Coatsink Software, creators of the Esper series, Augmented Empire (2017) and A Night Sky (2017), announced they’re collaborating with Viral series creators Fierce Kaiju on a new VR project scheduled for release in 2018.
Information is still thin on the ground about the project, with no real idea of what to expect at this time genre-wise. There’s no official word on what target platform is lined up either, which as far as announcements go is a fairly strange occurrence. With the upcoming $200 Oculus Go headset around the corner, there’s bound to be a few launch titles worth boasting about, although that’s only healthy speculation. Either way, judging by the pedigree of both studios, whatever results is sure to be worthwhile.
“We’re thrilled to be collaborating with such a talented team – and the creators one of our office game night favourites, Viral Quarantine. We can’t wait to show VR fans what we have planned.” said Eddie Beardsmore, COO, Coatsink
“Fierce Kaiju are very pleased to be working with our friends at Coatsink on an all new co-developed VR title. Both Fierce Kaiju and Coatsink have created pioneering VR projects and we have a lot of respect for the Coatsink team and their achievements. We’re building something very special and we can’t wait to reveal more in due course,” Paul Colls, Creative Director and Co-Founder, Fierce Kaiju.
We’ll be following the development of the project, so check back for more soon.
Dispatch (2017), a new episodic story from VR pros Here Be Dragons, launched on Oculus Rift and Gear VR yesterday. Following a small-town emergency dispatcher named Ted (voiced by Martin Starr), you experience the story through a sort of half-imagined, half-real version of the grizzly events he’s privy to.
One of the unique features in Dispatch is its minimalist art style, which leaves a lot of room for the viewer to fill in the gaps with their own imagination. After all, as a 9-1-1 dispatcher, Ted only has the sound from the phone to drawn upon, so every slam or creak of a door is potentially a clue to what’s happening on the other end of the line.
Writer and Director Edward Robles said in an Oculus blog post announcing the experience’s release that from the very beginning he was intent on creating something minimalist, “reducing the details of everyday life to the most evocative.” Highly reliant on positional audio, you’re essentially following along with Ted as he recreates the grizzly scenes of violence in his mind. Despite its visual sparseness, the effect Dispatch has on you is pretty visceral.
Martin Starr, also known for his role as Gilfoyle in Silicon Valley,deliversthe action with his patently monotone voice, acting as a sobering backdrop to the violence at hand.
Dispatch is told across 4 episodes, offering the first episode for free, which lasts about 5 minutes. The full four episodes however costs an additional $3, adding about 10 more minutes of overall time to the entire story.
Here’s how Here Be Dragons describes Dispatch:
What begins as a domestic violence call quickly cascades into a host of attacks across town, and the local police are struggling to keep up. Every new call sheds light on Ted’s inner torments and pushes him closer toward danger. Police dispatchers are trained to see with sound. Every door slam, tire screech, and piercing scream paints a picture in their minds. The visual world of Dispatch unfolds inside Ted’s imagination as he wades through the soundscape, advising terrified callers and listening for clues. Ted yearns to be at the scene of the crime, to be given the chance to really help someone. He’s about to get what he wished for.
You can read the full interview with Robles here, where he describes a little more about the creative process, and working with Starr to fill in the role as Ted.
The turkey is in the oven, the cranberry sauce is in the can, and your VR setup is in the box ready to be shown off to the family at Thanksgiving. Since you’ll be doing a fair bit of VR evangelizing on the big day, an important question remains before you can plug your unwitting relatives into ‘the final computing platform’: what do you show off first?
Assuming you aren’t actually hosting Thanksgiving, undoubtedly the easiest VR systems to lug around would be the selection of mobile VR headsets currently on offer, namely Google Daydream and Gear VR. With a little careful planning though, you can pack up your PS4 console and PSVR, or your entire Vive/Rift/Windows VR system—just make sure the house has adequate space (and electrical outlets!) for room-scale gaming. Unless otherwise requested, you should probably also keep sessions short and simple for VR newcomers.
Here’s a few recommendations for getting Grandpa, Grandma, Uncle Ted, Aunt Rachel and your little cousin Skippy McDingus into VR for the first time:
Gear VR
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Smash Hit
Minecraft
Oculus Video
Within
Smash Hit (2016): With its constant forward motion and a simple objective (smash the glass), almost anyone can understand Smash Hit. The game’s futuristic setting and great soundtrack also help give off the “woah, I’m in the future” vibe.
Minecraft (2017): Little Skippy will do and learn anything to play Minecraft in VR. Set up a station in the corner, put on a 10-minute timer and get all the Little Skippies taking turns.
Oculus Video: Load up a movie and toss your Uncle Ted in for his own private cinema. Yes, Ted. You can watch *other things* too.
Within: Let’s face it – most 360 video is crap. Within however offers a wide selection of curated content that looks pretty darn good considering both mono and stereoscopic (3D) 360 video still isn’t where it needs to be technically speaking. Still very much worth a gander.
Daydream
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Mekorama VR
Bait!
LEGO BrickHeadz Builder VR
Fantastic Beasts
Mekorama VR (2017): A quiet puzzler for Aunt Gracie, Mekorama VR tasks you with guiding a wibbly little robot pal through a series of 3D puzzles – of course with ever-increasing difficulty.
Bait! (2017): Somebody in your family loves fishing. I’m not even going to make up a pretend name. (also on Gear VR)
LEGO BrickHeadz Builder VR (2017): Ok.So it’s not Minecraft, the delightful little building app comes in second place with the ability to build LEGO structures without the need for clean up.
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2017): While pretty thin in the gameplay department, the overall “wow” effect is big with this little Harry Potter Universe game that lets you explore the film’s world and even do a little magic too.
PSVR
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Farpoint
Allumette
Fruit Ninja VR
The original PlayStation VR Demo Disc | Photo by Road to VR
Farpoint (2017): While it’s an intense trip for sure thanks to the immersiveness of holding the PS Aim controller while actually having to locomote across the map, there’s somebody in the group who’ll appreciate the ability to walk distant planets and shoot the ever-living shit out of the native inhabitants.
Allumette (2016): Sit grandma down for a story about a young orphan girl who lives in a fantastical city in the clouds. It’s a tear jerker, so make sure to give gam-gam a big hug from us all.
Fruit Ninja VR (2016): Just like the popular mobile game, Fruit Ninja on PSVR is easy to understand. Fruit goes up. Fruit gets sliced. Have a competition to see who can get the highest score!
PlayStation VR Demo Disc 2 (2017): PSVR’s updated demo disc is jam-packed with upcoming games and crowd favorites. Most are short enough to plug in a person for a quick 10-20 minute play session. Oh, and definitely play Moss.
Rift & Vive (and Windows VR)
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Google Earth VR
Space Pirate Trainer
Bigscreen Beta
Coco VR
Google Earth VR (2017) – Oculusand SteamVR: The controls may take some explaining, but giving a loved one the opportunity to travel, especially if they aren’t physically able, is going to really be a special moment. Travel the sights and revisit distant places you never thought you’d see again in the flesh.
Space Pirate Trainer (2016) Oculusand SteamVR: Han Solo doesn’t have anything on your Auntie Rachel. While it’s fundamentally just a wave shooter, it’s by far one of the best-looking and feeling out there.
Bigscreen Beta (2016) Oculus and SteamVR: Pop on a video and get your relatives reeling at the future possibility of never having to buy a TV ever again.
Coco VR (2017) – Oculus:Pixar’s first VR experience is absolutely astounding. Ideal for the first timer of any age, the experience can last anywhere from 15-30 minutes per player. check out our hands-on here. Vive and Windows VR headset users have had varying levels of success with Revive, so it’s definitely worth a poke.
The Lab (2016)SteamVR: Valve’s collection of mini-games and photogrammetry scenes are top notch, and warrant more than just a few minutes of you time to explore ever single bit of what’s on offer. Kids and adults a like will love the Longbow, Core Calibration, and Xortex.
Face Your Fears (2016) is a collection of horrifying experiences ripped straight from your nightmares; creepy clowns, monsters in the closet, dangerous heights, and now the world of Netflix’s hit show Stranger Things.
In a new update, the Gear VR app promises a peek into the show’s sleepy town of Hawkins, Indiana, the idyllic small town that plays host to a rip in reality, opening up a passageway to what the show’s protagonists dub ‘The Upside Down’ – “a dimension that is a dark reflection, or echo, of our world. It is a place of decay and death, a plane out of phase, a place of monsters.”
While only about 8 minutes long, the experience is surprisingly well-done for a TV show tie-in, showing Turtle Rock Studio’s clear capability hone in on the level of ‘creep factor’ they’ve cultivated since the launch of the most well-known game Left 4 Dead (2008).
Taking you through a unique mini-narrative, you travel to the Upside Down, come face-to-face with a Demogorgan and sit helplessly as the world decays around you. It’s more than just jump scares and screaming monsters though. Like with all Face Your Fears experiences, it dials in the growing disquieting feeling with a great use of music and positional audio to keep you guessing.
Locomotion through the real-time rendered experience is on-rails, meaning you go wherever the experience wants to take you. There are some misgivings with this, as the experience makes a brief use of forced rotation and camera bobbing, two ‘VR no no’s in Oculus’ Best Practice Guide. These are brief though and only slightly distract from the mounting terror of the Upside Down as it throws everything it has at you.
Face Your Fears is also available on Rift, but unfortunately doesn’t include many of the Gear VR app’s horrifying scenes like the Stranger Things experience, making this a Gear VR exclusive unless Turtle Rock deems it otherwise.
Augmented Empire (2017), Coatsink’s cyberpunk RPG, launched earlier this summer exclusively on Samsung Gear VR. Now the studio, which is also known for the Esper puzzle game series, has released a mini-documentary featuring its cast of high-caliber voice actors, including Kate Mulgrew, Nick Frost, and Doug Cockle.
While the mobile VR platform has its graphical limitations, oftentimes its things like storytelling and voice acting that set a game apart from the pack, and Augmented Empire has it in spades. Coatsink’s mini-documentary takes you into the studio to see the actors hard at work, and even hear a bit about their experiences playing their roles.
Featuring Kate Mulgrew as ‘Jules’ (Voyager, Orange is the New Black), Nick Frost as ‘Chris’ (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz), and Doug Cockle as ‘Mund’ (The Witcher: Wild Hunt, Horizon: Zero Dawn), Augmented Empire throws you head-first into New Savannah, a city starkly divided by class.
As the player, you control your team from the armchair of your secluded hideout, all in effort to overthrow the corrupt elite. Controlling several characters through the game’s ‘augmented reality’ interface, you follow the story of the world of top-tier citizen, Willa Thorne, on her journey to lead a team of misfits and criminals to survive the world’s brutal underbelly and callous ruling class.
We haven’t had a chance to review Augmented Empire, but our friends over at UploadVR gave it a solid [8/10], saying the game is “a rare treat for a mobile VR game in that it offers a ton of content, a compelling narrative, and cleverly designed encounters that really challenge you while maintaining a fun and well-designed gameplay loop.”
Revealed during the Oculus Connect 4 keynote today, Coco VR is Pixar Animation Studios’ first-ever VR project, coming to Oculus Rift and Gear VR. Timed with the launch of Disney-Pixar’s new animated film Coco in November, Coco VR is described as a “next level social virtual reality” experience.
The brief gameplay footage shown the trailer, which appears to run at an unusually low framerate, shows various scenes in which players appear as characters from the Land of the Dead, with plenty of interaction and customisation on offer.
According to this report on Oh My Disney, the app uses Facebook’s technology to enable social functionality, allowing users to explore the world of Coco with their Facebook friends. Animation World Network reports that the project is “a co-production from Disney-Pixar and Oculus, with VR creative development and execution by Magnopus.”
Coco VR will be available for preview at various Día de los Muertos festivals across the US and at Camp Flag Gnaw Music Festival in LA beginning October 28th, as well as in select Disney Stores and movie theatres through November 22nd. The app is due to launch on Oculus Rift on November 15th, followed by Gear VR on November 22nd.
Massive multiplayer online (MMO) games with persistent worlds and real economies like Second Life haven’t reached critical mass in VR yet, although many in the community are counting the moments until they can live out their days immersed in all-encompassing virtual worlds.Enter MetaWorld, one such MMO launching on Steam Early Access September 29th that hopes to bring about an age of virtual land ownership.
On the surface, buying a scarce resource (albeit immaterial) seems like a sound investment for virtual pioneers, the same instinct that continues to drive the cryptocurrency boom, but the waters invariably get murkier the farther you descend.
The Pitch
Considering MMOs require a healthy player base to function, MetaWorld is hoping to invigorate its procedurally generated 10,000 square mile digital wilderness with a wide swath of the VR headset-owning market, including cross-play support for Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, PSVR, and Gear VR. For reference, MetaWorld is planning to cover an area about as large as the island of Malta.
Developed by HelloVR, a studio founded by ex-Altspace VR director of user experience Dedric Reid, MetaWorld first suffered a rocky IndieGogo campaign that saw less than 10 percent of its $50,000 funding goal. Undeterred by the lack of community support, Reid continued development on the free-to-play world, which he’s hoping to monetize by selling plots of land that come with ready-made structures, ranging from a 1/2 acre plot with rustic log cabin to a 2-acre plot with ultra-modern space intended for vendors.
Built with SpatialOS, a platform that lets game developers stitch together multiple servers and game engines to power large-scale persistent worlds, MetaWorld also purports to offer detailed environmental simulations, complete with wind-swept trees and different animals like fish, foxes and deer that roam the map.
image courtesy MetaWorld
Prospective vendors will own a larger piece of the world, and have access to world-building tools that let them create a unique space as well as the still undefined ‘vendor tool kit’, presumably a way of creating unique world items so you can earn in-game credits. The company also promises its class of vendors a more ‘true to life’ avatar created by the team based on a picture of the person.
image courtesy MetaWorld
The economy, while presented in vague terms, promises to allow users to buy and sell anything, and also let vendors monetize their space. The company hasn’t mentioned its in-game currency outside of the IndieGogo campaign, so there’s still no telling if it will essentially be based on microtransactions, or function like Second Life’s Linden dollars, a currency that you can actually buy (and earn) and use for digital purchases and then convert back to regular currencies like the US dollar or Euro.
Co-founder Abandons Ship
HelloVR co-founder Carleton DiLeo left the company before the ill-fated IndieGogo campaign was devised. According to a post on DiLeo’s blog where he distances himself from MetaWorld, he isn’t sure how Reid can deliver everything he’s promised.
Last year, I began the journey to create MetaWorld. Being one of the first developers to use SpatialOS and being the first using it for VR was a huge challenge. Documentation was sparse and Improbable [the studio behind SpatialOS] was tied up growing their company. After a 3-4 months we had something to show to the world. The response was good, people who tried MetaWorld really connected with the world
Unfortunately, after the press showing, I ran into a number of issues with SpatialOS due to required version upgrades and bugs with SpatialOS itself. Improbable was busy with other things so they were unable to help. I slowly worked through some of the problems but progress was slow. I started to feel that making a massive VR experience wasn’t going to be possible. At our current trajectory it would just take too long.
I still wanted to create something that allowed people to be able to visit a living world together from around the globe. To get there we would need more support from Improbable and a much bigger team. Funding efforts weren’t going well because investors wanted to see more before investing. The time required for one developer/game designer and a designer to create what we need would just take too long, we needed more help which costs money. This became a contention point between me and my business partner. Eventually I just didn’t see a future in continuing the way we were. I decided to stop working on MetaWorld and focus on a new title called Community Garden. Community Garden would start small to prove the viability of building persistent VR worlds in SpatialOS.
I was surprised when I found out my partner had started an IndieGoGo fund. To avoid confusion, I wanted to make it clear that I’m not currently working on MetaWorld and I don’t know how my partner plans to deliver on the promise of the fund. If you plan on donating to the IndieGoGo fund, please note that none of the work I produced for the MetaWorld you see in videos like the one above is what will be delivered.
Buyer Beware
MetaWorld is headed into Early Access, which partly excuses it from being an incomplete product, but the inconsistency in messaging around the game’s core mechanics and features ought to leave you worried about the stability of the still unreleased MMO. The game purports to feature a variety of activities including hunting, fishing, camping, snorkeling, sailing, sports, training, RC, drones, and go karts—all well and good—but according to the company, the core gameplay is based around survival. “You’ll have to defend your land against other players as well as opportunistic animals,” the company says.
You won’t find this information conveniently listed on the MetaWorld website though, but rather strewn across various Reddit pages where the creator sporadically posts, oftentimes in cryptic, single-word answers. At the time of this writing, the game’s website only consists of press blurbs gathered from before the IndieGogo campaign was launched and a small marketplace selling the game’s three plot sizes. The custom avatar mentioned above is only detailed in a 2 month-old post on the company’s Reddit page.
image courtesy MetaWorld
It still isn’t clear how much is truly at stake for landowners or the landless free-to-players at the moment either. Questions like: can animals or other players kill you? If you die, do you lose your items? Can you trade in-game credits back to real cash? Can you craft items, or do you have to buy everything from vendors? The list of unaddressed questions goes on in the game’s largely abandoned discussion board on Steam.
To quell fears around the general lack of communication about the core game mechanics, the studio took to three major VR Reddit pages on Saturday (r/Vive, r/Oculus, r/PSVR), saying that the game won’t only be a wilderness area with cookie-cutter buildings as featured in the promo, but rather a growing framework “we can use […] to create many other worlds. Fantasy, Sci Fi etc.”
“We are building the world as a community, a few square miles at a time,” the company says. “Early pioneers will gather in world and decide on what types of diverse biomes to build. People in the world are discover-able through the UI. We figured out a way to make a huge world that feels alive, rich with things to do. One of our primary goals is to introduce an experience with lots of divergent game play, that you’ll never get bored of.”
For potential customers, HelloVR also had this to say about refunds on the PSVR Reddit page:
“MetaWorld was founded out of passion. Our team doesn’t expect to generate much revenue from the project. Our early access goal is to build a core community that has ownership in the world. Anyone can ask for a refund at anytime by emailing metabot@metaworldvr.com“
Anyone can ask, but it remains to be seen if anyone can actually have a refund—something to keep in mind for digital prospectors looking to settle a virtual frontier that might just as likely turn out to be a barren wasteland.
Iconic multiplayer board game The Settlers of Catan is making the leap to VR. Coming this holiday season to Oculus Rift and Samsung Gear VR, the game is aptly named Catan VR.
Developed by Experiment 7, Asmodee Digital and Catan Studio, Catan VR is an immersive take on Klaus Teuber’s tactical board game. Created specifically for virtual reality, Catan VR lets players engage in games either in online multiplayer or against ‘Catan personalities’. The creators haven’t shown any specific gameplay yet, and have only released a teaser featuring creator Klaus Teuber.
The game will feature cross-play between Oculus Rift and Gear VR. The developers maintain additional VR platforms (likely HTC Vive) will follow after the initial launch.
According to the developers, “players can watch the island come to life in VR for the first time, with beautiful in-game environments.”
“The first time I saw Catan on the Magic Table, I was fascinated by what VR has to offer,” said Catan creator Klaus Teuber.” The game I made in our living room with my family 25 years ago in Virtual Reality? It’s incredible. I never imagined actually stepping into the world of Catan when we first started making cut-outs and dreaming about exploring new lands.”
VR game studio Experiment 7 also created Magic Table Chess and Dungeon Chess, two fantasy-based VR chess game for Oculus Rift.
Marble Land is a physics-based puzzle game from Devious Technologies, a Bucharest, Romania based studio. We got a chance at this year’s Gamescom to pop into the unique little puzzler, which is slated to launch in the next few months on HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, PlayStation VR, Samsung Gear VR and Google Daydream.
I remember playing a prototype version of Marble Land when it was first released in mid-2016 on wearvr, the repository for all things virtual. Standing out among the cadre of low-effort wave shooters and overblown school projects was a gem of a demo that incorporated complex, physics-based puzzles.
Strapping into an Oculus Rift with Touch controllers, the busy show floor faded to the back of my mind as I was transported to an antique, but plainly alien-look environment. With the puzzle at the center of the strange building placed around me, I began to focus at the task at hand. The objective: guide an the ethereal blue marble into the green target area by using the world’s Rube Goldberg-inspired devices. With no time limit or point structure, your only goal is to complete the level and move on to the next.
I guided the ball through everything from simple pathways to weird transport gates, some of which could only be activated by changing the direction of barriers scattered throughout the level that would allow the marble to go one way or another. I went through 5 newly-created levels (the prototype levels have been scrapped entirely), each more complex than the last. None of them were particularly tough to figure out, but I definitely perceived the gradual ramping up in difficulty level with each marble I successfully got in the goal. According to Devious Technologies, 45 levels will be available at launch, but more will come in subsequent updates.
When seated, virtual locomotion was my least favorite part of Marble Land. It’s basically a very slow first-person smooth-turning mechanic using the joy sticks for forward-back and up-down motion. While it was slow enough not to cause any nausea, I would have appreciated a quicker way to reposition myself. The game also offers room-scale support, which makes it a little easier to naturally walk around the little puzzle to get a better view.
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image courtesy Devious Technologies
image courtesy Devious Technologies
image courtesy Devious Technologies
image courtesy Devious Technologies
image courtesy Devious Technologies
Visually, Marble Land looks super interesting, combing a weird melange of futuristic and ancient in both puzzle and surrounding environment.
Inquiring about the possibility of a level editor, studio founder George Cristian Tudor told me that Oculus (for example) is very stringent on games maintaining a minimum of 90 fps, and that the addition of a level editor, which allows you carte blanche to rig up complex physics-based interactions, would only really be possible as a mod released after the initial launch.
Marble Land will be available sometime in the second half of 2017 on VR headsets and traditional monitors.
House of Secrets, the Amsterdam-based studio behind acclaimed real-time VR music videos Surge (2015) and Apex (2017), havereleased their first full VR game, a puzzle platformer titled KIN. Now available on Gear VR for $10, the game will also be headed to Oculus Rift in January 2018.
Update (12/22/17): House of Secrets have just released ‘KIN’ for Gear VR. According to the game’s website, a Rift version is also headed to the Oculus Store, slated for January 2018 release. The Gear VR requires a gamepad controller, so it isn’t clear at this point which control scheme the Rift version will adopt.
Original Article (08/17/17): The studio calls the game a “VR puzzle platformer game with combat elements.” The game is due to launch “later this year” on both the Oculus Rift and Gear VR (Galaxy S6 or higher only). Catch the teaser trailer below:
From the looks of it, Kin is likely to be a third-person game. It’s unclear at this stage if it will be based on gamepad or motion input, though the studio says it is a “seated or standing experience.” As for gameplay, House of Secrets says that players will “traverse the remnants of an ancient civilization on a distant planet. Throughout your journey through alien landscapes, a story will unfold.”
The game holds an abstract aesthetic that has become characteristic for the studio through their earlier VR experiences such as APEX and Surge. Lively colours, intuitive gameplay and interesting level design set the tone for KIN, in which the player moves through the world as a mysterious, tiny girl with big hair clad in a bright dress. Defeating enemies and solving puzzles, she leaps from platform to platform, travelling through different landscapes.
Surge and Apex were headed by House of Secrets’ Arjan van Meerten; fans of those works will be pleased to know that Meerten is also heading Kin as the game’s Creative & Technical Lead, alongside the studio’s Sven Neve.
House of Secrets has formerly done VFX and interactive work, but Kin will be the studio’s first VR game proper. The studio says the game is “made possible by Oculus,” though it isn’t clear to what extent the company is involved; our guess would be that they will be publishing and/or funding the development of the title.
