I did an interview with Gustav Stenmark at Meta Connect 2025 talking about their latest game Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked, which enables some pretty interested co-located mixed reality social features, but also enables individual players to have their own mixed reality or VR POV. You can cee more context in the rough transcript below.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.438] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling, and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So continuing my coverage of MetaConnect 2025, today's interview is with Gustav Stenmark. He's the game director for Battlemark, which is a Demio D&D collaboration, where they're using the core ideas of Demio, but also adding more and more stuff from D&D, since I got an official license from Wizards of the Coast, to start to integrate more aspects of Dungeons & Dragons, although I will say it's probably a lot more simplified and watered down and streamlined. to make it easy for people to come on without having to know all the rules. And it's basically like a term-based RPG game that is using mixed reality in a very compelling way. And so they had demos of this happening for four people at MetaConnect, and you had the ability to play with other people at the same time they started the demo out where you're sitting around a table in physical reality and you see people around you but then you have the ability to kind of zoom in and orient the virtual world however you want you can even make it as big as like you're in a first person perspective view and all the other people that around you are completely included Or you could create more of a tabletop experience where you could have that on the tabletop while you're around the table with other people, but you could still have control of the orientation. And then they had another feature where they have like the more mixed reality locked version where you're able to lock the perspective. So everybody in a social experience looking at the same virtual objects and their actions would be like one to one for what you're seeing versus what they're seeing. but you have a little bit less fidelity for him being able to have the best view within the virtual reality. So it's an interesting trade-off between like the shared social experience and shared reality versus like a virtual reality experience where you could have like optimized to see like the most and best perspective from your own perspective, being immersed within the game, but having potentially the capability to kind of switch back and forth between these two different modes. But it was something that was really quite innovative and interesting. And different trade-offs between, say, the social presence of being in a shared reality with other people versus more of an environmental presence where you're fully immersed within the world and happen to be with other people, but where they're at in physical reality around you may be different from where you see the virtual representations for what they're doing within the context of VR. because of those different trade-offs sometimes it was a little bit confusing when it was oriented towards the environmental person's perspective of you seeing someone do something but it's happening on like the opposite side of the virtual world or when it's locked together then you have like a sense of shared presence and more of a plausibility that these mixed reality things that people are all interact become even more real but a little bit less like you're transported into another realm and you're more in physical reality at that point with the social dimension as more of an emphasis so Anyway, that was quite an interesting demo. We talk around kind of the development of this new game called Battlemark that's going to be able to enable all this. So becoming all that and more on today's episode of the Wists of VR podcast. So this interview with Gustav happened on Thursday, September 18th, 2025 at the MetaConnect conference at Meta's headquarters in Menlo Park, California. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:03:20.561] Gustav Stenmark: So my name is Gustav Stenmark. I'm the game director for Battlemarkt. I've been a producer at Resolution Games for 10 years. So I've been working with VR from pretty much before the first Oculus Go and Gear VR. My first game I made was Bait, which is a fishing game. It was like a launch title on Gear VR back in the day, almost 10 years ago.
[00:03:46.314] Kent Bye: Nice. Well, I always like to hear the different design discipline and experiences that people are bringing into VR. So I'd love to hear a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space.
[00:03:54.460] Gustav Stenmark: Yeah, sure. So I was a game programmer first in my career, making mobile games. I never really did PC games before. It was mostly mobile games, so always like other types of input than traditional games and then i was later a producer and game designer worked on a king among other companies and then i joined resolution as a producer my background is in in ux and i think to me that's been my my main interest and driver with vr is the ux part of it like how a player experiences being inside the world of the game as opposed to just looking in so That's always been fun and created some cool challenges. So we've been forced to invent stuff because there hasn't been that much to look at since the very first game I made. It's been a very exploratory journey, which is really cool.
[00:04:55.238] Kent Bye: Was that using Oculus Go with the 3DOF controller?
[00:04:57.833] Gustav Stenmark: Yeah. So for the Gear VR, it didn't even have a controller initially. It was just a touchpad in your temple. So you could actually play the game fully with that. And then we later added the support for the 3DOF controller. When the first Quest came out, we added full 6DOF two-hands support. So that game snowballed with that. And then obviously for every game we've added since then, we built upon the experiences of different games. I think Resolution is, I think we launched 20 games now. So we've been quite productive for over 10 years. So we also have multiple projects going in the studio.
[00:05:40.388] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's really quite impressive that each new platform that comes out, it seems like you'll have a game for it, including the Apple Vision Pro, where you'd come out and had a whole sort of arcade game boards and other things that you're creating for that. But loved it. If we focus on what's showing here at the MetaConnect 2025, you have this Demio with D&D. Maybe you could take me back to the origins of Demio at Resolution Games, how that came about, and then how it kind of evolved to what you're showing here.
[00:06:06.101] Gustav Stenmark: Yeah, absolutely. So DiEMio was actually, we worked very closely with Meta and their social VR teams for Facebook Spaces, and we're creating experiences for four players. And you could say that DiEMio was like an offshoot of that project. So it was always four player co-op, high sense of presence in the room. It should feel like you're playing a board game with your friends. So that was one of the core tenets of DMEO. It's very much about cooperation and strategy and finding things out. And then DMEO itself is, I would say, more than being like a Dungeons & Dragons clone or whatever. It's highly inspired by it, but it also tries to emulate the feeling of playing Dungeons & Dragons with your friends or any role-playing game with your friends. But obviously, simplified, no one is the dungeon master. The game takes care of all that for you. You move your pieces, you attack enemies, you have spells in the form of cards, and then you roll a die. We even have a die that has symbols on it instead of numbers. There's no tables to roll to hit. So all that's streamlined to give you a fast-paced co-op experience.
[00:07:24.349] Kent Bye: Yeah, it feels like it's really optimized for the more fun parts of that, rather than the more complicated math or rules that you have to know or be onboarded onto. So it's really kind of simplified. And so I know that Demeo started from Spaces. It sounds like it went to virtual reality. At some point, mixed reality came into the scene. And then what you're showing here has some other kind of like. So just curious to hear how the mixed reality has kind of evolved out of the VR into different things that you were experimenting with. with both co-located mixed reality, but also more of a distributed VR, but also what you're showing here, if there's new things in that evolution that you're showing here, or if that was a part of previous iterations.
[00:08:05.349] Gustav Stenmark: Yeah, so the augmented reality aspects, they came later, right? DMEO was launched on the Quest 2, I think, or maybe it was even the Quest 1, I'm not sure. But with full-color pass-through, it was such a... Home run to just add augmented reality to that so you can just place the game board on your kitchen table or on your self like a coffee table and you start playing. Then we later added hand tracking so you can actually play using your hands. It's a very comfortable way of playing. And for Battlemarked, we already had all that. For DMEO, a lot of the procedure of adding that to the game was not that much the technical aspects. Obviously, it wasn't easy, but it's in a lot of ways a UX problem. Humans are so used to using our hands. So if you're going to give them hands in a game, they're going to expect those hands to work one-to-one with how their hands work in the real world. so it can still feel a bit janky and like we played now we're sitting next to each other it's easy if you play with hand tracking that you steal someone's hand because the headset will identify someone else's hand as yours but when you're playing it at home maybe across the table with someone else using hand tracking that's not an issue it's more that's more of the demo situation of the whole thing right So yeah, I think it's great. This game is going to be from day one with hand tracking passed through. If players are in the same room, they can play co-located, and that experience is like playing an actual board game. You have to reach across the table if you want to reach the far corner, which adds something. It's also, I mean, being able to rotate the board doesn't hurt either, right? But I still think it's quite an experience to play with co-location.
[00:10:00.441] Kent Bye: Yeah, there's kind of an interesting trade-off here between, like, there's a number of ways to play it where everything is synced so that everybody that is around the table sees the exact same view and you have more of a shared physical presence with people. But then you can also have it so that each person can rotate around the table to have their own custom view. And then once you rotate it, then it gets a little disorienting because then you'll have people in physical location and mixed reality that They're singing, but you're seeing their ghostly hands that are floating around with colors. And so then there's a bit of translation of what color is what. So we played a number of different ways. We actually started with it preferencing the spatial experience of the world, where you could even make it as big as it felt like you're kind of embodying from a first-person perspective. back down to tabletop and then rotating it all around and then at some point you said okay now we're gonna play it synced and then everything was synced and then once that hit I was like oh wow this just feels like we're all paying attention to this shared reality of this mixed reality that gave it even a deeper sense of physical presence because I was so connected to other people in that space but also the social dimension that also got amplified so it feels like you can kind of turn the dial of like when you have your own first person perspective you can dial up the environmental presence but lower the social presence because it kind of gets disconnected but then you can make it a tabletop and lock it and everyone has a much deeper social experience but it isn't always as good of a spatial experience because it's kind of small and you have to maybe get extra close to see what's happening but it's still good enough, but it's like a lower resolution than what you would see if like really amplifying the environmental. But the fact that you can kind of have those trade-offs and allow people to pick and choose, I thought it was one of the more interesting mixed reality experiences that I've had so far with this kind of shared social experience. So I'd love to hear any reflections on the design to allow people to pick and choose what they want, but to have these different modes where you're really optimizing the shared social mixed reality experience.
[00:12:01.249] Gustav Stenmark: Yeah, sure. So, I mean, like I said, like, co-location, when you lock the board and it's like you're playing an actual board game. I think it's a quite rare use case because you need to have, like, at least two players with a headset in the same room. The room needs to be mapped up. You need to have defined a tabletop surface. But when you have all that and you set that up, like, it's worth it going through the hassle. This demo, we're showcasing augmented reality from the start, so with pass-through. But some players actually prefer the even more immersed version when you're in full VR. So the game ships with... It's like a room, an attic, with some bookshelves, some art on the wall, with classic Dungeons & Dragons art and stuff. So it's designed to feel like you're... at someone's home playing Dungeons & Dragons together, right? But if you want to be more present with your family or be able to see what's going on in your apartment or in your living room, you can go to mixed reality mode. I really think putting the controllers down and using your hands, it adds another dimension to making it feel like a proper board game, right? So it's like you have different tiers of immersion, but also tiers of... how board game you want it to feel right so that's really cool and then i mean we're also building this game it's going to be launching on flat screen control with keyboard and mouse or a gamepad if you want and obviously that has even less immersion but it opens the door since the core of it is cooperative four-player gameplay a lot of players will have like a friend group where maybe one or two people have a VR headset and the others are left out. So now they can play with their friends together. So it's fully cross-play between flat screen and VR.
[00:13:51.777] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'm just curious if the reason why you were doing the hand tracking, if that came from wanting to be compatible with something like Apple Vision Pro, or if it came from wanting to just dial up the level of immersion of being embodied in the experience within the Quest.
[00:14:09.116] Gustav Stenmark: Yeah, no, so I think we actually supported hand tracking in DMEO before the Apple Vision Pro came out. You can obviously play DMEO on the Apple Vision Pro using their hand tracking. So that's great. It made it easier for us. We already had like a design for how to interact with the world. And I think it seems like that's where the tech is moving, right? We just saw the... the neural band technology and getting rid of controllers. I'm a gamer at heart when I play VR. A lot of the games, I actually want controllers, but hand tracking can be great, and especially for something like Battlemarkt, where it's not that so action-focused. You don't need to push a lot of buttons to shoot or whatever. MARK MANDELMANN- Did you also have something with Tilt 5? MARTIN SPLITTMANN- Tilt 5? So I've tried it. I met them several times. Those guys are great. We haven't had the opportunity to do a project with them yet, unfortunately.
[00:15:05.260] Kent Bye: MARK MANDELMANN- OK. Yeah, just curious, because that's another. For me, it felt like a super high fidelity. mixed reality experience that would work well for this type of form factor. I think having four headsets in the same place would maybe be a limiting factor. But if you're able to play cross-play across, well, I guess you're kind of losing a lot of the magic of the Tilt 5 technology. But yeah. And in terms of augmented reality, like Glass Designers, like Snap Spectacles and Snap Studio, that's something that doesn't even have anything with Unity. But just curious if you're exploring these new emerging platforms for where things go for maybe more casual augmented reality games.
[00:15:41.764] Gustav Stenmark: Yeah, so I mean that's super interesting of course, so I can't really talk about any projects we're doing in the studio, but we have been as a studio from the very beginning we've been very good at adapting to new technology, trying out new technology, finding games that work on whatever new headset it is. I think we've had a a launch title of every major game, like VR headset, that's been launched since the beginning.
[00:16:13.020] Kent Bye: MARK MANDELMANN Yeah, including Apple Vision Pro.
[00:16:14.702] Gustav Stenmark: MARTIN SPLITT Yeah, yeah, exactly, with Game Room. That was really cool. And then we later launched Gears & Goo as well for that platform. So yeah.
[00:16:23.251] Kent Bye: MARK MANDELMANN- Nice. And so with this experience that you're showing here at MetaConnect, you got a license with Wizards of the Coast for Dungeons and Dragons. So maybe just talk a bit about what did that license give you for what you were able to do with this that you maybe weren't able to do before?
[00:16:35.899] Gustav Stenmark: Yeah, I mean, so obviously Dungeons & Dragons is one of the big gaming IPs. It's been around for more than 50 years. Actually, I think it's 50 years this year. So you rarely come across a game IP that's that old and had such a rich history with, like, There's so much to just pour from. So Deemio had some of it, but for this game we've really been able to just pour over the rule books, find some stuff that we want to adapt into the Deemio set of game rules. So it's been amazing to just explore that. It's such a rich source of stuff to pour from. We also have the game writer. He used to be lore master at Wizards before working on Dungeons & Dragons. So we've been on solid footing with the world and making sure that everything is compliant or follows the lore. They have a canon and we need to follow that. Then obviously it's their IP. We can't do whatever we want with it. So we have to follow that process. But it's been super smooth. They've been great working with them.
[00:17:46.015] Kent Bye: Yeah. And it seems like it's a little bit simplified in a way that it doesn't have all the complexities, but at least it has enough of a connection and maybe some leveling up of the character, or at least a sense of progression. And so I'm just curious to hear how you navigate. Are there choice points that people make, or is it just more of a linear progression where as you play more, you just level up? And yeah, I guess that's a part of the whole D&D experience is leveling up and making choices how to customize your character. But just curious how you start to adapt some of that aspect of really getting connected to some of the characters that you're playing.
[00:18:16.486] Gustav Stenmark: Yeah, sure. So Demia was a roguelike, right? Every time you played, it was like picking up your piece from the game box and playing the first time every time you played. In this game, we wanted to add more hero progression. So there is... The system, you gather XP as you play, that gives you points that you can use to level up your character. You do have a choice on what your secondary ability is, and that gives you choices. Like if you level up your strength, you might be able to carry a heavier weapon, or you do more damage, and that's choices the player makes for each level. At the same time, we had to be careful because we want to avoid power creep. We don't want leveled up hero be so good that he will never want to play with a new player, right? So because it's all about multiplayer and co-op. So we're threading a fine line there between power creep and giving players some meaningful choices on how to level up their character. And then they can actually name their character. Obviously, when you create your new character in Dungeons & Dragons, that's one of the first things you do. You can change some aspects, like you can pick your own color scheme for your hero. We did not build a full character creator. That's an incredibly complex task that would probably take pretty much all of our development resources.
[00:19:48.234] Kent Bye: Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah.
[00:19:50.155] Gustav Stenmark: But then I have to say, like, if you play D&D, if you're curious about D&D, I think it's going to be a great, like, dip into that world. And I think D&D players are going to like being able to just show parts of the D&D magic to friends that might not be playing, for instance, without having the, like, slightly heavier, like, with the Dungeon Master. Obviously, that's a great immersive experience, like, a shared collaborative story, it's such an amazing way to play as well. It's more like the board game equivalent, right?
[00:20:24.501] Kent Bye: Yeah, part of the magic of D&D being that the Dungeon Master is inviting the players to use their imagination to imagine what's going to happen. But here, you're using the graphics of mixed reality, where there's not as much of that imagination, but you still get the kind of experience of the gameplay. In terms of the spells and the magic and the attacks and stuff, are those cards that you're holding, are those from the Demio IP and Realm, or are they also from D&D, or is there some sort of a hybrid? I'm just curious to hear some of those attacks, if they're directly inspired from D&D, or if you're also kind of bringing in what was already existing from the Demio IP and Realm.
[00:20:58.849] Gustav Stenmark: Yeah, so, I mean, it's a little bit of both. Some of them I don't think are in any way part of the typical Dungeons & Dragons rulebook at all. It's just stuff we have in DMEO that works really well with our gameplay. Some of them are actually spells that exist in D&D, but we also have them in DMEO, like the fireball, that's such an iconic choice for the sorcerer. That's in DMEO. We obviously have it in this game as well. And some of them are completely new for this game, or rather straight from Dungeons & Dragons into this game, where we found a cool spell. How can we translate that to our set of how our game works? And we've done that translation. So we try to capture as much of the D&D feeling. We don't want to just use a word or the name of a spell, and then it's something completely different. We've really tried to stay as close to the original as possible. Like design goal wise, we've always wanted it to be like if you are a D&D player, you should have a good grasp of what's going to happen. Yeah.
[00:22:07.342] Kent Bye: So what's next for this game? We're here at MetaConnect and getting a bit of a sneak peek. And is there a launch date set? And just curious to hear where you go here in the future.
[00:22:15.828] Gustav Stenmark: Yeah, so there is no official launch date yet. So we will do an announcement early October. I think we're going to announce the price and the exact launch date. So that's next for Battlemarkt.
[00:22:30.916] Kent Bye: MARK MANDELSSON- Great. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality, and augmented reality, mixed reality, and this intersection with games, and what they might be able to enable?
[00:22:41.101] Gustav Stenmark: MARTIN SPLITT- Yeah, that is a big question. Yeah, I think no one saw. I was doing mobile games when we still had Nokia 3110, with all the buttons, black and white display. And then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, it felt like, obviously, it wasn't out of nowhere. People had smartphones, and now my dad is doing his banking on his phone. That was something completely different. I think what we're seeing here at Connect this year, like the glasses, they get more and more features. They're minimizing technology. I think some of that technology is eventually going to end up in headsets or vice versa. And I think... We're in for maybe a big shift, but people are always going to play. I don't know what the percentage is, but I'm suspecting there's a big percentage of games in the App Store rather than productivity apps. And I would expect whatever stuff we put on our heads, that's going to be a lot of games. So as a game developer, I'm super psyched about that. But also as a consumer, I really hope I'm going to be able to maybe at some point not have a smartphone and instead just wearable devices. That would be really cool.
[00:23:56.101] Kent Bye: We've got quite a streak that's going with launching new games and platforms. They just announced today at the developer platform that they have early access of the SDK for the meta-reban display glasses. I guess from what I can tell, it's only first-party apps that are even going to be available. But it sounds like that you'll likely be digging in to see what might be possible, though.
[00:24:16.531] Gustav Stenmark: Yeah, absolutely. So actually, I've been demoing all day, so I missed the developer conference and the talks, unfortunately. But that sounds super interesting to be able to get a hold of that screen, maybe potentially in the future. Yeah.
[00:24:31.408] Kent Bye: That's worth checking out the developer conference. A lot of my conversations yesterday were like, are there going to be third party developers even allowed? And so they did announce something in early access and some of the kind of early things that you may do. It sounds very minimalist in terms of not like a full SDK, like as sophisticated as some of the different apps are, getting some of those features. And so yeah, at least it sounds like there's kind of opening up to the possibility for third party developers to get involved. With the past of resolution games, you'll certainly be getting access to dev kits and the actual, I guess they're not technically dev kits. It's a consumer product, but treating them as dev kits to kind of explore what's possible, especially with the neural interface. It's really quite a new human-computer interaction. So it sounds like over the years, you've always been tinkering with what's possible. So very excited to see where you take this here in the future. And yeah, is there any other final thoughts or anything that's left unsaid you'd like to share with the broader immersive community?
[00:25:24.007] Gustav Stenmark: No, not off the top of my mind, actually. But yeah, that would be super cool, though. I didn't even think of that, getting access to that display. Yeah, and the neural link as well. Yeah.
[00:25:38.266] Kent Bye: There is a game that's actually on the experience because there's a lot of like there's basically turning your hand into a mouse and so you have with your thumb kind of sliding across you know as you have like a fist sliding across your the top of your index finger for left right or up and down and so you can have like a mouse movement and then With your thumb and your index finger, it's like the left click and the middle finger to the thumb is like the right click. And so you have the backwards and the forwards conceits you get. So you have basically the equivalent of a mouse that they turn your fist into. So just with that, there's a game where it's mostly like get this object from the left side of the screen to the right side of the screen and avoid the object. So it's more of a timing of that swipe rather than move and stop, but starting to play with what gestures are there, and having a very minimalist game there, just to get used to how to use these more optimized motions. So anyway, once you see it, the- Where there's tech, there's games, right?
[00:26:32.578] Gustav Stenmark: So I think we're going to see more of that. For sure.
[00:26:36.440] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thanks so much for joining me to share a little bit more about what's going on at Resolution Games. And yeah, looking forward to seeing where the next platforms are coming out with the LensFest and the Snap Spectacles are obviously coming up with the consumer launch next year. So very curious to see if I'll be running to anyone from Resolution Games at the LensFest coming up here in mid-October, but also looking forward to seeing where you're taking this all here in the future. So thanks again for joining me here on the podcast. Thank you so much. Thanks again for listening to this episode of the voices of your podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast and please do spread the word, tell your friends and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a, this is part of podcast. And so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
