Category: Game

The ability to edit and create virtual reality games while inside VR comes to Epic Games’ Unreal Engine today for anyone to use, technical director Mike Fricker announced during a press conference at GDC this morning.
The source code is available now on GitHub, and binary code will hit this June.
Editing in Unreal Editor is a one-to-one experience. Editors can move around the world by grabbing the world and pulling it, sort of like Spider-Man walking up a wall. You can also pinch and zoom objects or the whole world.
Pointing to one controller with another controller brings up menus in the VR world, which then let you select objects or functions and use them in real time. You can also go straight into much more robust tools like the material editor or blueprint visual printing in VR.
“This is really just the beginning, and we want to take you along for the ride," Fricker said.
The tech, which allows game makers to strap on a headset and be inside the game they’re working on, was first shown off in February during a livestream. The livestream showed how Unreal Engine developers can use the game’s editor in VR to develop content, moving and editing 3D objects with a "virtual iPad" interface.
"You’re editing VR in VR," Sweeney said at the time. "It’s a completely what-you-see-is-what-you-get experience. There’s no question about what your game looks like."
"To see all of Unreal Editor in VR … it’s something I never thought possible when we started," Oculus co-founder Brendan Iribe said.
You can watch the February presentation in the video below.

Shadow Complex is perhaps best known as the game that took “Metroidvania" from ghoulish portmanteau to actual genre. If you missed it the first time around (and when it was remastered for PC last year), it’s now available on Xbox One for $14.99.
Besides the obvious visual upgrades, Shadow Complex Remastered features new melee takedowns and challenges. The subset of players who don’t have access to Chair’s side-scrolling classic gets even smaller this May when the game comes to PlayStation 4 and Steam.

Travel around the world with Sony’s London Studio. Over the past year at various press events, Sony’s London Studio has shown a handful of experiments it created for PlayStation VR.
There was The London Heist, where players participate in a freeway shootout, using one hand to load ammo while holding a gun in the other. There was Into the Deep, an underwater shark attack where you stand in a cage and watch a shark tear it up. And there was VR Luge, where you lie down and race along a street in California.
Today, Sony revealed that it is releasing all three of these together, along with two other short games, in a retail and downloadable package called PlayStation VR Worlds. Think of it like Wii Sports but with quick tastes of what it’s like to be in different action movies.
According to London Studio lead producer Tom Handley, while Sony has called these “tech demos" in the past, releasing them as a package was the plan all along. "It started absolutely as kind of a package, a desire to create a collection of bespoke experiences for VR, which we have then demoed bits of," he says.

The two newly-announced games are Scavenger’s Odyssey, an adventure game where you control a ship in space, and Danger Ball (seen above), a "futuristic sport" where you use your head to bat a ball back and forth, which Handley compares to Virtua Tennis.
Danger Ball, at least conceptually, seems like a bit of an odd fit amongst the four other experiences that put you into extreme scenarios. But Handley says that’s the point.
"What we’ve gone after is that variety," he says. "VR is this kind of brand new medium, this brand new way of playing games, so we wanted to showcase as best we could the different things that you can do in VR. So we have consciously picked five very different things — different themes and tones, different game mechanics, different ways to play."
Fitting with that concept, the five games span across all of Sony’s control schemes for PlayStation VR. The London Heist works with either the DualShock 4 or two PlayStation Move controllers. Scavenger’s Odyssey works with just the DualShock 4. And the other three all only use the tracking in the headset.
While Sony showed VR Worlds at a PlayStation VR press conference today, it didn’t show either Scavenger’s Odyssey or Danger Ball, so we’ll have to wait to get a more detailed look at those down the line.

What’s the future of Unreal Engine 4? Epic Games is discussing the state of its Unreal Engine during a presentation at the 2016 Game Developers Conference. Tim Sweeney, a co-founder of the company, is on stage — watch live! Potential topics include Paragon, the studio’s new MOBA, and the Bullet Train VR demo.

It’s a new way to create video games and other types of entertainment Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice developer Ninja Theory debuted a new trailer during the 2016 Game Developers Conference for the game formerly known as just Hellblade, and the two-minute video is about more than just the titular character.
Senua, the protagonist of Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, is a Celtic warrior left traumatized after a Viking invasion. She develops psychosis as a result of the attack, and hears voices in her head; Hellblade seeks to explore mental health issues through the character.
Tameem Antoniades, Ninja Theory’s chief creative officer, presented the trailer during Epic Games’ “State of Unreal" talk at GDC 2016 today. In the middle of the trailer, a picture-in-picture window popped up to reveal that it wasn’t a trailer at all — Senua’s facial animations in the video were being generated from a live performance on stage by actress Melina Juergens, which was being captured in real time and streamed into Unreal Engine 4.
Ninja Theory and Epic Games worked with Cubic Motion, a facial animation and computer vision firm that has contributed technology to games like The Order: 1886, Until Dawn and Ryse: Son of Rome, on the demo. The facial rig was built by a company called 3Lateral and "optimized for real-time performance," said Cubic Motion in a press release.
"The robustness and quality we showed today is the result of serious technical breakthroughs that will transform production," said Dr. Gareth Edwards, CEO of Cubic Motion. "We’ve seen a few groups try this kind of thing before with more primitive technology, but we’ve never seen a system reach the kind of level required to make it a genuine alternative to offline production for facial animation."
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is in development on PlayStation 4 and Windows PC, and is set for release later this year. For a behind-the-scenes look at the real-time capture in action, check out the developer diary from Ninja Theory below. You can see the final product in the trailer above.

That time when a seagull tried to steal your lunch. At Sony’s PlayStation VR press event yesterday, most of the software on display consisted of games, but a handful of short films popped up as well. One of those, Gary the Gull, runs about four minutes and features a seagull talking to the viewer for most of that time. The twist is that the viewer can talk back.
The film is the first public experiment from a company called Limitless, which has created technology to help make virtual characters that can respond to a viewer’s actions. A separate team called Motional used that tech to create Gary the Gull which asks the viewer to shake their head, answer basic questions and turn around to get different responses out of the seagull.
“Just like in real life, if a seagull started talking to you, you’d probably talk back," says Tom Sanocki, CEO of Limitless.

The story features light conversation where Gary asks the viewer’s name and tries to convince them to turn around so he can steal their lunch, but there’s nothing overly complicated here. Over the course of four minutes there are six points where the viewer can interact, and those generally takes the form of yes or no answers. In many ways, the short film feels like a tech demo intended to sell Limitless’ technology, or to give a hint at what could be possible down the line.
Sanocki says he isn’t sure yet in what form Limitless and Motional might sell or distribute the project, but that Limitless is working with other partners as well to add different sorts of interactive characters in different mediums. He sees a world where characters like Gary the Gull can appear as part of a larger game, as well, similar to what Lionhead attempted with its simulated boy in the unreleased Milo & Kate.
Ultimately, Milo & Kate ran into trouble by being overly ambitious, whereas Gary the Gull seems too simple to really judge one way or the other. It makes for a fun four minutes, though.

More to come in the future Spanish developer Tequila Works has reacquired the rights to Rime, its pretty, surrealist adventure game, from Sony Computer Entertainment, the company announced in a press release.
“SCE is no longer proprietary of the IP, nor the publisher of the game," a representative for the company told Polygon. Tequila Works promised more updates on the game, originally planned as a PlayStation 4 exclusive, in the future.
The game was revealed at Gamescom in 2013 and has been in development since. For more on Rime, check out our interview with its developer and watch the trailer below.

MICKEY LOOK OUT FOR THAT TRUCK MICKEY NO Hipster Whale will release a new Crossy Road game starring Disney characters “soon" for mobile devices, the developer announced today.Disney Crossy Road will feature more than 100 Disney and Pixar characters. As in the original Crossy Road, players will attempt to guide characters to safety in "endless Frogger"-style gameplay. Check out the teaser trailer above to see Mickey Mouse attempt the challenge. For more on the original Crossy Road, which has been downloaded more than 120 million times since its launch, check out our feature.

Everything in balance. At a Sony press event yesterday, Supermassive Games — best known for horror soap opera Until Dawn — revealed Tumble VR, a sequel to the block-stacking PS3 PlayStation Move puzzle game Tumble.
Essentially an adult version of a child’s pre-school test, each stage of Tumble VR gives you a set of cardboard blocks and a task, and it’s up to you to combine those blocks in a way that accomplishes the task without letting physics get in the way. In one scenario, for instance, you have to place six blocks on a table but place them low enough that a floating “limbo" bar doesn’t knock them over. So you rotate the blocks, find the proper orientation to make them all fit and complete the stage.
In another stage, you have to stack all the blocks vertically at just the right angle to balance them and reach a certain height. Basically it’s this, as a video game.

In other stages, you may have to use blocks to shine light in a specific way, or blow up your blocks at specific angles. The developers have taken the idea of stacking blocks and tried to come up with as many permutations as they could on what that means.
You can use either a Move controller or a DualShock 4 to rotate blocks, and for the latter the game provides options to let you use an analog stick or the built-in motion sensing to place a piece at a precise angle. During a demonstration of the game, I ran into brief issues with moving the DualShock out of the camera’s view and not realizing it, thus temporarily losing control over the controller and my piece, though it was easy to find a solution by resetting the shapes in front of me and rotating the table they were sitting on.
The final version of Tumble VR will contain more than 80 stages, as well as two-player cooperative and competitive modes with one player in the VR headset and one player watching the TV screen. The game is on track for release later this year.

Game engines aren’t just about video games High-end British car maker McLaren Automotive is now using Epic’s Unreal Engine to help design its luxury and high-performance cars, McLaren design manager Mark Roberts announced at GDC 2016 today.
“McLaren is all about cutting technology …. most of all about truly great design," Roberts said. "Working with our friends at Epic to create a range of new tools, new virtual tools in the visualization field … it’s going to revolutionize how we do things starting with design and going right through to the customer who can customize their car in the engine."
Roberts said the car maker gave Epic capture data from all of its cars, plus actual paint samples, material samples of paint and fabric, and even audio recordings of engine noise and the sound of doors opening and closing. That data was then used to produce the first real product born of this new closer relationship between Epic and McLaren.
That product is the Customer Configurator, which allows a potential customer to fully customize their car and then see what it looks like and sounds like in an Unreal Engine-powered demo.
The Unreal Engine is also helping to power and improve McLaren’s design process, Roberts said.
"UE4 has given us this incredibly level of believability so our designers can make accurate, confident designs before we even thought about going to a model."