News: Upcoming Hardware Support

[Slayemin]

Today, I've made an agreement with NullspaceVR to add full support for their Hardlight haptics suit[www.hardlightvr.com]. This will be an optional accessory you can use to enhance your VR gameplay experience. The suit will work as a directional damage indicator, so when you get hit in the back by a zombie or a spell, you'll feel the damage rippling outwards from the impact point. Your arms also have rumble packs attached to them, so some spells will make use of those rumble packs and the haptics within your motion controllers. You'll be able to merge two fire elements together to be able to do the "kamehameha" fire blast and you'll feel the energy blast build up being summoned through your arms and released through your hands.

I'm also going to be working to add leap motion support. This is going to also be an optional accessory which I support the best I can. I am currently creatively blocked on how to gracefully handle artificial locomotion with leap motion, so the way I'm going to design this is that it's going to be an accessory enhancement for hand held motion controllers instead of a replacement for motion controllers. I've been talking with the Leap Motion team about hardware capability requests and getting eager support from them. Eventually, my vision is to completely remove the hands from artificial locomotion and free up the hands to being used exclusively as hands in VR. Artificial locomotion would be done through some knee tracking accessory and you sort of walk in place in order to move in the world. I don't know of any company working on a knee tracking hardware solution yet, so I'm not going to be holding my breath.

The key here will be supporting various hardware platforms to the best of my ability, showing people what can be done with the hardware to enhance immersion within VR, and using my (very limited) influence to request hardware development and advances. Ultimately, what we want is a unified VR hardware platform instead of a bunch of fragmented hardware options players can choose from. Will that be a full body suit? An all-in-one solution by a prominent hardware company? Who knows.

Anyways, there's a bit of other news worth mentioning as well. I have submitted Spellbound to the Oculus Store so that Oculus owners can purchase the game and the game gets additional exposure to more players. This means that the small community of spellbound players will be increasing (which is a good thing). All of the updates and changes to Spellbound will be shared on both Steam and Oculus Store (no separate builds!), so if you own Spellbound from Steam, you don't need to repurchase it on Oculus Store and vice versa. The broad goal here is to create a bigger community of players and to make Spellbound easy to discover and accessible to the widest community of VR players.

Eventually, I would like to add multiplayer support -- probably sooner rather than later. The online VR community is very small, so the number of concurrent in-game players is going to be pretty small. My goal is to use a platform agnostic online subsystem for connecting online players together. Whether you are playing through Steam or Oculus Store, you should be able to meet and interact with players from both communities and the online platform should not matter. That's going to be a bit technically difficult on my end because Oculus currently only wants to use the Oculus online subsystem but SteamVR doesn't care. It may eventually require using a third party server for match making and hosting. If we can bring players from both communities together, it means that it'll be easier for you to find new friends to join in with adventures.

In a bit of personal news, I have had to intermitently put Spellbound game development on hold during the last two months due to lack of funds... and from falling off of a horse at full gallop and recovering from sustained injuries... and from moving into a new rental house. I think I am mostly past those pressing problems and will be able to dedicate a lot more time towards game development now. The next few updates will be focusing on adding new tech and building new content.

I probably won't be at any major gaming events. I just can't afford booth fees. Someone might be able to pull some strings to help me get in the door at PAX west. If there are any events, I'll let you guys know so you can stop by and say hello if you're in the area :)