Last week’s VRTV was all about the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) 2017, with masses of virtual reality (VR) news and content coming from the event. While this week maybe somewhat quieter there’s still plenty of VR news going on with Nina bringing you the next recap.
The episode covers SUPERHOT VR’s new ‘Forever’ update, significantly expanding upon the gameplay modes available. Studio Roqovan also gets a look in with its next update, adding new characters, a map and more.
For fans of Owlchemy Labs’ Job Simulator, there’s lots of new mechandise available should you want a t-shirt, magnets or other officially endorsed stuff. And for those wanting to head to the Virtual Reality World Congress (VRWC) we’re offering a 20 percent discount on tickets.
Checkout the next episode below for further info, and stay tuned to VRFocus and VRTV for more news info and videos.
Free-To-Play first person shooter (FPS) World War Toons is introducing a large update to its game. Including new map, new characters and weapon skins and a new virtual reality (VR) control method.
Developer Studio Roqovan have announced the new map will be called The Great Brawl. The new map introduces new adorable panda characters, and there are other new characters being introduced with the update, such as a New York Rat, a Scottish Nessie and a military Chickenhawk. There will also be new legendary skins, British Bulldog Bobby, a robot rabbit and a shark with “a frickin’ laser on it’s head.”
There’s also a new prototype VR control scheme, designed for people who are not used to moving around in VR. It’s a teleport control scheme that minimises the motion sickness effects some people experience when in a virtual environment. The new scheme is currently available for testing on the Basic Training map. Studio Roqovan are looking for feedback on it, so be sure to provide your thought at the official website.
Studio Roqovan themselves are an independent game studio based in Los Angeles. They previously went by the name Reload Studios. World War Toons was originally released in October 2016 for VR and non-VR platforms. The class-based FPS is a cartoonish take on World War 2 featuring animals.
The new update has its own trailer, which you can watch below.
VRFocus will continue to keep you up to date with VR gaming content
Has it been a while since you dived into the wacky world of VR compatible multiplayer shooter, World War Toons by Studio Roqovan? You might want to give it a look over today; there’s plenty of new content inbound.
Headlining this update, seen in the trailer below, is a Chinese-themed new map called The Great Brawl. Set in the the wreck of the Axis team’s Dread Zepplin blimp, you’ll dart around a map unlike anything else seen in the game thus far. Also included are new weapons and player skins to decorate yourself with.
Perhaps more interesting on the VR front is a new prototype control scheme, which might help anyone that suffers from simulation sickness whilst playing. It’s a teleport option, which many developers use to comfortably move players from one spot to the next, but hasn’t really been utilised in VR multiplayer games that also use traditional stick-based locomotion before. Whether the control scheme works out with this mix remains to be seen, but for now it’s only available on the Basic Training map.
World War Toons is available now for free on PlayStation 4 in the US with optional PSVR support, and a closed PC beta is ongoing. There’s no word on when it might move into a full worldwide release on both platforms just yet.
For the launch of PlayStation VR, Studio Roqovan (formerly Reload Studios) released online multiplayer World War Toons in beta. Today the developer has announced its first major update for the title, themed around the holiday season.
The update takes the Moulah Ruse map and turns it into a winter wonderland, filled with ice sculptures, candy canes, presents, sleighs and lashings of snow.
To mark the launch of the festive map Studio Roqovan has released a trailer (shown below) that highlights the festive theme. Roqovan created its latest trailer with an animation pipeline based on real-time game engine technology. Everything in the trailer utilizes actual in-game assets from the World War Toons game using a modified version of the Unreal 4 Engine.
As an extra bonus World War Toons’ premium currency, ‘Loonies’, will be discounted by 10 percent for all PlayStation users, with PlayStation Plus members enjoying an enhanced 20 percent discount throughout the month of December
VRFocus will continue its coverage of World War Toons, reporting back with any further announcements.
As an artist and designer with many years of experience in Triple-A game development, the move to VR is, in many ways, like traveling back in time. In the early days of game consoles, you had to find creative ways to deliver gaming experiences when there were no standards – or even audience expectations – for how things would work. Being in VR right now is very much like those early days; we’re still finding a universal language for VR, and everyone is making things up as they go.
I am currently working on World War Toons, a PlayStation VR game by Studio Roqovan that was recently released as an open beta. The founders of the company come from Infinity Ward, and wanted to leverage that experience to create a first-person shooter experience for the PlayStation VR platform. As a hands-on game designer, I’ve been involved in everything from character development to modeling to environment building, as well as interface, map, and mission design.
The game environments, characters, and music have the look and feel of a Saturday morning cartoon, paired with the gameplay of a first-person shooter. You can pick a character class and weapon, and play in a variety of modes to achieve a set of goals per level. Playing this game is like walking around in a vintage cartoon world: it looks fantastic and the soft-shaded feel of this type of environment reduced the pressure of conforming to the bandwidth limitations of VR.
Optimizing Assets for Small Pipes
Prior to coming to Roqovan, I was at Naughty Dog working on game franchises like “Uncharted” where you’re dealing with very powerful console hardware, and are building environments with lots of detail and lush geometry. We simply can’t do that in VR. With VR, you have to go back to your roots and relearn how to squeeze as much visual fidelity as possible into the narrow bandwidth capabilities afforded by the current platforms.
This type of development requires artists to be very efficient when building assets. On World War Toons we employed tricks like wrapping verts, combining texture pages, and assigning shaders in ways that maximize a look while minimizing polygon count. Whether or not you have a background in games, it really behooves VR artists to have an underlying knowledge of what is going on with the game engine, and how to optimize your art, because ultimately you have to push 90 frames per second through a very small pipe. You can’t get away with being a sloppy modeler, and have to be very frugal with the data you’re creating.
VR Tools of the Trade
The most important skill for a VR artist is to be a creative problem solver. That, along with a good strong eye for natural symmetry, dimension, scope, and scale are also essential. Since our current approach to VR production is so new, there are no set guidelines for bringing projects to life. While the workflow is most similar to video game development, the skillset for artists requires substantial CG and visual effects experience as well.
When you’re hired as an artist in video games, the art part is only half of what you’re doing. There is also an important art to the technology side of maximizing what you’re building. The same applies in VR. You need to have the ability to get incredible results regardless of the limitations of your hardware platform.
We authored World War Toons using the Unreal 4 game engine. It’s fairly straightforward and the folks at Epic have adopted a very clean integration pipeline. It only takes moments for me to take assets from Maya and export them as FBX models into Unreal to view in a VR headset. We used to have so many dependencies to get assets into a game, but with the maturity of the Unreal engine and Maya pipeline, it’s almost seamless. While VR artists need to know the ins and outs of Autodesk tools like Maya or 3ds Max, they also need to understand the fundamentals of composition and design, and old-school principles of art.
Scale and Interactivity in VR
When you develop console games, you’re approximating a world that will make sense to someone sitting on a couch, looking up at a flat screen. But if you take those same cameras and scale applied to VR, it will feel very different. For VR, you pretty much have to retain one-to-one dimensions for what exists in the real world, because your audience isn’t sitting back and watching – they’re in it. Reality is the best guide for CG spaces in VR. We also have to design for the fact that there’s no guarantee a player will follow a set path, and everything in a scene has to be ‘camera ready’ because you have no control over where the viewer is going to be looking.
Once you get over the conceptual hurdle that your player is inside the experience you’re building, you need to figure out how to engage them in gameplay. We have a pretty well established language for how to interact with players in traditional video game HUDs (heads-up displays). However, inserting a floating 2D screen doesn’t work in VR. The UI elements of VR are very tricky. It helps to have design elements be intuitive.
One of the visual cues we used in World War Toons happens when a character gets knocked out: they turn into an angel and float into the sky, informing the player where a battle is taking place so they can get there. Another cool gameplay element unique to VR is the ability to see, and physically dodge, incoming projectiles by moving your head around.
Looking Ahead
We are just scratching the surface of VR and AR, and the potential of these exciting new platforms. Today everyone in VR game development is going through a process of intense trial and error. We’re all essentially guinea pigs figuring out what the best practices are. It’s a very exciting place to be, and whenever anyone says something doesn’t work, it just means that they haven’t figured it out yet.
The promise of VR is huge, and I’m hopeful that early adopters of PlayStation VR, along with World War Toons as one of its first titles, lead the way for whole new world of immersive entertainment.
There’s no denying it: shooting games are going to be the most popular and dense section in the PlayStation Store. But with all of this choice, and you wanting the best games that will be out there from day one, you have to take it from us which titles are unmissable.
Check out the list below for why exactly we have chosen the retro Rez Infinite from Enhance Games, EVE: Valkyrie from CCP Games, and World War Toons from Studio Roqovan Inc.
Rez Infinite – Enhance Games
This isn’t your usual harsh and gritty looking shoot-em-up type of title, and you can tell that from the psychedelic aesthetics, but there is so much soul attached to it as it is the long awaited sequel to the Dreamcast title Rez. This is something that you will quickly and easily be sucked into, from its intriguing look down to its playability – there’s also a pretty sweet merch line for it, too.
EVE: Gunjack – CCP Games
I know what you’re thinking – what about EVE: Valkyrie? Well, EVE: Gunjack has something spectacular about it that we most certainly didn’t want you missing out on it or overlooking it in any way, especially as it was only recently announced as a launch title. This is pretty one-tracked, but there is much skill needed in order to complete your mission. Imagine this: You take on the role of a gun turret operator on the Kubera, the largest mining vessel ever constructed, in the Outer Ring region of known space. It is up to you to protect the base from pirates and such, resulting in crazy shoot outs. Just look at it – it is beautiful.
World War Toons – Studio Roqovan Inc.
You may have noticed that Reload Studios has given itself a whole new revamp, calling itself Studio Roqovan Inc., so this means that the studio is all about big business now, and that is exactly what World War Toons reflects. You jump into a crazy cartoon world where you’re surrounded by unique characters, all in the time setting of World War II – except it is not quite the same. There are different classes that you can choose from, similar to most multiplayer FPS titles, and boy do each of them make a different impact. This is one of the best as it has been developed for a while, and by a very able team, many of which are Call of Duty veterans – so they really know what shooters are all about. Have we also mentioned it has a badass trailer?
There are some pretty good trailers out there for PlayStation VR titles, plenty of which came out today, but very few can claim that it has its own theme tune added in. Studio Roqovan, Inc., who was formerly known as Reload Studios, has released a new trailer for its Open Beta version, and it is unlike anything you have seen before.
Studio Roqovan really wasn’t lying when it said they wanted to make a cartoon title, and this trailer is something that could take you back to 90s adverts where explosions and cringey-cool theme tunes were all the rage – except this is more cool than cringey.
Quite a few studios have taken the leap of rebranding themselves, and it is a smart time to do so as virtual reality (VR) grows bigger, it is almost like a last chance before it all explodes – especially ahead of the PlayStation VR launch. Reload Studios has taken this step by renaming as Studio Roqovan, Inc., and it has a number of reasons as to why.
The name is said to reflect the company’s broader scope as their business model shifts from simple game development to a broader focus on IP content creation. It takes the R from Reload, but the rooster is symbolic as a wake up to the dawn of the new VR industry, and is also similar to the French words Coq au Vin which isn’t really explained.
”When we started Reload Studios two years ago, everyone in our core crew was coming from different places in their lives, and we all needed to ‘reload’ to focus on this new direction,” states CEO James Chung. “That was important then, and really defined our identity. Now the company has matured to launch our first major product with World War Toons, and we are deep in development on several other projects to move strategically beyond gaming. Shedding yesterday’s glory to embrace the next steps and beyond, we felt strongly that we’re beginning a new identity. We needed to rebrand ourselves.”
It is said that “also announced today in conjunction with the name change, the company is creating Project Time Machine, which transports users to an alternate past to witness a battle between the WW2 juggernauts USS Iowa and Japan’s Yamato.”
COO Taehoon Oh adds, “In the last few years, we have been at the center of the VR market explosion. Because of the incredible talents of the team at Studio Roqovan we’re now in a position to take advantage of this incredible opportunity, so rebranding was a natural step to reflect that momentum. We look forward to becoming a key studio dedicated to producing premium VR content whether for interactive, narrative, or educational experiences.”
For more on the latest from Studio Roqovan, as well as all the news, updates, and features in the world of VR, make sure to check back with VRFocus.
At PAX West, Reload Studios made a strong push for cultivating World War Toons as a VR eSports title. They were livestreaming a couple of shoutcasters announcing a four-on-four player capture the flag game of World War Toons, which is a free-to-play, VR first-person shooter. This was all preparation for Twitchcon this past weekend where they were on the expo floor with the same configuration, except with PlayStation VR headsets instead of Oculus Rifts.
I had a chance to catch up with Reload Studios CEO James Chung at PAX West where we talk about motion sickness with VR first-person shooters with different VR comfort options, their integrations with the Virtuix Omni, their free-to-play business model, and VR eSports as well as the future of streaming in VR.
When Sony Interactive Entertainment’s (SIE) PlayStation VR launches in just 12 days time Reload Studios will launch its open beta for World War Toons. The first-person, World War 2-themed shooter has now got a new trailer to celebrate that fact, showcasing the crazy cartoon carnage that awaits.
The trailer for World War Toons is just as bombastic as the videogame it’s promoting, proclaiming ‘Virtual reality is coming!’ at the start before diving headlong into some of the features players will soon be getting their hands on. From bazooka shooting and tank riding to character changing, piano dodging mayhem. It’s a fun filled look at the free multiplayer title, with giant walking red bombs, hamsters, chickens, face slaps, massive missiles being ridden, gun galore, pigs and loads of other zany ideas thrown in for good measure.
Reload Studios has been going all out over the past few weeks, revealing new characters such as the officer class General Mayhem, who’s a demolition expert and Sturm Shark, who’s German and a shark. There’s also been two female snipers, from Russia on the Allied side is Russian Olga Sniperova and from Austria there’s Adele Weiss. And because World War Toons doesn’t take itself seriously there’s a gorilla called Kongo who can hold three panzerschrecks under his arm and Tom Yeti who has the persona of an over exaggerated Swiss yodeller.
VRFocus will continue its coverage of World War Toons, reporting back with any further updates.
