Kite & Lightning – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

June 19, 2020

Bebylon: Battle Royale Gets a 2020 Release Date, Cinematic Trailer Drops

It has been a week of surprises with long-forgotten virtual reality (VR) projects like Blunt Force suddenly reappearing. And now there’s another, Bebylon: Battle Royale, with a new website and details released by developer Kite & Lightning; including a possible 2020 launch.

Details on Bebylon: Battle Royale have ebbed and flowed over the years ever since the title was first revealed in 2015. Kite & Lightning manage to secure a $2.5 million USD investment in 2016 which then led to the team expanding their ideas and the scope of the title.

As the name suggests, Bebylon: Battle Royale is set in a world full of babies. The story goes that a drug company created a pill for immortality but a side effect was that newborns inherited anti-aging genes and stopped growing after a couple of years, staying two-foot tall forever. Eventually shunned by tall society a few of the bebies decide to create their own utopia, a city just for them.

An AI is created to run the place but eventually, this haven starts to unravel as a competitive battle royale sport soon becomes the dominant form of entertainment. And this is where you step in, choosing from a selection of characters, vehicles and weapons to punch, trash-talk and beat rivals in arena matches.

From the details released on the new website Bebylon: Battle Royale is set to feature 12 arenas, 12 items to use in battle, 16 characters and 4 vehicles; all of which have arms as their main offensive weapon. There will also be three gameplay modes, Practice, Mano A Mano (PvP) and The 4 AMano’s.

A new cinematic trailer showcases various aspects of the fights such as taunting and the specials but there’s no actual gameplay. Previous iterations have been in third-person which is still expected, how much has changed to other elements remains to be seen.

Kite & Lightning have big ideas for the franchise which is likely why Bebylon: Battle Royale has taken so long to arrive – the studio even jokes about previous release windows from past years on the website. Previously the studio has said Bebylon: Battle Royale won’t just be a brawler but a big online world for players. However, there’s no mention of that now.

Instead, Kite & Lightning now says its: “conceived a multi-season animated series with a ruthless story arc between Game of Thrones and Fight Club.” And work is underway on a secret project which is set to be revealed next month. If a release date for Bebylon: Battle Royale does finally appear, VRFocus will let you know.

June 19, 2020

‘Bebylon Battle Royale’ Purportedly Launching This Year, But We’re Not Holding Our Breath

Bebylon Battle Royale was first announced by studio Kite & Lightning back in 2015. Coming off of several impressive early VR experiences, the pivot toward a full fledged game was an exciting new path for the studio. But with spurious updates on the game’s development over the last four years—and some radical changes in scope—it isn’t entirely clear what the studio will deliver, even if the game does launch this year.

Back in 2015, before the moniker ‘battle royale’ was strongly associated with the modern game genre, Bebylon Battle Royale was conceived as a third-person, beat-em-up VR brawler, well before motion controllers became a de facto part of the VR experience. At the time the studio expected to launch the game in 2016.

In 2016, Kite & Lightning announced that it had raised $2.5 million in venture capital, spurring the studio to expand the scope of the game from a “hybrid of Mario Kart party mode and Super Smash Bros” into a “mini-Sword Art Online… except in comedy… with adorable narcissistic babies….who love trolling each other.”

While the Smash Bros-esque game is the fundamental core of [Bebylon], we always envisioned a world that you could immerse yourself in. We want to create this amazing comedic world where you can craft your own personal character, cheer/boo/support your friends as a live audience member in the gladiatorial stages, or explore the world of Bebylon, from the shows it has to offer to the characters that inhabit it.

At the time, the studio expected to release the game in large chunks, starting with the first part in 2017, with more added “every couple of months.” However, the initial release never came.

In early 2018, the studio received $200,000 as part of Epic Game’s Unreal Dev Grant program. The no-strings-attached grant was given in recognition of Kite & Lightning’s low-cost real-time motion capture pipeline which has allowed the studio to do a lot with a little when it comes to Bebylon’s animations. At the time the studio expected the game would launch later that year.

This week—following spurious development updates over the last four years—Kite & Lightning announced that it has launched a new Bebylon Battle Royale website, which now says the game is due to launch this year.

Not oblivious, the studio poked fun at itself by writing on the site, “[Beylon is] coming ~~2017~~, ~~2018~~, ~~2019~~, 2020!”

Along with the revamped website, the studio also released a cinematic short. The footage is claimed to be rendered in real-time in Unreal Engine 4—with animations captured with an iPhone and Xsens mocap suit—which makes it an impressive demonstration of the studio’s technical abilities. Considering the lack of gameplay footage, however, it does little to build confidence that the game will actually ship sometime in the next six months.

In the intervening years, it doesn’t appear that much has changed to bring Bebylon Battle Royale in line with motion control-based VR design, making us wonder whether the studio is hamstringing itself by sticking with VR.

The game’s zany premise (and resulting aesthetic) is still there in full force. It posits a world where an immortality drug caused babies to stop growing physically beyond a few years old, leading to a futuristic world controlled by babies which gravitated toward a gaudy gangster fashion—an intentional clash of polar opposites.

Despite the unorthodox characters, it should be said that the studio has honed the look of its ‘Bebies’ over the years; the game’s attention to visual detail is perhaps the one thing the studio has clearly demonstrated thus far.

But what about that whole “mini-Sword Art Online” element? It’s entirely unclear if that’s even still on the table. The game’s new website glosses right over that part, and instead speaks to combat, arenas, items, vehicles, and characters.

Instead, the closest glimpse we see to that vision of an expansive Bebylon virtual world that the company had mused about is—and I’m pretty sure they’re serious—a “multi-season animated series with a ruthless story arc between Game of Thrones and Fight Club.” The studio says it plans to “pitch the networks later this year.” They also have plans for a theme park (I’ll leave it to the reader to decide if I’m joking here or not).

Kite & Lightning produced objectively impressive experiences in formative days of VR, but nothing close to the scope of Bebylon. It’s clear that the studio is full of creativity, talent, and ambition. But ambition might outweigh the other two.

The post ‘Bebylon Battle Royale’ Purportedly Launching This Year, But We’re Not Holding Our Breath appeared first on Road to VR.

October 24, 2018

Kite & Lightning Showcase new Items and Battle Mechanics for Bebylon: Battle Royale

Kite & Lightning has been developing Bebylon: Battle Royale for some time now thanks to the team securing a substantial $2.5 million USD investment back in 2016, allowing them to experiment and hone the experience. This week saw the studio release one of its regular devlog’s, highlighting battle mechanics, new items, and revealing the team will be at TwitchCon with an early build.

If you’ve been keeping up with VRFocus’ coverage of Bebylon: Battle Royale then you’ll know the title is a comedic take on the battle royale genre, involving babies inside vehicles that just so happen to have giant fists attached. While the aim of each match is to win, Kite & Lightning want to create as much of a spectacle as possible offering players the chance to really showboat.

So for this Devlog the studio focuses on Combat Basics part 2, humiliation and taunting. First off, humiliation. Why pummel an opponent into the ground if you’re not doing it with a little style and panache. Bebylon: Battle Royale allows you whip out some insulting gestures, special attacks, or simply taunting them for fun. However, taunting is far more subtle in the videogame than you might expect. Attacks have a built-in risk/reward directly tied to taunting, So players need balance their fighting skill with taunting for maximum effect.

Then there are the new items. With some wonderful names like Devil’s Slave, Cry to Mummy, Lust Bomb, Bitchplosion, Dyna Mugging and Pimp Supremacy, these are still in the experimental stage so all of them may not make the final cut alongside the cluster bombs, cupids arrows, and poisons the team have in store.

Bebylon Battle Royale

And for those heading to TwitchCon later this week in San Jose, California, Bebylon: Battle Royale will be there as an early build for attendees to try. Head over to booth #1542 to check it out, plus Kite & Lightning will have its facial capture set-up running to turn guests into Bebylonian characters.

There’s still no firm date on when Bebylon: Battle Royale will launch, when the happens VRFocus will let you know.

July 31, 2018

Kite & Lightning Showcasing iPhone Motion Capture At SIGGRAPH

VR development studio Kite & Lightning is taking its impressive iPhone-based motion capture pipeline to SIGGRAPH.

We’ve written a couple stories about the system which Kite & Lightning co-founder Cory Strassburger has been putting together mainly on his weekends. Strassburger uses a helmet-mounted iPhone X combined with an Xsens suit for completely wireless full body and facial motion capture. His latest additions smooth out the process even further and, with the Ikinema LiveAction tool, a performance can be brought directly into Unreal Engine in real-time.

“With the facial capture data being only 150kbps, you could easily have a mobile companion app for your game that allows an MC or Commentator to stream their audio and facial capture performance right into a live VR match,” Strassburger explained in an email.

Kite & Lightning is a small studio that developed VR experiences like Senza Peso as early as 2014 to show some very early adopters a true sense of immersion for the first time. Strassburger and co-founder Ikrima Elhassan also sharpened their skills with some work-for-hire VR projects before raising $2.5 million in 2016 with plans to build a game with an unusual premise. In Bebylon, immortal “bebies” regularly do battle in a character-driven VR spectacle.

Strassburger’s iPhone-based capture pipeline relies on face-sensing capabilities to transform his expressions into one of these bebies in real-time. Overall, it shows the potential of using one of Apple’s newest gadgets for decent motion capture at a relatively low all-in price. Strassburger explained in an email earlier this year how this possibility affected their roadmap.

“Having any meaningful amounts of character animation on our game’s early roadmap was a total pipe dream. I knew full well how slow and expensive it was to capture decent facial performances let alone the cost and time involved in simply building the facial rig for a character,” Strassburger wrote. “If Ikrima and I actually had a conversation early on, we would have both logically agreed that a handful of facial expressions would be all we need or could even entertain given the scope of our game. Luckily that conversation never happened because it went without saying! And as the concept for the game started to take shape and the Bebylon world was being born, so was this underlying, powerful desire to see these characters walk and smack talk and tell their stories to the public! The more I started to create and write about these characters, the more their existence became pivotal to the game’s concept of inspiring players to unleash their inner wild child within this crazy virtual game world.”

Capturing performances this way also opens the door to more easily making vignettes, TV shows, movies or other types of productions with the same core content and tools. These tools might not be up to the quality some creators need for their projects, but for those that do find this to be a good enough solution “it would definitely change the scape of creating content for those mediums because it is insanely easy to capture lots of motion capture content.” Strassburger thinks indie developers might be able to approach their projects differently with this type of capture system at their disposal.

“I think it still takes a good level of artistry to make it sing and it has to sing for people to resonate with it. You still need a great story, you still need a great performer driving it,” Strassburger wrote. “You need a great virtual character to embody it, you need a good artist to fill in all the gaps and solve all the visual problems that might try to break the illusion and you still need an animator to expand upon the data for all the money shots. However the true magic to this pipeline is it gets you very far, extremely fast and when you see your characters come to life that much with so little effort, it really really fuels you to push further and put in the manual work to get it over the finish line. Most studios and projects don’t have the time it takes to climb the mountain of good facial and body capture but when a cheap tech gets you near the top of the mountain, you start thinking differently about how you can get the rest of the way.”

Tagged with: Kite & Lightning, SIGGRAPH

The post Kite & Lightning Showcasing iPhone Motion Capture At SIGGRAPH appeared first on UploadVR.

July 11, 2018

Bebylon: Battle Royale Moves into Beta Phase

Battle royale videogames are all the rage at the moment, appearing on every possible platform, from the big publishers and tiny indie developers alike. Bebylon Battle Royale takes a slightly unusual approach in that the combatants involved in the fighting are… babies. Developers Kite & Lightning have now revealed that the pint-sized powerhouses are now ready to enter the beta testing phase.

Bebylon Battle Royale lets the player take control of an immortal, powerful infant who enters the arena in order to take on other tiny terrors. The result is deliberately off-the-wall and designed to be bonkers and hilarious to players.

The latest update from developers Kite & Lightning revealed that the title is almost ready to begin closed beta testing in advance of an anticipated launch later in 2018, though an exact date has yet to be set.

Some more details have also emerged, concerning how the battle will begin for players. At first, the player has only a tiny baby clad in sweat pants, who must enter a place abled at ‘Dojo Training Center for Bebies Who Can’t Fight Good’ (Sic). There the player will need to practice and train their skills in order to attracted the attention of one of the Four Great Families, who will act as your sponsor and team.

The arenas in Bebylon Battle Royale all have odd abilities that causes miniaturisation, enlargement, rotation, slow-motion and all manner of other effects. However, despite appearances, the arenas don’t actually move or alter, its all background wizardry and digital smoke and mirrors so the player avatars and the stadium backdrop that changes, but the developers have created many clever tools to make sure the player’s can’t tell.

As further information about Bebylon Battle Royale emerges, such as news on beta testing or a release date, VRFocus will be sure to keep bringing you the latest.

March 18, 2018

Bebylon: Battle Royale Showcases New Artwork

Bebylon: Battle Royale is an upcoming virtual reality (VR) title that puts players in control of a baby who, with the thanks of a crazy vehicle, enters an arena to battle against other babies.

Bebylon Battle Royal - newvehicle

As the two-man team continue to work hard on the development of Bebylon: Battle Royale they have shared some new images from the game. Above is one of the new images that showcases a new hover vehicle joining the titles lineup of other fashionable vehicles. All of these are of course the main mode of transport around the battle arena so don’t let the looks fool you, it will surely be packing a punch. Speaking of which, new items are being designed and added to the title which come in all manner of shapes, sizes and possible explosive nature.

Bebylon Battle Royal - Goodies

Elsewhere new character models are currently being worked on as well and Kite & Lightning have shown them off with some work-in-progress Zbrush models, which can be viewed in the below galley. The models in question are Aphrodite and Zeus and they attendance at the Bebylon: Battle Royale games is sure to be a show stopping one. Alongside them is also the work-in-progress model of a new clothing item in the form of a onesie.

Bebylon: Battle Royale has been in development for some time now with the team at Kite & Lightning exploring a number of possible options for the title. This includes face tracking from a mobile phone to allow users to get even closer to the crazy action. This is all thanks to the team securing a stunning $2.5 million (USD) back in 2016 which has allowed them to keep Bedylon: Battle Royale going strong.

VRFocus’ Editor Kevin Joyce got to preview Bebylon: Battle Royale saying: “Though Kite & Lightning assure that the build VRFocus experienced was very early, Bebylon: Battle Royale was already an impressively entertaining experience. The shifting, multi-layered arenas and the balancing of the available combatants can turn the tide of a fight in seconds. Given that the multiplayer gameplay is central to Bebylon: Battle Royale raison d’etre the videogame has clearly been designed from the ground-up with two-player competition in mind, and is exhilarating when victory draws close.”

For more on Bebylon: Battle Royale in the future, keep reading VRFocus.

January 16, 2018

Bebylon Battle Royale Part of Epic Games’ Latest Unreal Dev Grants

American developer Kite and Lightning hasn’t yet released it’s long awaited virtual reality (VR) title Bebylon Battle Royale but it is still being awarded funding for the project, this time through Epic Games and its Unreal Dev Grant programme.

Bebylon Battle Royale 1

Every so often Epic Games announces a new raft of dev grants for indie studios that use Unreal Engine for their projects. This new round has seen over $200,000 USD being awarded to a mixture of developers, with Kite & Lightning being the only one making a VR videogame.

Bebylon Battle Royale’s core gameplay revolves around a multiplayer combat arena where you control babies who fight it out for supremacy with customisable vehicles and weapons to play with. There’s more to the experience than just fighting however, with the studio creating an entire virtual world in which to explore. The title also made VRFocus’ The Best HTC Vive Games Coming in 2018 list.

“Unreal Dev Grants is our way to reward and highlight the incredible talent that makes up the Unreal development community,” said Chance Ivey, Partnership Manager, Epic Games in a statement. “These projects show what is possible when you combine passion with creative technology, and stand as examples of why we do what we do.”

Established in February 2015, Unreal Dev Grants is a $5 million development fund that supported many a VR developer in its time. These have included: Cooperative Innovations’ Raiders of Erda; The Soulkeeper VR by Helm Systems; Ape Law’s psychological horror title Albino Lullaby; Carbon Studio’s Alice VR and Kenzan Studios’ The Fantastic Voyages of Teo and Leonie to name a few.

While Bebylon Battle Royale may have been the only VR title on the list, an augmented reality (AR) experience also made the grade. Originally revealed back in September 2017, The Machines comes from Chinese studio Directive Games Limited. It’s a MOBA-inspired AR PVP game where players build an army of robots and duke it out with a friend in-person or online.

As new grants are awarded by Epic Games, VRFocus will keep you updated on the latest VR titles making the grade.

January 16, 2018

Kite & Lightning’s ‘Bebylon Battle Royale’ Nabs Unreal Dev Grant

Kite & Lightning, the studio behind some of VR’s earliest experiences, is one of 13 developers receiving a portion of over $200,000 in ‘Unreal Dev Grants’, a program set up by Epic Games to showcase and provide financial support to projects using Unreal Engine 4. Bebylon Battle Royale is the team’s first major VR game, described as a “vehicular melee party brawler,” and is due to release in 2018 on HTC Vive and Oculus Rift.

Unreal Dev Grants was established in February 2015 as a $5 million development fund, offering no-strings-attached financial awards from Epic Games, and includes the upcoming PSVR title Moss as one of its previous recipients. The latest round of grants has been awarded to a diverse range of projects, including a number of non-VR indie games, a full-length animated film, and The Machines, a MOBA-inspired AR PVP game.

Bebylon Battle Royale was first revealed in 2015, and represents a radical departure from Kite & Lightning’s previous work. Co-founder Ikrima Elhassan described the gameplay as a “hybrid of Mario Kart party mode and Super Smash Bros.” In 2016, the team received a major financial boost in the form of $2.5 million in seed funding to expand the scope of the title. The game is currently in closed beta.

“Unreal Dev Grants is our way to reward and highlight the incredible talent that makes up the Unreal development community,” said Chance Ivey, Partnership Manager, Epic Games. “These projects show what is possible when you combine passion with creative technology, and stand as examples of why we do what we do.”

The post Kite & Lightning’s ‘Bebylon Battle Royale’ Nabs Unreal Dev Grant appeared first on Road to VR.

December 5, 2017

Using iPhone X With Maya For Quick And Cheap Facial Capture

Can the iPhone X become a fast, cheap and simple facial capture system? About a month ago Cory Strassburger at Kite & Lightning received an iPhone X from Apple. Within a day, he was testing out software working with its TrueDepth camera and ARKit. He wanted to see if it could be used for their game and for cinematic content.

Kite & Lightning was an early innovator with Oculus VR developer kits and built ground-breaking experiences like Senza Peso that used some eye-catching human captures. Now, they are building Bebylon Battle Royale. The game revolves around these “beby” characters who have humongous attitudes. He wanted to see if giving these characters a big personality could be done more quickly and cheaply using iPhone X facial capture and he’s been spending some of his time on the weekends on it.

“I think my big conclusion at the moment is the capture data coming from the iPhone X is shockingly subtle, stable and not overly smoothed,” Strassburger wrote in an email. “It is actually picking up very subtle movements, even small twitches and is clean enough (noise free) to use right out of the phone, depending on your standards of course.”

He thinks it represents a viable method for relatively inexpensive facial capture. The system is also mobile, would could make it easier to set up and deploy. Apple acquired a company called Faceshift that seems to power much of this functionality. Though Strassburger notes Faceshift’s solution had other cool features, he’s been able to extract enough expressiveness using what Apple released with iPhone X that it still might prove useful for VR production.

Capture Process

Here’s the capture process Strassburger outlined for taking the iPhone X facial capture data and using it to animate a character’s expressions in Maya:

Using Apples ARKit and Unity I imported a work-in-progress Bebylon character and hooked its facial expression blend shapes into the facial capture data that ARKit outputs. This let me drive the baby’s face animation based on my own expressions.
I needed to capture this expression data in order to import it into Maya. I added a record function to stream the facial expression data into a text file. This saved locally on the iPhone. Each start and stop take becomes a separate text file and can be named/renamed within the capture app.
I copy the text files from the iPhone X to the desktop via USB.
The captured data needs to be reformatted for importing into Maya so I wrote a simple desktop app to do this. It takes the chosen text file(s) and converts them to Maya .anim files.
I import the .anim file into Maya and voila, your character is mimicking what you saw on the iPhone during capture.

According to Strassburger, he’s seen a couple minor glitches show up in the data and thinks his code was probably responsible. Also, though the capture happens at 60 frames per second, the process currently renders at 30 frames per second so you can see some quality loss. This is most notable in the “Horse Lips” section, according to Strassburger.

“The real beauty to this system is it is incredibly fast and easy to capture (right on your phone) and then import it into Maya or right into the game engine,” Strassburger wrote. “There is no real processing involved at any point and the data seems clean enough right out of the phone to use unaltered.”

Next Steps

Strassburger hopes to attach the iPhone X to a helmet and then use an Xsens suit to do full-body motion and face capture at the same time.

“I feel pretty confident that this beby character could be improved dramatically by dialing in the blendshape sculpts and also adding proper wrinkle maps that deform the skin as the face animates,” Strassburger wrote. “As well, using the captured data to drive secondary blendshapes will help the expressions feel more dynamic and alive.”

Tagged with: ARKit, Kite & Lightning

November 7, 2017

Kite & Lighting Uses iPhone X in Experiment to Create ‘Cheap & Fast’ VR Facial Mocap

Packing a 7-megapixel front-facing depth camera, Apple’s iPhone X can do some pretty impressive things with its facial recognition capabilities. While unlocking your phone and embodying an AR poop emoji are fun features though, the developers at Kite & Lightning just published a video of an interesting experiment that aims to use the iPhone X as a “cheap and fast” facial motion capture camera for VR game development.

Created by Kite & Lightning dev Cory Strassburger, the video uses one of the studio’s Bebylon Battle Royale characters (work in progress) to demonstrate just how robust a capture the iPhone X can provide. Flexing through several facial movements, replete with hammy New York(ish) accent, Strassburger shows off some silly sneers and a few cheeky smiles that really show the potential for capturing expressive facial movement.

While still a quick first test, Strassburger says that even though the iPhone X can drive a character’s blendshapes at 60fps while it tracks 52 motion groups across the face, “there’s a bit more to be done before I hit the quality ceiling in regards to the captured data.”

On the docket before the iPhone X’s TrueDepth camera can be levied as a VR game development workhorse, Strassburger says his next steps will include getting the eyes properly tracked, figure out why blinking causes the whole head to jitter, re-sculpting some of the blend shapes from the Beby rig to be better suited for this setup, visually tune characters, and add features to record the data.

To top it off, Strassburger is thinking about creating a harness system to mount the iPhone into a mocap helmet so both face and body (with the help of a mocap suit) can be recorded simultaneously.

Bebylon Battle Royale, a comedic multiplayer arena brawler, is due out sometime in 2018 on Rift and Vive via Steam. We can’t wait to see what the devs have come up with, as the game already promises to be one of the silliest games in VR.

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