Walking around sells the experience. You start the Game Developers Conference demo of Thunderbird standing on a cliff facing the sky. There’s a statue to your left, but you can’t interact with it. You stand there a moment, waiting for something to happen. You realize you should turn around. Then you start walking, and things begin to feel different.
I played through about 15 minutes of Thunderbird yesterday, and the base mechanics were pretty straightforward for an adventure game — grab an item, place it in a slot, rotate a lever, aim a light. The ability to walk around each room, though, sold the experience. I was hesitant about where I could go. I was excited to do something as simple as stand on a platform and see it inch forward. Being able to walk around the room gave everything an added sense of importance.
The game is essentially a series of room escape challenges connected by a story in a fantasy-looking setting. And in the GDC demo, the challenges were all easy to solve and designed to show how the game works, so it’s hard to say how they will play out as the game gets more complicated.
But as a basic idea it works very well. You just have to be careful with the wires.

During one part of the demo, demonstrated on HTC Vive, players need to rotate levers on two ends of a room, so they walk back and forth multiple times in the room. Each time I did that, I felt the headset cord wrapping around my legs. After the first couple of times, I learned to step over the cord, and after another couple times I trained myself to rotate away from the cord each time I turned around. That ended up being pretty successful, though it seems like it will be difficult to absorb yourself in the game if that’s always on your mind.
“There’s not a lot we can do about it," says Tony Davidson, founder of developer Innervision Games. "People seem to — after a few minutes of play — they adapt and they become pretty conscious of the cord. A lot of people are very sort of sketchy and walk around VR with a sort of blindfoldedness, and you can tell they’re still very much aware that they might walk into a wall. So people tend to be very slow at first and they take their time, and then they sort of adapt and they learn to kind of get by. We haven’t had anybody trip out of the hundreds of people we’ve demoed with."
Davidson says he’s been experimenting with a space of about 13 feet for players who want the full-room experience, but that he’s also designing a mode with a teleportation mechanic for players to play the game without any walking. That will be the default mode for the PlayStation VR and Oculus Rift versions of the game, he says, and Vive players will have the option to choose which way they prefer to play.
Davidson is currently working on the game with his son Kai, and at this point the pair is about seven months into development. Tony says making the full game the way he envisions it will require staffing up to 10 people and working on the game for about 18 months, which he is currently trying to make happen.
In the meantime, though, he’s also considering releasing the game episodically and putting out the first episode, at about an hour in length, this summer.

Arise from your slumber, Guardian Destiny will receive an infusion of new content with its version 2.2 update, which will be released April 12, developer Bungie announced today.
“As promised, it will have something for every type of Guardian," said Bungie. Here are some bullet points from the studio on what the April update will contain:

new PvE challenges
new and updated gear
new quest featuring the Blighted Chalice Strike
increased max Light and rewards
sandbox and Crucible updates

The Blighted Chalice strike appears to be an entirely new one — there isn’t currently a strike in Destiny with that name. The release of Destiny: The Taken King last September brought the game’s Light level cap from 34 to 40; the two smaller expansions before that, The Dark Below and House of Wolves, each raised the cap by two levels.
Just like the seasonal events Bungie has been running over the past few months, the new content in the April update will be available at no additional cost to owners of Destiny: The Taken King.
Bungie will provide further details on the April update in three Twitch livestreams, one every Wednesday at 11 a.m. PT for the next three weeks. The first, on March 23, will focus on "new things to do." The March 30 livestream will discuss "new things to earn." And the final session, set for April 6, will touch on sandbox and Crucible updates.
Destiny publisher Activision announced last month that it will release a full sequel to Destiny, but not until sometime in 2017. A "large new expansion" is scheduled to be released later this year. At the time, Bungie said its spring update to Destiny would deliver a "significant" Light level increase.

Students and industry folks join forces in the name of romantic diversity “Are tentacles in games going to make people uncomfortable?"
A group of game design students, industry veterans and everyone in between had been sitting on the floor in the North Hall of the Moscone Center for nearly half an hour when Michelle Clough, a narrative designer and localization editor whose resume includes Death Note and Mass Effect 3, asked this question. They’d been talking about different sexual kinks, practices and relationships in gaming with total candor, addressing subjects like, well, tentacle porn — among myriad other sexual preferences and portrayals.
The impromptu roundtable assembled after being shut out of a packed Game Developers Conference 2016 panel hosted by the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) on how to portray romance and sexuality in gaming. Clough served as co-moderator alongside writers Patrick Weekes and Sylvia Feketekuty of BioWare (both writers on the Dragon Age franchise), posing questions and fielding responses on subjects.
The moderators’ goal was to carve out ground rules for a possible special interest group that IGDA would sponsor to keep having these conversations. There’s a lot to talk about on the topic, they said — which the group proved to be true right away.
"Fuck men, more femmes"
Before discussing more fringe romantic relationships like the controversial tentacle-monster-meets-schoolgirl trope, students and designers had impassioned things to say about other brands of sexuality. These included Weekes, who discussed the impact that the pansexual Dragon Age: Inquisition character Iron Bull had on players and the writer himself.
"It raised some eyebrows in the studio," he said of including the beefy minotaur with a predilection for BDSM.
"There were a lot of developers outside of the studio who were not familiar with that lifestyle," Weekes explained, adding that some members of BioWare thought that the character’s taste for "consensual power exchange" might make people uncomfortable. But if anyone was uncomfortable, it was people at the studio, not the audience, Weekes said.
Based on the various requests made and debates had by participants of the provocative and fascinating discussion, this certainly seemed true. To the opening question of what gamers wanted to see more of in terms of how romance and sexuality are represented, a student shot her hand up in the air:
"I want to see femme-on-femme relationships," she answered. "Basically, ‘fuck men, more femmes’ — or don’t fuck men, more specifically."
Others said they’d like to see more relationships like that of Iron Bull’s or the bisexual Josephine, also from Inquisition, whose storyline Feketekuty designed. They also talked about diversity not just in sexual representations in games, but in the body types of these marginalized characters. Many expressed their desires to see queer characters of all shapes and sizes.
"some people are offended by women. Some people are offended by penises"
These discussions and suggestions were thoughtful and thought-provoking, but the moderators didn’t want to limit the conversation to the small group seated on the floor. The goal was to launch a special interest group dedicated to this subject. There, members could have these conversations in safe spaces with even more fans who have ideas of how games can continue to get more diverse in all manners, but especially in how they depict relationships.
The conversation had been powerful and refreshing up to the point that Clough asked how some might feel about a game including tentacle porn as a romantic option. But even the moderator recognized that there are some lifestyles that many just can’t get comfortable with — including herself.
To answer the question, though, the same student who called for more lesbians in games vouched for those who are interested in kinks on the fringe.
"Yes, some people are offended by schoolgirls and tentacles," she said. "But some people are offended by women. Some people are offended by penises."
Counterarguments like this were what made the discussion one of GDC’s hidden highlights. But although everyone there was comfortable talking about what some might consider taboo topics, the group conceded that the spectrum of kinks and sexual preferences doesn’t necessarily appeal to everyone. So how can games give people a heads-up about the relationships included within as they get more diverse — in order to reach out to fans of these kinks and warn those who are decidedly not interested?
how tagging content could help fans find the stories they’re looking for
Someone proposed a tagging system that could take cues from fan fiction sites like Archive of Our Own. These websites feature writing on a plethora of romantic relationships and characters, including stories based on characters from games.
These sites use tagging systems that detail the content readers will discover within. If a story features explicit content depicting two underage female leads in a sexual relationship, that will be noted appropriately. Games could include a similar system to benefit players, the group suggested.
Tagging content made sense to these fans of a wide array of sexual material — and, they said, they were likely not alone in thinking this. While the members of BioWare, whose games often let players have queer relationships as a standard option, didn’t have hard numbers on how many straight fans played as gay characters and vice versa, they said they’d heard from many people on how this content appeals to a broad set of players.
"Gay relationships don’t just appeal to gay people," Clough said. Talking openly about these relationships with wider groups of people — in safe, dedicated spaces — could only help make that more apparent.
While the floor of a busy convention center might not be what the group had in mind, it was certainly a great start.

Epic-sponsored GDC session compares virtual reality to film’s early days Game Developer Conference 2016 is in the grip of a virtual reality frenzy. Lines for speaking sessions this week snaked around the Moscone Center, with some talks relocated to much larger rooms.
You can see a few of the games being demonstrated in Polygon’s round-up. But what does this burst of developer enthusiasm mean for the fledgling form?
In “The Future of Virtual Reality: Luminary Panel Discussion" yesterday, hosted by Epic; execs from Lucasfilm, WEVR, Oculus and Baobab discussed some of the likely creative consequences of a technology that is only beginning to be understood.
"The beachhead of VR will be games," said Max Planck, technical founder of Oculus Story and a one-time Pixar technical director. "Gamers are willing to go through early adoption." He added that game-related design would have a profound effect on all kinds of VR-related entertainment experiences.
"It’s very quickly expanding to non-gaming experiences and audiences," added Neville Spiteri, CEO of WEVR. "We’re seeing game folks, video people and web people collaborating as well as musicians and writers. The response from the creative community has been amazing."
Rob Bredow, chief technical officer at LucasFilm said that he is looking to tell stories "that are best told, or can only be told, in this medium." He said that "we are still at a place where we can make things 50 times better. Ways of doing things better will be discovered even this year," he offered, adding that all creative people would benefit from those discoveries.
Eric Darnell, chief creative officer at Baobab as well as he director and screenwriter on the Madagascar movies, compared VR to the very early days of film, when film-makers often innovated by understanding and manipulating a new technology. "Artists got a hold of this new technology and found new ways to tell stories. In VR, we will see the same kind of progression."

“This has been a really weird year for me" "I never hoped to create anything that would be featured on the cover of the New York Times," said Amy Green, co-director and writer of That Dragon, Cancer.
"To get press like that, you have to do something innovative, truly groundbreaking and deep. And the truth is, we didn’t. My husband and I experienced the most common thing in the world: pain."
That Dragon, Cancer tells the story of a family — Green’s family — through a series of vignettes. It revolves around the illness of their real-life son Joel, who was diagnosed with cancer as a baby and died at the age of 5 in 2014. Green, in recounting her experience during GDC 2016’s Indie Soapbox panel, said she does not feel that the game accomplished something extraordinary. Instead, she said, it speaks to the power of video games as a medium.
"We didn’t do anything surprising," she said. "We took the hardest situation of our lives, our son’s terminal cancer diagnosis — the event that shook us to our core and threatened to destroy us altogether — and we tried to create something beautiful out of it."
To Green, the game would never have made headlines if people understood what video games could be.
"My husband and I experienced the most common thing in the world: pain"
"If writers really understood what was possible in a video game, we wouldn’t have to worry about a lack of diversity and voices in games," she said. "We wouldn’t have to worry that a non-technical person like me would be too intimidated by technical terms like player agency, because if great writers knew the potential of games, like you all know it, they would overcome any obstacle placed before them, technical or otherwise, to create in this medium.
"The fact that the world sees That Dragon, Cancer as novel just shows that outside of this room, outside of this conference of your peers, people still don’t understand the potential of video games."
Although Green resisted the idea of calling herself a game maker at first, defaulting to That Dragon, Cancer being " Ryan’s thing," she eventually embraced her presence in the space. It no longer mattered if she was a "technical" participant or not.
"I started to realize that my voice was essential to this medium … I had to carve a space for myself in this medium because the medium itself is compelling and innovative," Green said. "It takes the most common experience in the world and it makes it new and profoundly personal.
"My sweet, funny, cuddly son whose laughter had been silenced is still working his way into another person’s heart."

Vive and Rift launch title is about underwater exploration This new trailer for Vive and Rift launch title Time Machine takes viewers into an ancient underwater world of aquatic dinosaurs.
Players are on a scientific mission to go back in time and investigate long-extinct creatures in order to fend off a modern disaster. During a Game Developers Conference 2016 demo, players are asked to inspect the eye of an enormous predator, without being eaten.
Currently available on Steam Early Access for Oculus Rift DK2 for $19.99, the full game launches next month on Rift and Vive, with a PlayStation VR launch planned later this year.

A heartfelt interactive story At the 2016 Game Developers Conference this week, Penrose Studios is showing Allumette, a virtual reality movie that looks like a cross between papercraft and claymation.
While the full film will run for approximately 20 minutes, the clip on display at GDC lasts less than five. In it, the viewer watches a grown woman and a child interact in a town floating in clouds. Part of it takes place in a small town and another part takes place inside an airship.
“It’s a story about the infinite bond between a mother and an orphan child, and it’s about the sacrifices that people have to make for the greater good, contrasted with the love that family members share for each other," says Penrose Studios CEO Eugene Chung.
Chung started Penrose after heading up Oculus Story Studio, and says the move came partially because he always wanted to build his own storytelling company, and partially because Facebook acquired Oculus.

"That changed the nature of the entire industry," he says. "And I stayed on for a while after the acquisition. […] But as I saw the industry grow, I think what I thought was going to take 10 years got condensed into one."
Similar to the projects from Oculus Story Studio, Allumette will react based on how players interact with it, though Penrose is keeping most of how that works under wraps for the time being. In the demo I watched at GDC, the viewer could only look around and poke their head through walls to see what was happening in certain rooms.
Penrose recently announced that it raised $8.5 million in seed funding, giving the team enough breathing room to create other upcoming projects beyond Allumette, though it hasn’t announced specifics on those. Chung says he formed the company to focus on storytelling in both virtual and augmented reality, and sees both as the team’s focus for the future.
Allumette will be a launch title for PlayStation VR, and it’s also headed to the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, though Penrose has yet to announce timing for those versions.