Category: Ray Davis

Posted on

Oculus Offers Glimpse of ‘Robo Recall’ on Quest with New Screenshots

Drifter Entertainment, the studio behind Gunheart (2017) and Ready Player One: Rise of the Gunters (2018), is taking the reigns of porting Epic’s impressive arcade shooter Robo Recall (2017) to Oculus Quest. In an Oculus blog post today, the studio showed off a bevy of screenshots, and gave a peek into just how difficult it was to bring the PC VR game’s photorealism to the standalone headset platform.

Epic’s Robo Recall is by all accounts a fun game, but the robot-smashing arcade shooter also played a big part in showing just how good games can look and feel in VR, setting a visual bar that few have approached even two years after its release on Rift.

“It’s going to push the platform extremely hard,” says Drifter CEO and co-founder Ray Davis, speaking about the task of bringing the title to Quest.

1 of 7
Image courtesy Drifter Entertainment
Image courtesy Drifter Entertainment
Image courtesy Drifter Entertainment
Image courtesy Drifter Entertainment
Image courtesy Drifter Entertainment
Image courtesy Drifter Entertainment
Image courtesy Drifter Entertainment

While Oculus maintains the gameplay experience is set to be identical to the PC VR version, albeit with the ability to gank robots in it full untethered, 360-degree glory, there’s undoubtedly going to be some sacrifices in the visual department.

“Our core principal was, ‘Do not change the gameplay,’” Davis maintains. “We want complete parity on Rift and Quest.”

SEE ALSO
Oculus Explains Rift S Design & Manufacturing Partnership with Lenovo

Bringing the game to Quest required methods such as lowering polygon counts, and utilizing Multi-View, a rendering technique typically used to lighten the load of CPU-bound applications on Oculus Go and Gear VR; this is done by rendering objects once to the left eye buffer, then duplicating them to the right buffer automatically with appropriate modifications for vertex position and view-dependent variables such as reflection.

The studio says addressing the game’s photorealistic style, bloom effects, and depth of field all proved to be especially challenging.

“We had to find ways to bring back the feel of those things while still hitting our performance targets,” Davis says.

Robo Recall is set to be a day-one launch title for Oculus Quest when it releases at some point this spring. Drifter worked closely with the Platform Team at Oculus and Epic Games to bring Robo Recall to Quest.

The post Oculus Offers Glimpse of ‘Robo Recall’ on Quest with New Screenshots appeared first on Road to VR.

Posted on

What’s Better Than a First-Person Shooter? A Online Co-op First Person Shooter

If you’re a big fan of first-person shooters (FPS) and virtual reality (VR) then you might have heard of Gunheart. Created by developers who have a background in FPS videogames such as Gears of War and Halo, Drifter Entertainment, you know you’re in for a good videogame.

Gunheart throws you into a futurist world where you have the options of three weapons. A shotgun, because an FPS is incomplete without one, a crossbow where you can guide and control the bolt with one controller to hit enemies hiding behind cover as well as a giant spinning disc lovingly called the death disc where you can slash straight through enemies.

VRFocus interviewed Ray Davis the CEO of Drifter Entertainment, and he explains that there are three major biomes where you have to adjust your strategy to face various enemies in different play modes. What’s really interesting about Gunheart is that this will always change from mission to mission, so no matter what map or gamemode you choose enemies will always be changing. You won’t play the same game twice. The idea is you can drop in, do a few missions, kill and collect rewards and drop out again. Davis hopes that as VR becomes more popular that online co-op will grow. The title will launch for HTC Vive and Oculus Rift with Touch and whilst you’re waiting in the lobby you can also play around with Tetris blocks or alternatively annoy friends with arrows because friendly fire is on.

To find out more watch the video below.

Posted on

Shooter Veterans Form VR Game Studio Drifter Entertainment

Shooter Veterans Form VR Game Studio Drifter Entertainment

Three veterans of first-person shooter games have formed Drifter Entertainment, a Seattle-based virtual reality game studio.

The founders include Ray Davis, Kenneth Scott, and Brian Murphy. Davis recently served as general manager for the Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4. He was also a chief technology officer at Microsoft on the HoloLens project, and he was the lead programmer on Gears of War and Gears of War 2.

Scott spent 15 years as an art director in Triple-A games at places such as id Software and Microsoft Game Studios. He worked on titles such as Quake 3, Doom 3, Rage, and Halo; most recently, he worked in VR with a team of veteran developers at Oculus.

“After working on the Bullet Train demo, I am doubly excited to work on immersive VR games,” said Davis, in an interview with GamesBeat. “We see a real marriage of active play and VR.”

Murphy spent the last decade as a designer and creative director at Microsoft. Murphy helped take several major platforms and games from incubation all the way to ship, including Xbox One, Microsoft HoloLens, and the Xbox Kinect. Most recently, he helped create the virtual travel experience Holo Tour for HoloLens.

“We like to shoot things, and that is the territory we are likely to march into,” Scott said in an interview.

Drifter plans to make action games for VR headsets; in particular, it will focus on the headsets that support good motion controls such as the HTC Vive, the Oculus Touch and Oculus Rift, and the PlayStation VR. The company has about five working for it at the moment. And the founders are working on raising a seed round.

Above: Drifter Entertainment’s founders (left to right): Ray Davis, Kenneth Scott, and Brian Murphy.

Image Credit: Drifter Entertainment

“We’re about to start dramatically growing our team,” Davis said.

Murphy said in an interview that he spent the last four years with the HoloLens team, and he also helped launch Kinect.

“I round out some of the creative energy on the team,” said Murphy. “I’ve spent my career building new platforms and launching games on them. I’ve had a focus on more of the casual and enterprise apps. I bring solid design on emerging platforms.”

Davis said one of the challenges for VR is to solve movement in shooter games.

“Teleportation works well, but nobody is excited about it,” Davis said. “We’d like to build a shooter that embraces teleportation and turns it into a first-class feature.”

Davis noted that using motion, such as physical movements that match actions such as loading a gun, or drawing a pistol, are exciting things that you can only do in VR.

Scott added, “VR is deeply personal. Designers need to accommodate it, especially when it comes to comfort. It doesn’t map one to one to anybody. This is one thing this team has been dealing with.”

And Murphy said, “When you design something, you have an ego that says it works for me. We realized it takes a lot of testing and experimentation. If you try to build a game for a million people, and one out of 10 get sick in a playtest, that means you’ll have 100,000 people who get sick from it. You have to take the comfort very seriously.”

As for the name, the founders said it evoked the image of Clint Eastwood in films such as High Plains Drifter. But instead of drifting through the Wild West, you would drift through one universe and another in VR.

“VR is still early days,” Davis said. “It’s hard to do one with such big scope. But we want to build a game that speaks to the power of VR.”

This post by Dean Takahashi originally appeared on VentureBeat. 

Posted on

VR Veterans of Epic Games, Oculus & Microsoft Form New Studio: Drifter Entertainment

There are plenty of small studios appearing that are focusing on virtual reality (VR) development, some having more experience in the field than others. Today a new studio has been announced, Drifter Entertainment, formed by VR veterans from Epic Games, Oculus and Microsoft.

The new developer has been formed by Ray Davis, Kenneth Scott, and Brian Murphy, three highly experienced professionals who have spent their careers building platforms such as HoloLens, Oculus Rift, Xbox One, and Unreal Engine 4. This also includes well known titles like Gears of War, Doom 3, Halo 4, and Bullet Train.

Bullet Train 02

“We’re passionate about the opportunity to finally bring our vision to life,” says Ray Davis, who most recently served as General Manager for Unreal Engine 4, following his role as a CTO at Microsoft on the HoloLens project. “Virtual reality represents a rare opportunity to build an entirely new generation of game experiences to completely immerse yourself in.  We’re combining our expertise in crafting incredibly polished games along with our early expertise with VR to build some truly amazing (and fun!) games for these emerging platforms.”

Kenneth Scott, built his 15 years of experience as an art director in AAA game development with companies like id Software and Microsoft Game Studios. His videogame projects include Quake 3, Doom 3, Rage and Halo. Recently, Scott worked at Oculus, directing a team of veteran developers.

Last but not least is Brian Murphy, who spent the last decade as a designer and creative director at Microsoft. One of his last major projects was the creation of the virtual travel experience Holo Tour for HoloLens. “It’s pretty humbling to collaborate with such an amazing group of developers,” said Murphy. “The stuff we’ve put together over just the last few months has each of us the more excited than we’ve been about anything we’ve ever worked on. We can’t wait to show everyone what we’ve been up to.”

Seattle-based Drifter Entertainment hasn’t yet confirmed what its working on, simply stating that the studio plans to bring esports to VR.

VRFocus will continue its coverage of Drift Entertainment, reporting back with any new announcements.