
When we first got [the weapon 3D models] it was like, yeah, there’s whole chunks missing because they never had to show them on-screen so you can reveal the weapons and re-texture them up and stuff and then all the additions of the laser target, the flashlights, redoing the sound, redoing the VFX. It really is a remastering and I think once everybody’s able to jump in and play it, they’ll really feel it.
UploadVR: I remember when the game first came out there were lots of complaints about how the flashlight worked. How does it work exactly here? Were the weapons totally remade?
Thain: Yeah, it’s just depending on the weapons. We modified the weapons for those that either we had to put a flashlight on it, or we just keep it on your shoulder or it’s on your head where your aim and for VR is particularly good because with Doom 3 being so intense, like you literally playing where a door opens, it’s dark inside, you peek your head in, look around, put your gun in with the flashlight, check out all the dark corners, it feels totally different…The fact that your flashlight is still on a battery, it can run out, you can turn it off and on and you can look in one direction and have a flashlight going in another direction. So I think people will be really happy with that addition.
UploadVR: Can you talk a little bit about getting the lighting and all that, adapting it for VR, just right? How important is that sort of creepy atmosphere in a VR game like DOOM 3? As you said, it’s a slower-paced game, more horror-style than the others—I imagine it really helps amplify things tremendously.
Thain: First off, it was an advantage in the sense that games built back in 2004 were a lot less complicated rendering wise than they are now. So we’re able to bring the engine forward to update it, but like our team had a lot of Doom 3 fans, particularly, and there’s a group of us actually that were motors in an era of this.
Luckily enough, we uprezzed the environments, we uprezzed the weapons, we uprezzed all the UI and stuff. These additions feel really good. They feel really modern. You play the game, it’s super solid frame rates, 60 frames across. It feels really smooth. Everything’s really clear. It has this modern feel to it but yet this nostalgia of the style of graphics and the style of creatures and stuff from the original Doom. From there, it feels really good and then there was a few things we had to work on, like the original Doom 3 had a lot of strobing lights and that’s not good for VR because you are right in there.
We had to go through and do some modification, either tone down the strobing of some lights or leave them on full time. There was some atmosphere that we had to work around with that, but overall, based on all the additions that we did to it, the game itself stands out really well. I mean it’s id Software, they invented the first person shooter.
UploadVR: Have you looked into the Quest version of DOOM 3 at all? Is that something you’re aware of?
Thain: We’re aware of the Dr. Beef Quest 2 version. There’s also a lot of VR mods for DOOM 3 on the PC as well and we’re aware of these and it’s good. Overall, it’s good. We’re all contributing to VR. We’re all creating good content for VR players. There was never a moment we’d looked at it as competitive or anything like that. As far as Archiact is concerned, we support those mods and I’m sure Bethesda does as well as far as making sure that as many people get to play DOOM as possible.
UploadVR: I didn’t know if that was one you had played or not.
Thain: Well, definitely looked at it. We looked at actually a lot of shooters in the VR space just to see what was working, what doesn’t. Even our experiences ourselves with Evasion, we knew what worked and what doesn’t and the good thing is with id Software, they were very supportive of when we came up with the features and we prototyped them and we had them try it out. We had some collaboration back and forth of exactly the placement of flashlights or even the art. Like, with the double barrel shotgun we have the flashlight taped on because it feels a bit more visceral. Yet the modern machine gun, which is very sci-fi looking, we built the flashlight into it.
Let us know what you think of DOOM 3 VR Edition down in the comments below!
Wraith: The Oblivion – Afterlife presents an interesting challenge for concept artist Henrik Lundblad.
Yes, it’s a horror game with expected tropes, but Lundblad was also tasked with visualising a universe with little in the way of visual assets. World of Darkness, the universe in which the game is set, is a pen & paper RPG, and not something that has an abundance of reference points to touch upon, save for the game’s original rulebooks. That’s especially true for the Wraith factions, which have never had their own game to help inform the art.
For Lundblad, then, this is a different type of project. Tonally, topics of death and the afterlife are very different to the subjects Fast Travel approached in Apex Construct and Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets, but the artist was also given a lot of creative freedom inside an established universe. As part of our final entry in our Upload Access spotlight on the game, we spoke to him about the challenges of bringing the World of Darkness to life.
UploadVR: Tonally, working on the art of Wraith must have been a big change from your past projects, how was that to handle?
Henrik Lundblad: Yes, Afterlife is a very different game from what we as a studio have done before. In this project we were dealing with a much darker subject: death and what follows there after. Naturally, we wanted to use a slightly different art style than what we have done in the past. A style more suited to tell the story of Ed and his dreadful fate in the Barclay Mansion. Choosing a much darker tonality and more close to reality look for the game felt like a good match when visualizing this alternate reality. This of course came with challenges, both technical and creative, but also interesting new ways of expressing our ideas.
Our ambition was to be a horror game but also to bring something new to the table visually. Instead of basing the environments in the game on, say, a more classic looking Victorian haunted mansion we let ourselves be influenced by more modern architecture.
UploadVR: As a pen & paper game, there aren’t a lot of visuals assets for Wraith out there – were you given a lot of freedom to envision the universe?
Henrik Lundblad: The original rule books for Wraith the Oblivion actually contain a lot of interesting artwork. This helped us as visual stepping stones when developing art for this game. Sure, we were given a lot of freedom, but felt it important to still let the mood and tonality influence the art of the game. It was interesting to see how concepts from the pen and paper game had been visualized previously and come up with creative ideas for how to realize them in a VR game.
UploadVR: Did Paradox give you any directions for the art behind the game and the designs of creatures/environments?
Henrik Lundblad: I think Paradox really gave us a lot of creative freedom. At the same time they also helped us to stay true to the World of Darkness IP. During the project we bounced a lot of our ideas with some of the lore experts over at Paradox and got many useful insights.
UploadVR: Did you look to other WoD properties for inspiration? What were some of the guiding influences?
Henrik Lundblad: It was important to us that Wraith: The Oblivion Afterlife felt like it was a part of the WoD family, but also mixed with other visual ingredients that felt important to us. Early on, the team studied films from the same era as the original Wraith: The Oblivion as a source of inspiration.
Wraith: The Oblivion – Afterlife is coming to Oculus Rift and Quest on April 22nd, with a SteamVR version following on May 25th. A PSVR edition is coming later down the line, too.
Zenith: The Last City is an upcoming VR MMORPG from Ramen VR that’s slated to release on PC VR, PSVR, Quest, and non-VR PC platforms sometime this year. Last week, I sat down with Andy Tsen, CEO of Ramen VR, to discuss the game, their ambitious plans, and what players should expect with a game of this scope and scale.
If you’d rather watch the interview instead of read it, which clocks in at just around 45-minutes total, then you can check that out above. We met in the UploadVR virtual studio, the same one that we use to capture and stream our twice-per-week talkshow podcast, VR Download.
Keep in mind this was a 45-minute long conversation-style interview, it wasn’t an email Q&A or anything like that. Enjoy and let us know of any questions or comments down below!
Zenith: The Last City—Made-For VR MMORPG
Andy Tsen, Ramen VR CEO: Zenith is a virtual reality MMO and it has kind of a JRPG East Asian aesthetic. It’s kind of sci-fi fantasy and we want people to be able to come into the world and just explore and have a really positive, fun kind of RPG experience that they would have on any other platform except built for VR. We really think that this is the stuff that people have been wanting for a long time, and that’s why we set out to build it.
David Jagneaux, UploadVR: Yeah, you guys had a Kickstarter campaign, right? I’m drawing a blank on remembering how much you guys ended up raising but it was pretty successful, right?
Tsen: Yeah, we had a $280,000 Kickstarter a while back ago. Mm hmm.
UploadVR: Awesome, that’s exciting! You talk about VR MMOs, it’s something that everyone wants, everyone has been dreaming about since Neuromancer came out, since who knows how long. And certainly, pop culture has fed into that with– You know, for me growing up, there was .hack//Sign and then Sword Art Online and The Matrix and Ready Player One, and there’s just so much pop culture centered around that idea of this magical sci-fi fantasy world where we can all go in and hang out and do stuff together. Obviously, VR headsets are getting us closer to that. In what ways do you think Zenith is doing things that hasn’t been done yet?
Tsen: Well, we’re building a full-scale VR MMO and so… It’s basically a lot of is uncharted territory, right? I’m actually a big fan of Orbus and the guys at ATT -A Township Tale. Everybody has their own take on what of their MMO should be. But what we’re really trying to do is create a top extremely polished core game loop that is really, really fun to play that feels a lot more polished and a lot deeper. That’s our fundamental goal; to create an experience where it feels both familiar to MMORPG players as well as completely unique being in the space of VR itself. As an example, Zenith is going to feel a lot more like an action RPG than something like Final Fantasy XIV or WoW where they are basically spreadsheet simulators where you’re pressing macros and you’re doing the whole hotkey dance, right? In Zenith, you literally have to parry enemy’s attacks, throw fireballs, you can slow time. And of course, all of this is tied together by a gorgeous environment where we’ve spent thousands of hours creating unique props and content and just building a world that feels fully alive and immersive. Along with that, obviously, one of the most important things about VR is a sense of presence and I think that that’s something that other genres outside of VR, MMOs can’t really reach. And so for us, it’s all about that feeling of physical embodiment in the world. That’s why we introduced our recent pop one-style gliding, we have climbing, we have full-body IK, right? These are things that will make the players feel like they’re really in the world living a different life essentially.
UploadVR: This is a key question for me that a lot of MMOs don’t handle this well and I feel like a lot of MMOs- like you alluded to- with spreadsheet simulator style gameplay, they’re all very target based. You target an enemy, you use your abilities and you just flow on from there. But is everything in Zenith real time? Like if I cast a fireball, does it travel in real time through the game world where it’ll then hit an enemy or can he dodge it? Or if I miss with bad aim? Is that an aspect of it? Can I target something then automatically hit it?
Tsen: Yeah, absolutely. That’s where you get to the real time action RPG part of this. Yes, things in Zenith do feel like real time. You’ll have to raise your sword up at the right time to block an attack, you’ll have to do gestures to cast spells. We have a pretty innovative casting system that we’re excited to show people. But yeah, if you aim wrong, for example, or you throw your fireball in the wrong direction, it’s not going to hit the enemy.
UploadVR: Got it, got it. That’s pretty cool. I know nowadays there are a handful of MMOs that do stuff like that, like New World is coming out soon a non-VR MMO that’s going to have real time combat, but it’s pretty rare still. Most all the big MMOs are all target-based, you don’t have to really aim anything. So, I’m excited to have a game like that in VR for sure.
Tsen: Yeah, for sure. I think there’s a couple of MMOs out there that are a little bit more action paced in the non-VR realm. If you look at games like Black Desert Online or Guild Wars 2 to an certain extent, they feel a little bit more Diablo-ey or Path of Exile-ey. Also ESO I guess is another example of something that feels a little bit more real time. But for us, we are literally talking about having hitboxes and being able to dodge enemy attacks and being able to parry. One of the things that’s really cool is in Zenith is you can actually parry enemy projectiles. You can block arrows, knock arrows down as they are coming towards you.
UploadVR: Nice. Okay. That’s pretty cool. I think a lot of MMOs right now even going back all the way back to Ultima and the early days, such a big part of an MMO, obviously, the fact that it’s online is the community, right? You have to have a good core community, you have to be welcoming and accessible to new players, you have to have endgame content to keep the core community happy for months and years on end, and there’s just so many layers and facets to it. What are some of the ways that you guys are hoping to keep your community engaged and embrace and encourage social interaction and stuff like that?
Tsen: I think the community is at least as important as the game design and the marketing on the game if not more so. We’ve spent the past two years building up a really passionate and engaged and active community on our Discord where I think we’re over 25,000 people now and that’s just on Discord alone. And that’s been really exciting to see because… Well, there was a bit of time there where we were just heads down on coding and getting ready for all of the milestones we had to submit and we didn’t do much community engagement because we were so busy building the game. What was really cool to see was our moderating team and regular members of the community really come together and form a community that’s not just about Zenith, but also just about being friends and just hanging out and streaming together. We have people that have gotten married because of our Discord. They met in the Zenith Discord and they got married. And we have somebody who’s now one of our top moderators that said that he’s basically a lurker in other discords but was so welcomed by our community and felt so accepted that they actually spoke up for the first time and then became a moderator, and so now this is like a family to them. That’s the kind of community that we’re creating outside of Zenith.
Within Zenith, one of the cool things that we’ve really seen that I’m pretty excited about is our guild system. Because what we’re seeing is people are already self-organizing in our Discord around different guilds and stuff like that. We have a Guild Recruitment channel and a place where people can form guilds and tag themselves. We have a variety of social features within Zenith, obviously. Your standard friend system, parties and guilds as well as things that encourage more emergent gameplay like public events that can be completed with random people all over the world. I don’t know if you’ve played Destiny or Final Fantasy 14 with the FATEs, it’s kind of like that in terms of just having events spawn over the world that you can play together. But ultimately, I think what’s really important is just to have the gameplay reflect the need for collaboration. If you look like EverQuest is still out there today, right? That’s still making money. They still have a full team dedicated to churning out content for EverQuest because so much of it in the early days was impossible to do by yourself, right? You had to–
UploadVR: They just celebrated 22 years this week.
Tsen: Yeah. Yeah. Did you ever play by the way?
UploadVR: Oh, yeah. EverQuest is my first MMO. I played that a lot.
Tsen: Nice. WoW was my first real MMO, Classic WoW that is. What I will say is like with games like WoW and 14, they have gotten so good at basically just hitting a button and getting into a queue with someone, a random person, that you don’t necessarily need as much community. For us, it’s always about striking that right balance of yes, it’s easy for newbies to get in and party up but also, there’s enough challenging endgame content there where you still need to organize and you can’t just do pugs, you need to basically know people and form friendships and alliances.
UploadVR: That’s great to hear because my main MMO that I play personally right now is ESO. Sometimes, I could play that game for three hours straight and never have to type in the chat box, you know? So much of MMO design nowadays is about streamlining in terms of not just accessibility, but streamlining content so that you don’t have to even turn your brain on hardly. So, I think VR is not really the right medium for that type of game design. I think the more interactive and more hands-on something is, the better it is. So, I think you guys are taking a smart approach here where you’re going to try to incentivize real collaboration and communication because… And a lot of people forget every VR headset has a mic built in. So, it’s not like someone could not have a mic and not have a headset, you know? If you’re in VR you can talk, so you might as well embrace that.
Tsen: Yeah, definitely. It’s something that’s important to us. I think one thing we’re excited to explore when we have a chance to implement it, for example though, is voice modulation. I know that a lot of people want anonymity. I certainly do when I’m online. I’ve played a lot of D&D and I played a lot of– I don’t know if you’ve heard of this game, Neverwinter Nights.
UploadVR: Yeah, for sure.
Tsen: Yeah, I used to play it in a lot of RP servers online and in those worlds, you’re typing out what you’re saying so that leaves a lot more to imagination. And if you’re in an MMO, one of the things we want to do is eventually allow people to sound like whatever they want to sound like so that they can basically… they don’t pierce the veil essentially.
UploadVR: Yeah. For me, roleplay is something that I’ve done a little bit here and there in some games but whenever you’re using your real voice, you can feel shy about it especially if it’s around strangers. I definitely think that kind of thing would definitely help encourage them more and I mean, you’re putting on a VR headset. It’s kind of like wearing a mask in a way. You’re becoming your avatar more than when you’re looking at a computer screen so I think that kind of stuff is going to be really great.
Tsen: Yeah. Then the other interesting thing that we’ve seen is typically in a VR or an MMO of any kind, you want to spend several hours in there, right? For most of the, I guess, not even hardcore just like a regular MMO player wants to log a couple hours on a given weekend. At least for me the way that I do it is when I’m really busy weekdays, I’ll do dailies, right? Weekends, I want to put a lot more time into it if I have it. But in VR, you’re not talking about a 30-minute dungeon, that even feels a little bit too long for the average user to start off with. What we really want to capture is the same feeling that people get when they’re going into a game of Pop: One or Blast-On or Beat Saber. You go in and the first five minutes there’s already something that hooks you in. And that experience itself is the thing that gets you into the VR device. But then once you’ve played for five minutes, it’s “All right, I’ll just do another five minutes. And another five minutes.” So that’s been my pattern of the way I play games in VR is that I’ll jump in for a quick game of Beat Saber and then an hour later, I’ll be like, “Oh, how did this happen?”
UploadVR: Yeah, it’s tricky, right? I mean, designing an MMO, that’s the type of game that you want your players to play that for hundreds and hundreds of hours and designing it in a way that not only has the content there– You don’t want it to feel like you’re going to punish people if they don’t but at the same time, you do want to reward the people that do. It’s such a tricky balance. I don’t envy the task of trying to balance one of the first ever VR MMOs and make it sticky for all types of players out there. There’s just so many variables involved.
Tsen: Yeah, definitely. Thankfully, we’re not doing it alone. We have a great team. We have a game designer, Colin, that we brought on board that has a decade of MMO design experience. He worked on Rift, ArcheAge, and a couple really other popular games, Atlas Reactor and some other stuff like that. We’re fortunate to have a really amazing team of gaming veterans to help us start to bridge this gap between what a traditional MMO is and what a VR MMO should be.
UploadVR: Going back to that point a little bit, can you talk a little bit about the types of content that will be in the game? I mean, I’m assuming there’s main story quests and side quests and group dungeons and stuff, but for someone that jumps in to play the game, what are the types of events and activities and things that they’ll be able to do?
Tsen: You mentioned main story quests? Those will be there. We have procedural quests that will be able to ramp up depending on what level the player is and what areas they’re in and things like that. We mentioned public events earlier where you can go through and complete quests together, as well as just world boss events and also having group dungeons that people can go into and play together. There’s also just a plethora of things people can do in the world whether that’s going out and seeking treasure chests, kind of like Genshin Impact if you guys have played any of that. Or just going and leveling up the crafting. For example, one of the most fun things in this game right now is fruit gathering because you have to literally climb up the tree. And the distance grab only goes five meters, so sometimes you have to like stretch out to a branch to grab an apple and put it away. I guess what I would say is, all the core experience of an MMO is going to be there at launch, but we have plans to add a lot more on top of that later. I think the thing we want to avoid is stretching ourselves too thin so that we can’t deliver a polished experience across all the things we’re going to launch. The thing we also have to keep in mind is that we’re a small team. Right now, we’re about 10 people fulltime and with a couple other contractors beyond that. So we have to think of clever ways to not be constantly on this content treadmill that bigger AAA studios are able to do, right? If you have 100 artists and 20 game designers and 20 engineers, you can just create content without really thinking about reuse. For us, it’s all about having a really fun core gameplay experience like killing monsters, leveling up, getting loot, completing public events, and having those systems all tied together in a way that can be repeated over time.
UploadVR: Yeah, I know you’ve talked a little bit about the scale of the game, the multiplayer, sociability of it all and all that stuff. But I think the big question a lot of people probably have about games like this is how much is it truly an MMO? How many people will you see at any given time? Is it a truly open world? Are there instances or are the zones segmented? How does the actual game design look from a top level in terms of being an MMO?
Tsen: I think MMO is a term that has been really liberally used especially in mobile. And when I say MMO, what I’m trying to say is an MMO in the sense of something like WoW or Final Fantasy 14, where it will be a large world where you can have thousands of people per shard. Our eventual goal, of course, is to make it even bigger and tie the different shards together to have this infinite world, but we’re starting with just a regular MMO and a regular shard which by itself is hard enough.
UploadVR: That’s what Elder Scrolls Online did, right? They have the “One Tamriel” thing that they do where just depending on whenever you load into a zone, it’ll just assign people into that zone with you on the fly in a way. So, I mean, if I were to go fight a world boss, how many people can be there with me at any given time? Is there like a cap on that or is it just whoever is nearby? How does that work exactly?
Tsen: It’s going to be whoever is nearby, right? We need to take into account traditional load balancing issues that other MMOs have as well. You see this with Black Desert Online or Warframe and to some extent FFXIV and WoW as well. But basically, for example, if you’re in a party and you’re in a highly dense zone, your party members are prioritized in terms of latency and how well they’re rendered. And then the other people, you know, depending on what platform we’re playing the game on, are either at a lower level of detail or if there’s hundreds of people, you kind of just call it out completely. So like in Warframe, for example, you’ll be able to see most of the players around you but if you have a really dense zone like in a city or something, you’ll see players that just have name tags or kind of shadows. That’s the kind of thing that we’ll need to implement at launch to be able to support this. But our goal is to have it be a full-scale MMO with full-scale world bosses and things of that nature.
UploadVR: So you mentioned depending on platforms, I guess you’re alluding to the fact that on Quest, for example, if more than a handful of people are nearby, it’s probably you’re not going to see fully detailed avatars, right?
Tsen: Yeah. It depends on… Even within the Quest platform, there’s like Quest and Quest 2, right? And so one thing that we will make sure to do is that we’re not sacrificing anything from a gameplay perspective. That’s the most important thing to us, is that across all the different platforms people can have a… They won’t be hampered by having an older device or a weaker device versus, you know, PCVR, for example.
UploadVR: Cool. And it’s coming to PSVR as well, right?
Tsen: Yeah.
UploadVR: I got to ask, how does it play on PSVR? Because the move controllers don’t have analog sticks and so I mean, they’re kind of limited a little bit from a playability perspective. Is it going to be teleport only on PSVR or how does it work?
Tsen: Yeah. We can’t reveal too much about that yet. Partially because we’re still deep in the dev cycle for that, I don’t want to kind of say anything that might change later on. But what I can say is that we’re going to try to offer the same types of movement mechanics in PSVR as you have on other platforms. Yeah.
UploadVR: Gotcha. Yeah, there’s a lot of devs that have been creative about ways to do that. So that makes sense.
Tsen: Yeah, we have on our team people with decades of experience at Sony working on networking and gameplay so, you know, we’ll have a good idea. We’ll do a couple of iterations and I think people will be happy. Also excited about like the new controllers that have just come out.
UploadVR: I was just about to ask you. Well, what do you think about those?
Tsen: I think those are awesome.
UploadVR: They look great.
Tsen: Yeah. I am really excited about just how VR is coming together. You’ve probably been doing this for a while David, but my experience started with the DK2 back in like 2015. And every year since then, people have been saying like, “This is the year for VR. This is the year it’s going to take off.” And I really think we’re starting to kind of hit that inflection point. It’s really just about how many people have been able to hang in during that entire kind of strenuous time where there wasn’t a lot of revenue and it was the dark times.
UploadVR: Yeah. I think the important thing that the industry has seen is it’s expanded enough to have something out there for everybody, including the accessible, cheaper hardware, like the Quest 2 that is still super good, super great, has a good library. But then if you want to go high end with an index and a PC you totally can. And then you’ve got the console with the PSVR, which has an amazing library of games. Hopefully, it seems like the next headset is going to be better from a hardware perspective. I think that that’s the big thing for me, just seeing so many different options that are all viable is super exciting because for the longest time it seemed like everything felt so unfinished and experimental. But now we’re finally at that point now where I could… If I have a friend that is a gamer or something like that, I feel comfortable just recommending a Quest 2 nowadays without any caveats. Because up until then it was always like, “Oh well, if you don’t mind never turning around, you can get this headset,” or “If you don’t mind setting up and mounting cameras on your walls, then you can get this headset.” But now all that stuff’s gone and it’s exciting. And I think games like Zenith are exciting and they’re the kind of games people have been wanting to play. I’m excited to try it for myself. I haven’t gotten to try it yet, I’m really eager to try it out, hopefully.
Tsen: Yeah. Definitely love to run you through. We’re currently kind of crunching on the Alpha that, as you know, is coming out in about a month and hoping that’s going to be a really good experience for everybody. To go back to your point of kind of how you can recommend headsets to people now, I used to have to recommend people headsets. And now I’m in people’s homes like my brother-in-law, I’m just seeing people that are like- they just bought it! Not because I was like pushing it like a drug dealer, but like they have it and they’re like playing it. And one of them had a broken controller and it was like, you know, that’s how you know you’ve put a lot of hours into it when you’ve slammed your wall on accident so hard that the controller breaks.
UploadVR: Those controllers are pretty sturdy too, so that was… yeah, rest in peace that wall. That was probably pretty hard impact.
Tsen: Yeah, it was a zombie… It was one of the zombie defense games, he didn’t tell me the title.
UploadVR: Classic.
Tsen: Yeah.
UploadVR: Yeah. That’s awesome. It’s a great anecdote that I think a lot of people are starting to have more and more nowadays where instead of people asking me, “Should I get a VR headset?” It’s, “Hey, which game should I get for my VR headset?” It’s a very different question that I get more commonly now. So that’s pretty awesome to see.
Tsen: Yeah. And we were kind of excited to be able to get the major platforms really excited about Zenith as well, working with both, as you guys saw, being on the PlayStation store coverage as well as the Oculus coverage. It’s just been a really great experience for us. I think there is a unique moment in time for companies of our size to succeed right now. Basically, we are in a period of time where people want this, but AAA studios haven’t exactly committed to building MMO yet, right? Because it’s super, super expensive for that kind of scale. And so if we can deliver an experience now, we could really help set the kind of tone and define a lot of the mechanics that become known in this next group of, this next wave of MMOs to come out.
UploadVR: Yeah. You look back and Meridian 59 and Ultima, you know, those had to come before EverQuest and WoW could come. It’s a kind of a similar trajectory and, you know, it’s exciting to see. I do want to speak a little bit about some of the other things on the horizon out there. Like I know you talked a little bit about Orbus. Have you seen much about Ilysia? Is that one that you’re aware of very much? And how does Zenith compare to Orbus and the other VR MMOs that are on the horizon? What are some of the differentiating factors?
Tsen: To be honest, we’ve been really deep in development on Zenith. We haven’t had much time to come up for air. Ilysia is a game that we’ve definitely heard about, but we haven’t really delved too deep into it. What I will say is competition is always healthy, it always makes for a better product. And ultimately, I think, there’s going to be a lot of differentiating factors that players will be able to choose from when they play or choice when they have the products in front of them. I’m really personally excited about the features that Zenith has and I think we’ll be able to have a lot of people excited about that as well. Again, I haven’t done too much research into this, it’s mostly, you know, seeing it in our community. Like, “Hey, have you heard of this other game?” type of thing. But I guess a lot of it comes down to just the core game design as well as the aesthetic that we’re trying to hit. I think with us, we kind of have this JRPG, Sci-Fi fantasy, really colorful, stylized cel-shaded look. Other games are different.
UploadVR: The kind of the Cyberpunk almost sort of Sci-fi fantasy style, like you said, is not super common. I think most people when they think of MMORPGs, they have in their head kind of the Ultima, EverQuest, WoW style of medieval fantasy. But you guys are going for a little bit different of an aesthetic there while still having swords and magic, but also having skyscrapers. It’s kind of an interesting amalgamation.
Tsen: Yeah. I guess a good example of this would just be something like Final Fantasy, right? Final Fantasy, if you’re a fan of VII or any of them really, there’s always this kind of element of technology or steampunk or dieselpunk, but then there’s also kind of if you go far enough out into the open world, a lot of it can feel like fantasy because it’s natural environments, it’s wide open plains to explore, it’s lush forests. And we have all of that. I think is just… It’s going to be exciting.
UploadVR: Cool. One other topic I want to talk about is I would love to hear some more from you about the moment-to-moment gameplay. Because I know that you guys have previously described your melee combat as similar to Beat Saber. So if you could talk a little bit about what that’s like for the player, you know, like what they’ll physically be doing and how it works, that’d be great.
Tsen: Yeah. So that was like really early on. And I remember saying that and then getting coverage about it because Beat Saber was like the biggest thing back then. Well, first of all, there’s 30 minutes of uninterrupted gameplay footage on our YouTube- it’s not cut or edited at all- that anybody can just go on and check out. That’ll give people a good feel for what the gameplay is going to feel like. But second of all, in terms what we meant by in the early days having Beat Saber-inspired combat, was that you would be able to block things. You would have to time things to make sure that you were hitting things optimally. Now in the early prototype, what we had was literally lines that you would kind of slash through, and you’d have to slash it at the right time.
Tsen: Yeah, like Until You Fall style. We got some feedback on that that was a little bit too gamey for what people were looking at for an MMO. They wanted something that’s a little bit more visceral. So we modified that so that timing is still important, but it’s no longer so obvious like you have to do this or you have to like… Yeah, and so combat now is basically… I think one of the most important things is the enemy stagger gauge. The idea is that you would be doing movements in real time, like parrying, blocking or if you’re made, to sling fireballs. And then that would all be incrementing attacking the enemy stagger meter. And then when they get staggered and vulnerable, that’s when you’d go in and you do maximum damage.
UploadVR: Got it. I’m nearing the end of my play-through of Final Fantasy VII Remake. So the term stagger is very large in my brain right now because that’s a huge part of that game. Yeah, that’s common mechanics, that makes sense.
Tsen: Yeah. If you’ve seen the stagger gauge in Final Fantasy VII, it’ll feel a lot like that.
UploadVR: Cool.
Tsen: There’s also this problem with energy fatigue. If you’re going to be playing a game for two to three hours, you need to make sure people aren’t getting exhausted while they’re in there. So our goal is to kind of make the game reward reflexes and strategy more than like just raw physical prowess. It’s definitely not a game like Blast-On where you’ll be literally dodging things all the time, there’s going to be a component of just reaction time and timing and strategy.
UploadVR: Got it. And the last topic I’d love to touch on a little bit is, I know you mentioned things like loot and stuff earlier, but what is the gear system like? Are there lots of items and customization in terms of armor and weapons? Can I look down and see my entire avatar? Because you mentioned full body IK, I’m just curious to know how deep and detailed is that system.
Tsen: Yeah. Players will be able to look down and see the different armor sets that they’re equipping. We’ll have a lot of different armor types, really awesome looking unique armor sets that people will be able to put on. If you could imagine something that’s kind of like any other MMO, where you have tons of loot and gear to grind after, you know. You have modifiers and stats on those things. For us we also want to take that one step further and kind of allow people to continue making their armor sets more and more powerful over time. Enchanting those armor sets, making those better, enhancing them. That’s how we kind of think of loot. And also just making it extremely apparent when you’ve gotten a really powerful piece of loot. We want people to feel every piece of armor they get. Because again, it’s kind of like an action RPG mixed with an MMO so you can’t just get something that increases your stat value by five and like increases your DPS by one, that’s not going to make you feel more powerful.
UploadVR: Yeah, that’s very important. That’s definitely good to hear. Reminds me of two very specific important questions from one MMO player to another is, will there be transmog? Can I change the look of things to look like other things?
Tsen: We do want to have a transmog system. It depends on whether or not we can get it at launch, but that’s definitely something that we’re going to put in.
UploadVR: Okay.
Tsen: Yep.
UploadVR: Cool. And the second one is: In terms of trading, will there be like a player economy type of thing going on where high-level gear that you get from one place you can sell to someone? And will things be bound to you when you pick them up? Is that going to be part of the game design at all?
Tsen: We’re still pretty early on the player economy side of things. All I can say is that there will be one, that’s something that we promised our backers on Kickstarter when we raised that. I think what we want to do is we want to introduce it in a way that is sane. We’re not quite EVE Online where you can literally sell everything and your job is just to become a corporate overlord. We think of our ourselves more like a traditional kind of MMO where there’s some player economy in there, but there’s also a game economy outside of that. Players that choose to participate in it will be rewarded handsomely but it won’t be a requirement.
UploadVR: Okay, cool. Well, sounds like you guys are checking a lot of boxes and hitting a lot of bullet points, and I’m very excited to check out the game. Hopefully during the Alpha, I’ll find some time to try it out and play it. Why don’t you go ahead and let everyone know the dates of the upcoming Alpha, how they can pre-order, and platforms, when it’s coming out… and all that good stuff.
Tsen: Yeah, sure. The game, the first pre-Alpha starts on the 19th, and it’ll run for about a week.
UploadVR: Of April, right?
Tsen: Yeah. Sorry, April 19th. Some people were messaging me today about why it hasn’t started yet. It’ll start on April 19th and run for about a week. Unfortunately, pre-orders have closed at this point. We just had a phenomenal amount of demand and we want to make sure we can fulfill that and make sure everybody has a good experience. We’re working hard to be able to open that up, but no guarantees on that yet. I would just encourage everybody to come check out our Discord and our mailing list. Yeah, Alpha will be the first taste people get of the game publicly so we’re excited for everybody to try it out. Important thing is to just note that it is a real Alpha not like a marketing Alpha, so it’s going to be rough, it’s going to be a little bit unpolished. There’s going to be crashes and bugs, you know? We want to set expectations on that. We still think it’s going to be a really fun experience though.
UploadVR: Right. So this is an Alpha test, not a free demo. It is an Alpha test.
Zenith: The Last City is an upcoming VR MMORPG in development by Ramen VR slated to release on PC VR headsets, PSVR, Quest, and non-VR PC platforms. We sat down with Andy Tsen, CEO of Ramen VR, to chat about the game and their ambitious ideas.
The video will premiere on our YouTube channel at 3:15PM PT today. You can watch it as it premieres right here down below, or once it’s over you can watch it back just like any other YouTube video.
Zenith: The Last City VR MMORPG—Interview Q&A
For a shorter excerpt from this interview, you can read about Tsen’s commitment to making Zenith: The Last City a truly full-scale MMORPG with all of the features and ideas that come along with that. They’re building it out to be a massive, sprawling world that you can really live in.
Zenith raised over $280,000 on Kickstarter in late 2019 and are currently aiming to get Zenith out sometime this year. The first closed alpha tests are happening next month for pre-order customers and Kickstarter backers.
Fans of anime like Sword Art Online and .hack//sign as well as popular franchises like The Matrix and Ready Player One have been eagerly awaiting the arrival of a true, full-scale VR MMORPG like this and Ilysia for years. OrbusVR scratches the itch a bit, but is small in scope by comparison.
Let us know what you think of the game and the interview itself down in the comments below! If you’d rather read the interview, check back tomorrow for a full transcript.
We’ve got a special guest joining us in our virtual studio this week — Daniel Beauchamp aka @Pushmatrix on Twitter — and we’re going to look through his fascinating and occasionally nightmarish hand tracking prototypes with our live audience.
Tune in at 10 am Pacific time on Wednesday March 24th for our live discussion with Pushmatrix.
We’ll be in our virtual studio with hand tracking for an in-depth discussion about the VR experimentation he’s been doing since 2015. He’s the head of AR/VR at Shopify and in late 2019 Facebook released experimental hand tracking support for the Quest. In 2020, Beauchamp started publicly sharing his various experiments centered around Facebook’s hand tracking technology and it turned him into a bit of a viral sensation.
From machine learning and Beat Saber to cheese grating and string cheese, Beauchamp’s experiments turn his fingertips into a playground of ideas and the videos he produces showcasing these ideas spread far across Twitter and the wider web. We even worked with some folks who know American Sign Language to try one of Beauchamp’s experiments in a networked setting to explore what limits there are to that sort of robust communication with current generation hand tracking technology.
Pushmatrix shared more than 20 of these experiments with us and we’re ready to show them on our virtual TV during this special broadcast. We’ll have our hands tracked in our custom virtual studio for the discussion, and if you’ve got any questions or comments for Pushmatrix be sure to share them in our live chat as we discuss the past, present and future of VR hand interaction.
