Laser Dance is a mixed reality game by solo XR game developer Thomas van Bouwel, who previously released minimalist puzzle game called Cubism. I had a chance to try out Laser Dance through Raindance Immersive, and it’s one of those types of games that I think will really help define some of the key affordances of successful mixed reality games that modulate your existing context enough to transport you into another realm of play where you use your body as a controller.
I had a chance to catch up with van Bouwel to unpack more about the mixed reality and hand tracking lessons from Cubism in the first half of our conversation, and then we dive into many of the peculiar considerations of mixed reality game design for Laser Dance covering everything from gameplay that adapts relative to the uniqueness of someone’s space, the evolving Presence Platform functionality for mixed reality along with the types of custom programming needed to solve some of the open problems, as well as collaborating with the newly-formed Creature label that is providing additional support for innovative indie-driven, mixed reality and XR games like Laser Dance, Thrasher (more on this experience tomorrow), as well as their flagship mixed reality game of Starship Home. We also cover some of the unique insights from architecture that have also really helped to shape van Bouwel’s journey from architectural visualization into the frontiers of leveraging spatial affordances for mixed reality gameplay.
The release date for Laser Dance has not been announced yet, but you can wishlist it here.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] 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 future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So in today's episode, we're going to be talking to a solo VR and mixed reality game developer, Thomas Van Bouw, who's created Cubism, which is a puzzle game within virtual reality and mixed reality where you have to fit these pieces into an overall shape, and so it's like a puzzle for putting the pieces into the right places, and it has a 2D and 3D he expanded it out to have like hand tracking and mixed reality and then now he's working on a new experience that i had a chance to get an early look at at rain dance immersive 2024 as part of the gaming competition it's called laser dance it's a mixed reality game that's going to be one of those types of experiences that you point to to say this is part of what makes mixed reality gaming so compelling it's using your space it's modulating your space you're using your body as a controller it's just a lot of fun we'll be digging into that more in the second half of this conversation but i wanted to spend the first half digging into the evolution of cubism and overall we're going to be reflecting on mixed reality gaming and some of the different unique challenges and innovations that have to happen in order to even create a compelling mixed reality game So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Thomas happened on Wednesday, June 12th, 2024. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:33.873] Thomas van Bouwel: So first off, thank you so much for having me on the podcast. I've been a fan for quite a while, so I'm very happy to be on. My name is Thomas, and I run a one-man XR studio in Brussels where I make video games. I have previously released a game called Cubism, which is a simple puzzle game of putting blocks into shapes. And as you sort of go along, the shapes become more and more complex. So it's really a game about spatial thinking. I released that back in 2020, and I've been updating it quite frequently. And now I'm currently working on a new game called Laser Dance, which is a game that's been built from the ground up for mixed reality. And it's a game that transforms your living room into a laser obstacle course straight out of a spy film. so i've been making games since 2020 but i actually come from a background in architecture and engineering so i was an architect for about three and a half years but then as sort of vr sort of came along back in 2014 15 16 i got really interested in that and interested in how that sort of could impact the design process in architecture so that was sort of the initial thing that got me sort of interested in learning how to develop for xr i tried to go to every hackathon and game jam i could back then to sort of teach myself how to develop for these platforms And then in 2016, I switched careers and started working for a startup called Resolve, which was a startup that was making design review software for architects and engineers in VR. So it was this perfect mix between my previous career and my new interests. And I worked there for about four years. And during that job, I was still making games for fun and doing game jams for fun. And Cubism was this side project that I did for quite a while until it released in 2020. And at that point, I switched to being a full-time game dev. So that's a pretty short summary.
[00:03:10.345] Kent Bye: Nice. Well, I know that I always appreciate talking to architects because it's one of the disciplines that is really, truly interdisciplinary, where you have to fuse together so many different types of things from psychology, sociology, materials design, and spatial design, and working with the constraints of so many different things when you're building buildings, but also just thinking about spatial design and architecture. And so it's a real translation of the skills of an architect and to moving into XR design. So I'm wondering if you can maybe give a bit more context as to your background as an architect and your journey into working with VR.
[00:03:45.939] Thomas van Bouwel: Yeah, absolutely. So I think the main thing that interested me in XR, coming from architecture, was that as you study architecture, you can ideally design the things that you want to design during studio projects. And you get this ideal representation of what it is to be able to design buildings and build environments. And as you get into practice, you see that the reality is quite a bit different. There's a lot more rules that you need to follow. And the design practice is very economically driven as well. And one thing that always frustrated me a bit was how far the practice of design could be from the actual end user sometimes. And what I found really fascinating about XR and these immersive media is that you could really put yourself in the shoes of the end user as you're designing a project. The fact that you can inhabit the building design that you're seeing and see it from the first person perspective of somebody that might be running around the thing that you're designing. I think really could have a big impact on how people actually design their buildings. And so that was sort of my initial interest in trying to get involved with those technologies. And so the first few hackathons that I would go to try to learn VR, I would also try to do these little projects, trying to think about how can XR be used during the design process? What would it look like to design buildings in VR? Making really very rudimentary tools to do shape studies and volume studies of buildings. So that was sort of my initial interest in that field.
[00:05:10.349] Kent Bye: Yeah, maybe you could just give a bit more context as to how virtual reality started to come onto your radar and your journey into actually transitioning into doing game design in VR.
[00:05:21.257] Thomas van Bouwel: Yeah, for sure. So maybe before the new wave of VR, I think the first time I got interested in using immersive media to involve end users more was actually during my studies. I don't know if you remember, there was this PC game called Crysis, which was kind of like a military shooter back from 2010, I think. But it had these really realistic graphics. And the game came packaged with the engine, CryEngine 2. And so during my studies, I had this one studio project where I had to design an apartment building. And then for fun, I was putting that project into the game engine. And I actually did the final presentation walking around in first person through the building. And it was more for fun at first. But after that, I actually showed my dad the project. And I usually show the projects that I worked on. And normally, I would show plants or renders of buildings that I would design during my university years. And he'd just be like, OK, that's interesting. But as he walked through this game in first person, he actually started giving me a bunch of feedback about things that I never really thought about, just because he was experiencing it from a first-person perspective as a user. that really clicked something for me, that with the right set of tools that are more immersive and more human-scale, you can lower the barrier of entry for people to take part of the design process. And that really stuck with me after I graduated and kept working in architecture. And then as these new technologies started coming along, that really piqued my interest in that aspect of it again. And so I think the first thing I got was Google Cardboard, I think, as a lot of people. Just this very simple, low barrier of entry thing to just see that it is really interesting to be able to be more immersed in that medium. And then I got a DK2, and that's when I really started to learn Unity and started bringing over more of the projects that I was working on in practice into these immersive walkthroughs. Initially, just to learn how to make those walkthroughs and how to make applications in Unity. But yeah, that's basically how I got started there.
[00:07:16.590] Kent Bye: Okay, well, I was just jumping into playing Cubism again. We're going to talk about your latest game, Laser Dance, here in a minute. But I recently watched the documentary about Tetris and how Tetris was created. And actually, the creator of Tetris actually was doing a game that was very similar to what Cubism is, which is taking these what he calls the tetrominoes and putting them into a box. But you essentially have to do this in a 2D context that's floating in the context of VR. I know that when you first launched it, it was probably a VR game and then moved to mixed reality. Then you have like hand tracking, but maybe you could just talk a little bit about like your initial inspirations for creating this game of cubism.
[00:07:55.265] Thomas van Bouwel: Yeah, absolutely. So I was a really big fan of sort of minimal games on mobile, you know, games like mini Metro or trees or line lights, you know, games that are visually very simple and have a very simple input, but that really fits the medium well and can do a lot with a little. And I was very curious, like why there weren't minimal games in VR or why there weren't that many examples of that. and so i wanted to figure out what a good example of that could be a game that is visually simple but that also makes the most of the way that you interact with vr in the same way that these minimal games on mobile make the most of the way that you interact with a phone by tapping and swiping and things like this and so this gameplay of cubism felt like a really good fit you know it's something that a lot of people already intuitively know what it is and how it works. A lot of people have played with these wooden puzzle blocks where you put blocks together to form a cube or something like this. The goal is very simple. And people with very little experience in VR and games can sort of pick it up and start playing it. But it felt like something that was small enough that then in that sense, I could build it as a sort of hobby project, which was also kind of important for me back then. I was working full time at Resolve. So I sort of wanted to pick a little project to work on that wouldn't like take up too much of my time and wouldn't be sort of overscoped. So that's sort of how I got started with that.
[00:09:11.255] Kent Bye: And how many levels did you launch with and how many levels are there now?
[00:09:15.202] Thomas van Bouwel: Yeah, I launched with 60 levels at the start. And then later on, I sort of launched the second pack of levels, so an additional 30 levels. And then just a year and a half ago, I launched the level editor, so people can actually draw their own levels as well. It's local only, but still. That was sort of one of the first features I built when I was building Cubism at the start. was a little built-in level alter because I knew I was going to have to iterate over levels quite a lot, but it was always this like rudimentary thing that was just for me. So I was happy to be able to launch something like this so people can build their own levels as well.
[00:09:50.014] Kent Bye: And what was your process of making these puzzles? Because you imagine you maybe start with the solution first and then work around that or talk about the design of actually making it challenging, but not impossible. Yeah.
[00:10:01.820] Thomas van Bouwel: Yeah, absolutely. So usually I would start with shapes and then fill those in. And it's always hard when you're designing a puzzle, you don't really know how difficult it is yourself. So I would generally try to find an interesting shape language for a stage of Cubism. Because the main campaign of Cubism has 10 stages, and each stage has a distinct pattern language of shapes for the puzzles. But as I mentioned, it's really hard to gauge how easy or difficult the puzzle is when you're designing it yourself. So playtesting was actually a really huge part of the level design process as well. I would go to a lot of events at first, which is a really good way to playtest the initial few puzzles that the game has. Because not only people are trying to figure out these puzzles, they're also learning the core mechanics of the game. So you want to make sure that they're easy enough for most people to be able to pick up the game and get through the first few levels and not get too frustrated at the start. But to gauge the difficulty curve of the rest of the campaign, I actually did a lot of online playtesting as well, where I had a demo online for quite a while. And I would cycle through puzzle designs in that demo for quite a while and collect anonymous metrics on the solve percentages of puzzles and also the average solve times. And that way, I had actually pretty concrete metrics on how difficult and how accessible puzzles were, so I could build a difficulty curve that was accessible to most players.
[00:11:22.096] Kent Bye: That makes sense. One of the other things I really noticed was that there's little musical interludes that happen when you finish a level and maybe talk about the sound design and the music because it sounds like it's fragmented musical composition that might be unfolding as well.
[00:11:36.127] Thomas van Bouwel: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so the game design is pretty minimal. And I kind of wanted the same for the sound design as well. And so the idea for the main sound effects for Cubism is very piano-based. And so the main campaign has basically this song that's composed specifically for the song for the game that is broken up into six. So the game has like 10 stages with six levels each. And basically, every puzzle that you solve represents this chord that's part of the song. So every puzzle piece represents a note. When you solve a puzzle, you hear the chords, the piano chords, and then the sequence of puzzles actually forms a sequence of chords that forms the song of the puzzle. So it's this extra incentive to sort of solve, sort of play your way through the campaign because you're progressively unlocking the song that you can hear. as you sort of solve enough of the initial puzzles, there's this like play button that appears on the menu. And so you can actually hit this play button and it will cycle through the levels that you've solved and you'll hear the melodic version of this song up until the point that you haven't solved the puzzle and then it will sort of break off there. But so it's this extra incentive to sort of try to solve all the puzzles so you can hear the song. But I also like how the sound design sort of really mixes well with the level design in that sense. It's very one-to-one, you know, every piece is a note. There's also a selection of classical music that is recorded for the game that sort of fades in if you're spending a long time with a puzzle. So it's this way to sort of, you know, if you're getting frustrated or if you're stuck on a puzzle, it helps suit the mood a little bit. And it also, as you then find the solution and have the final piece that you need to fit in, that music will fade out. So it helps create some extra suspension and sort of satisfaction for finally finding the solution to the puzzle.
[00:13:18.683] Kent Bye: Yeah. Puzzles already have a lot of mental fiction, but I also appreciated how musical the piece was because there was this building and releasing of the consonants and dissonance cycles of the music that have these chords and music that was playing that, you know, I'd played it originally when it had come out and then I just revisited it again just to check it out and surprised with how musical it was. Was that from your own background in music or did you hire a composer or how did you work with creating the music for it? Hmm.
[00:13:46.983] Thomas van Bouwel: Right. So the musical song that's sort of tied to the gameplay itself, that's sort of gradually unlocked. That's something that I wrote myself on piano. I'm not necessarily classically trained, but I sort of taught myself a little bit of piano as I was growing up. So that was something that I composed myself. But I got a friend of mine, Salia Wong, to record that. She's actually classically trained at Berklee. So she recorded that song. I basically sent her a really bad recording on my phone and just like, please, can you please record this properly on a good piano? And she did. And then a lot of the background music, the soundtrack, is a lot of public domain classic music, mostly from Robert Schumann, but also Salia would record versions of this for the game.
[00:14:29.048] Kent Bye: And the game starts off, they're 3D blocks, but it's mostly in a 2D plane, and then it starts to expand out into the third dimension and having more volumetric puzzles as well. And so one of the things I would notice was sometimes the challenge of grabbing the block versus grabbing the space to be able to rotate. And if I misclicked, I was sometimes rotating the volume of the container versus the actual shapes. And then sometimes if I was trying to grab one of the shapes, then I was also misclicking things. And so... It feels like there's a little bit of just as we play it, they get trained with where to click and how to click because there are some ways that you can misclick, I guess. But yeah, just talk about that process of both creating the 3D spatial components, but also the user interface to make sure that people were able to do something that was intuitive, but also be able to self-correct. And how do you find that middle ground? Being robust enough to be able to rotate everything without creating something that's terribly complicated.
[00:15:26.218] Thomas van Bouwel: Right. I appreciate that feedback also. It's something that you do a lot of playtesting. You try to refine it as best as you can. But interactions in VR will always have some level of abstraction, especially when it comes to grabbing things. So getting the perfect solution is always hard. But I do try to train people as they come into the game for the first time on the basics interactions. And I've also like a lot of integration and design work in Cubism went into reducing the amount of interactions you had to learn. and reducing the friction to getting into the game. Early versions of the game, early prototypes basically used every button on the controller to do different things. You would have a separate button to grab the puzzle. Rather than a puzzle piece, you would have a button you could press to open a menu and a different button that you could press to call all the pieces to you if they floated away. But I gradually started removing a lot of those buttons and improving the design so that everything could work just with the trigger buttons, which was something that I saw the necessity of this after just playtesting a lot. Initially, I was playtesting a lot with mainly other developers. And if you're very familiar with game design or very familiar with games, you won't really struggle with controllers and picking them up and quickly learning how the button mappings work. But as I played the set more with people who didn't play games or weren't familiar with VR at more family-oriented events or things like this, I would see that those people would really struggle just to get through the tutorial to learn all the inputs. And so then it became really important for me to really simplify the input system and have everything work just with triggers. And that's how the game basically starts now. As the game launches for the first time, you just get this one piece and one shape that you have to sort of learn, OK, you grab a piece and you put it in the shape. And the game doesn't tell you to do this. It's something that people can discover on their own. And then you sort of learn the core mechanic of the game and get launched directly into the first puzzle. So you sort of learn how to play the game and are solving your first puzzle within the first 15 seconds. And so because there's not too much to learn, people can get into it pretty quickly in general and sort of learn the core mechanics pretty quickly.
[00:17:29.346] Kent Bye: And by translating into a single click, then you're able to then transition from going to the controllers and to the hand tracking, which I also had a chance to try out, which I think when it first launched, there wasn't a hand tracking option, but I noticed that grabbing and moving things around, like sometimes it felt nicer to grab things and place them. But I also felt like the accuracy or the gap between my intentions and the actions was larger. I had more errors with the hand tracking, so I didn't quantify it or anything. It was just more of a, a feeling of feeling like I had a little bit more granular control with the controllers and that the hand tracking, while it was great, it was also like some subtle differences and a little bit more friction, I guess, hard to really quantify, but that was just the feeling I had. It was just a little bit more errors that were happening or actions that wasn't exactly what I had intended. So love to hear your process of actually implementing the hand tracking.
[00:18:24.389] Thomas van Bouwel: Absolutely, yeah. That's totally fair, by the way. That's something I still see, especially when you're grabbing objects. With controllers, input is very binary, right? You're pressing a button or you're not. And so the downside is that you have to learn the abstraction of a controller to do that action. And the upside of hand tracking would be that you know how to grab things intuitively. So you have the mental model of what you have to do. The problem is that people's mental model of doing that interaction can still be very different. And so trying to account for all the different ways that people would grab a piece is very challenging and difficult. And it's hard to really have a solution that fits everyone. But yeah, when hand tracking first became available, I believe it was at the end of 2019, beginning of 2020, before the game launched, I actually did this quick implementation of it just because I was really excited about the technology. And I put this out in the demo of the game as well. But that version of hand tracking was definitely not very good. So I saw that it would require more playtesting and more iteration to properly implement it or try to properly implement it. And so I didn't launch the game with hand tracking. But that was one of the first updates that I started working on as I switched to working full time on the game. And so Cubism specifically is a game about grabbing small objects and very precisely trying to put them in a small grid. So it's depending on what you're trying to do with hand tracking and the type of interactions you want to do, your approach to how you want to interact with objects and how you want to grab an object is probably going to be very different. But so I let the gameplay inform my approach here as well. All the grabbing happens with thumb and index. And so as you start to grab a piece, there's all these indicators to sort of help signal how you can do this interaction. So you'll actually see your fingertips of your thumb and your index take the color of the piece that you're about to grab. And that sort of indicates that you can almost initialize a grab. And as you grab and bring your fingers together, as soon as those two touch the piece, it'll sort of grab that piece, and you can sort of put it in the shape. That sort of color indication really helps also when you have a lot of pieces in the shape. It's really hard to correctly predict what people are trying to grab out of a shape if they're trying to reposition something, because you're probably going to be close to several different pieces. So that's also a bit of a challenge. And then having those clear signals about what you're going to interact with helps indicate that to the user. But it's definitely been a bit of a challenge. As I worked on the actual updates with hand tracking, I just tried to playtest with a lot of people and try to dial all the parameters for the interaction to try to make it work as well as possible. But it's definitely always a challenge.
[00:21:00.501] Kent Bye: And my recollection when I first played Cubism was that it was a fully immersed VR experience. And then when I just fired up again, it defaults to mixed reality. And so I'm curious to hear a little bit more about that decision that this would be a good candidate to have more as a baseline of a mixed reality game rather than as a VR game.
[00:21:19.079] Thomas van Bouwel: Yeah, I mean, these days, I kind of think of Cubism more as a mixed reality game than a VR game. I think for a lot of people, it feels more natural to play the mixed reality, I think, because the nature of the game takes more the shape of something akin to a Rubik's cube that can sit in your desk. It's this small experience that happens in front of you, so it works pretty well as that sort of tabletop mixed reality experience. And so after the game came out, the Quest 2 launched, and then the Quest 2 received a series of updates. that made the headset better. And Cubism, for me, has always been this sort of playground to test out these new features. And because the game was simple, it would usually not be too difficult to try some of those features out. And so Mixed Reality was the same. And I just found that it sort of fit pretty well with the game. And I think a lot of people enjoy playing it in that mode as well because you're not disconnected from the environment around you or the people that might be around you. When it comes specifically to hand tracking in Mixed Reality, I think it helps also a little bit because you can see that your hands are actually interacting with the pieces. And I think that adds to some of the immersion that Mixed Reality can bring when you play the game.
[00:22:20.546] Kent Bye: Okay. And so you'd mentioned that you're able to transition into working on this full time. So I'm assuming that it has been doing well enough for you to be able to work on it full time and then also expand out into other projects that we're going to be diving into. But I'd love to hear any comments on anything you want to say around like just the success or how well it's done.
[00:22:38.926] Thomas van Bouwel: Yeah. I mean, it definitely surprised me quite a bit. Because when I first prototyped the game, I made sure to playtest it with people to see if it was something that people were interested in. And I would post it online. And I did see that there was some interest in a puzzle game like this. But I never thought it would be necessarily a big game, specifically because vr market was and still remains kind of relatively small compared to other gaming markets and then this is sort of a pretty niche interest i think for people to play puzzle games like this but i've been very happy to see that people have been interested in playing it when it came out and i think especially because the game has received quite a few updates since it launched let's sort of follow along with a lot of the feature updates of quest you know when hand tracking became better and better and When pass-through became a thing, I think the game became also a way for people to experiment with these technologies and see what it would feel like to play them. And my favorite thing that I've seen since the game launched is when people send me messages or post online that they actually use the game to introduce people to VR or to mixed reality. One of my favorite tweets about the game that I've seen was somebody who, their grandma, who was 95 years old, if I'm not mistaken, who never played a game before, who definitely never worn a VR headset before, that they used Cubism to introduce her to the medium because they felt it would be, the barrier of entry would be low enough for them to understand what to do and understand how to play it, sort of be introduced to games like that. So it makes me very happy to see when people are looking for recommendations to like, hey, I want to introduce my parents to VR, or my partner who doesn't play games, what game should I use? And it makes me very happy to see people recommend Cubism for that sort of game. So I think it sort of found a spot in that sort of market as well.
[00:24:19.150] Kent Bye: And also imagine that it has some direct connection to improving one's spatial reasoning skills because you have to essentially take a fixed volume and a number of shapes and have to rotate them around and both imagine them in your mind, but also place them. And so love to hear comments on the connections to the types of transferable skills that this may also be potentially creating.
[00:24:43.089] Thomas van Bouwel: I really do think it builds on your spatial reasoning skills. There have been a couple of universities that have been using Cubism in part of research studies, but I haven't seen any concrete results of it yet. I mean, these things take a bit of time, I think, to get published and all that. There was a study on relaxation where Cubism was used as well. But recently, I saw a video of somebody who mentioned that they did their master thesis with Cubism, specifically on spatial reasoning. But again, I reached out to see if I could actually read it and see what the conclusions were, but I haven't really heard back yet. But since the game came out, actually, if people have VR programs in schools, are trying to use VR as a way of like, as part of education for kids, I've been offering schools that reach out that they can have a free key for Cubism. And so there have been some schools that have actually been using Cubism in the classroom as well. So yeah, just as a fun way to train spatial reasoning and things like this. But yeah, I would love to see actual studies on whether doing these sort of puzzles in VR actually can help that sort of spatial reasoning. But anecdotally, people seem to enjoy it as a way to train their brain in that sense.
[00:25:51.255] Kent Bye: Yeah, definitely exercises that muscle for sure as you're playing the game. Yeah. Well, that kind of leads us into your next big project that is being featured at Raindance Immersive, where it's called LaserDance, and it's a mixed reality game. And yeah, maybe you could just give a bit more context for this game and how it came about.
[00:26:07.330] Thomas van Bouwel: Yeah, absolutely. So for Cubism, mixed reality was this sort of thing that got added after on. It's nice to have, but not a feature that's essential to the game. And LaserDance kind of came about because I wanted to try to figure out what a game could be that could only exist in mixed reality. And it was built from the ground up for those technologies. And so LaserDance felt like, I mean, we all sort of have an association of some spy film or some heist film where we've seen some scene of somebody breaking into a bank and trying to avoid all these lasers. And it felt like a type of gameplay that really could only be properly done in mixed reality. There have been VR games in the early days like Unexpected Diplomacy, if you remember that game, which was a room-scale game that I think you needed 2 by 3 meters. And it had these non-Euclidean spaces where you infiltrated a facility, and sometimes you would have to also dodge these lasers. So it was something you could already do in VR, but only when you have enough space. And so why it felt interesting to do something like this in mixed reality was that it could really make use of your actual space and you could more or less safely play it because you were constantly aware of the space that you were playing it in. And where before you sort of needed this big space in VR to play very physical games like this where you move around a lot, now with mixed reality you can try to instead make the game more adaptive to the space itself so it can work in more different types of spaces. That was both the initial excitement of the early days of room-scale VR with the HTC Vive, but also the first edition with a lot of players. All these really cool experiences that required a lot of space, and not a lot of people had the two-by-two minimum free space that some of those room-scale experiences required. I think that's the challenge, and both the interesting thing about designing for Mixed Reality now is trying to be able to accommodate more different spaces. That's definitely the intent with LaserDance. And so specifically how the gameplay works is you place these two virtual buttons on opposite walls of your room. And then you go back and forth between these buttons. And each time you press the button, a new pattern of lasers will spawn in your room, a pattern that tries to adapt to the space that you're in. And if you have furniture that's in your room, then those patterns will sometimes also try to sneak around the furniture. And then you go back and forth until you finish a level. So it's very straightforward. Again, I tried to make something that You really don't have to explain too much to somebody if you put them in there. So hopefully, it'll end up becoming a game that's like a good introduction to what room scale mixed reality could mean for games.
[00:28:30.387] Kent Bye: Yeah, that game was called Unseen Diplomacy by Katie Good. And yeah, it was using a lot of non-Euclidean spaces. And I think when I was doing VR, my space wasn't quite big enough. But now that we have more wireless VR, I can go into some rooms that are bigger. And so is there a recommended size of it? Because I feel like that my space, that was at least like 10 feet by 10 feet, which is around three meters by three meters. I had a little bit more because it was actually tracking the whole space. But is there a minimum amount of space that people need?
[00:29:01.067] Thomas van Bouwel: For laser bands, so it's less about an area that you need and more a minimum distance between these two buttons, which makes it a bit more flexible. So the smallest part between the buttons needs to be about three meters or about nine or 10 feet, if I'm not mistaken. But that doesn't need to be in a straight line. For example, if you have a master bedroom with a big bed and you have two night cabinets on the side of the bed, you can also have one button on each night cabinet and go around the bed. That's also a valid path, for example. So obviously, if you live in a one-bedroom studio, maybe it's still difficult to find three meters between buttons. But you could play in the hallway, for example, or there's a little bit more flexibility because the path doesn't need to be a direct line.
[00:29:42.406] Kent Bye: Yeah, I had a lot of fun playing it, and it felt like one of those games that, like, sort of when I played Beat Saber, I was like, ah, there's something here that's really quite compelling, and it reminded me of some of the gameplay elements of, like, Superhot, so that when you move, the world moves, and so there was some mechanics where as I'm moving, and if I'm moving slow, then the laser's moving slow. And so, yeah, I had a lot of fun going through, like, I think there's, like, six different levels. I appreciate it. This demo version that's showing at rain dance and like, you know, between 25 to 30 different levels. And yeah, I just found myself having the VR giggles just because it was like, I would fail, which I think is good to have it challenging enough that you can go through it and actually fail, even if you're trying your hardest. And so I think that it makes it challenging as a game, because if I would go through each of the 30 levels without failing, then I was like, oh, that wasn't really all that difficult, but it is. There are some difficulties there that make it a little bit more challenging and frustrating when you keep dying over and over again, but then also fun as a game to try to get through it all. So yeah, I just had a lot of fun and I just was thinking to myself, this is going to be like Richie's Plank type of experience that people showed other people to be like, okay, this is what VR is, or this is what a mixed reality game can be.
[00:30:57.150] Thomas van Bouwel: Yeah, I think that'd be great. One of my goals with Cubism and also with this game is to try to make the barrier of entry to play the game pretty low. So understanding what you need to do needs to be simple enough, but then that doesn't mean that you can't challenge the player as well, right? It was also true in Cubism as the puzzles got harder, and here I hope it's also true For the levels of laser dances, they become harder as well, although level design is very much still in full swing for this game. So doing that same exercise of just playtesting a lot and sort of finding the right balance and the right difficulty curve is sort of an ongoing process. And yeah, the experience we played is this sort of initial demo that I've been using for events with six levels. And then the idea for the full game is to have A bigger set of levels probably categorized in stages that each introduce like a new type of laser. You know, you have the classic static lasers, but then you also have these moving lasers. There's some levels in the demo that have these blinking lasers that turn on and off. And then there's also some levels that you played there. Lasers move when you move sort of in a super hot style. So I'm going to introduce some variety in levels in that sense as well.
[00:31:58.447] Kent Bye: Yeah. And sometimes near the end, when you start to combine them where some of the lasers are asking you to move quickly and that others are having, when you move quickly, then there's other lasers that are moving quickly. And so I found myself doing the kind of things sometimes you can do in super hot to kind of wave your hands around to get things moving, just to understand, okay, where is this going to go in the future? And There's certainly been a lot of VR games where you're walking through these gauntlets of things swinging by. And it reminded me of some of those different types of gameplay, but it was in the mixed reality living room and something that looked very convincing with the lasers. And they were like drawing these little black lines in the floor to give it a little bit extra plausibility that they were actually in this environment. And Yeah. And you're, you're tracking your hands as well and your head. So if any, one of those body parts gets hit and then you kind of freeze your body to see like what, so you can kind of look back. Okay. Where did I hit? It also helps people learn to see like, okay, it's actually tracking my hands and I need to be mindful of where my hands are and not just pay attention to my head.
[00:33:05.279] Thomas van Bouwel: as well as your upper body, right? So the game actually started development on Quest 2, before Quest 3 came out. But as the game has been developing and since Quest 3 came out, there's a lot of features that are specific to Quest 3 that just make a lot of sense for this game. And I've since made the decision that this game will only come out for Quest 3 and future devices on the MetaQuest system because On Quest 3, you can only do the scene meshing, where you get a 3D scan of the scene, which has a huge impact on the variety of types of room where you can play a game like this. For me, for example, previously on Quest 2, you would have to manually map out the room. And it would mean that the room would also always be this abstraction, just like a box. For example, I live in an apartment in Brussels that has slanted ceilings. So the slant of those ceilings would always be abstracted away. But with a 3D mesh, which is possible in Quest 3, then suddenly you can take that into account as you sort of spawn the levels. You can only do upper body tracking on Quest 3. So before you could track your head and your hands in Quest 2, but now you can actually also track the upper arms, sort of the general position of the spine. So that's taken into account in this game as well. So when you touch a laser, as you mentioned, you see this sort of silhouette of your body position. And that's determined also by what Quest 3 can affirm is your body pose. as you get touched by the laser. And finally, there's also dynamic occlusion on Quest 3, which is something that you can do before on Quest 2, where it actually creates this depth texture of your environments, and you can sort of real-time hide virtual objects behind real things, even if they're dynamic. So if you have pets or other people in your space, they'll actually, lasers behind them will also be not visible, right? So it creates, it's a bit rough around the edges, obviously, at this point. It's like the first generation of doing this on the Quest devices. But it's something that, similar to hand tracking, I'm sure will also improve over time and helps sell that these lasers are part of your environments. And especially because you have the inside-out body tracking from playtesting, I've seen that even without dynamic inclusion, people tend to play with their entire bodies. Even without inside-out body tracking, it feels like, Because of the mixed reality and because people can see their bodies, they tend to assume that their whole bodies are part of the game. So I've seen developers who fully understand the limitations of the system step over lasers with their feet, even though there's no foot tracking at all in the game. And I think this dynamic inclusion where your own body actually occludes virtual lasers will help sell the idea that you should try to play with your entire body, which for the upper body tracking at least is true. Those parts of your body will actually be able to touch the lasers as well.
[00:35:33.423] Kent Bye: yeah one of the things that you have to do in this game is to do a whole onboarding of capturing that spatial data if it's not there yet and so I think this is more of a comment on the meta system because as I was doing it it was like okay this is how much of your room you've captured and I'd only captured like a quarter of my room and it was already done and it's like wait and then I clicked okay and then it was like three quarters of my room wasn't actually properly captured and so then I was like okay I have to cancel this out and try it over and The second time I did it, I just ignored the button when it had reached to the end, because it was like, okay, I want to actually get a good capture, but I'm wanting to still capture the data. It allowed me to still capture the data, but just the user interface was confusing because it felt like it was trying to rush me to get things when I was maybe doing things a little bit too precisely. So the second time I made sure that I got a scan of the entire room at a high level, and then allowed myself to fill in the gaps in case it cut me off again, but Yeah, that was more of a meta system level thing of just the onboarding of stuff that is probably out of your control, but at least you're having interface and have to work through some of these onboarding issues because some people may not have a reason to have captured that data already. So that when you're doing that, you have a whole interface to be able to go from your game and then basically hand the reins over to meta to do this whole other process.
[00:36:52.685] Thomas van Bouwel: Right. It's something where luckily there's a lot of back and forth between people building on presence platform, which is like meta's term for this collection of APIs that enables room scale mixed reality. There's luckily a lot of back and forth where people developing against these APIs are giving a lot of feedback because obviously these are new tools that are still in the process of being developed and where the UX still needs to sort of be fleshed out as well as some of the technology underlying it. Any technology like this, there are things that aren't foreseen until people start building against it. So the UX issues of scanning your room, I've seen exactly this that you describe, where people will scan way less than of the room than they might actually want to use. And especially because the 3D mesh that you scan gets then post-processed and sort of simplified. There's some issues that can occur at this point where we're sort of still going back and forth to try and find good solutions. There's actually some pretty bad issues currently where if you don't, certain parts of the mesh that you scan might not be very high detail. And so maybe you missed a part of your room, and something that's actually your wall becomes this open space. Or for example, in my apartments, there's a staircase that goes down. So it's effectively like a hole in the ground. And as I 3D scan this staircase, that gets flattened out as like a floor, like an empty floor. So for a game like LaserDance that can only infer what the room is like based on the 3D mesh, that feels like the ideal place to guide a player, right? Oh, cool, empty flat space, where in fact, there's a hole in the ground, right? So finding a good solution to be able to catch the lower detail parts of the mesh like this and figuring out how to avoid that so that people can you know firstly the game is playable but secondly the game is safe to play is still something that we're trying to figure out like the best way to approach that but yeah these are issues that you find out as you develop this game so luckily meta has been very receptive or at least engineers that have been very receptive on the feedback and they're definitely trying to learn and improve their software and their apis
[00:38:46.530] Kent Bye: Yeah. And just like Superhot and Beat Saber, some of these games that we think of as these paradigmatic examples of VR gaming and what is interesting about the medium, I feel like this is hitting on some of those different aspects of using your body as a controller, moving your body through space, doing something you could only really do in mixed reality. And there's enough of gameplay that's fun and challenging that the thing that I'm coming away with was, okay, how do you turn this into a little mini game experience into a full-fledged game that has other progressions and other levels and goes beyond just like being able to play through it and get to the end. But I noticed that you had little things that are like, here's a goal of how long we want this to take. And then here's how long it took you. And so you could have some ways for people to revisit the game and try to get faster because there are some ways that you have to either know how the lasers are moving, or if you've set up your room in one way, maybe you have the same room and maybe there's some variations where it actually like different paths that you have to take that are different than what you did the first time. So yeah, I'd love to hear some of your thoughts on as you continue to design it. I feel like there's something that's super compelling there, but you're also at that phase of like, okay, how do you make this into something that's not just a one-time novelty, but something that people can come back again and again and play it.
[00:40:09.534] Thomas van Bouwel: Absolutely. So the goals you mentioned, that's one way to try to make it more interesting and give it a bit more depth for people who want to really engage with the levels that are there. Some of those goals are dynamic also. Obviously, there's the target time that the game indicates. Like, oh, if you go underneath this target time, you get an extra star. That's something that's actually dynamically adapted based on the distance between the buttons or based on the size and shape of your rooms. Actually, for some levels, it's not the direct distance between the buttons that will determine your time, but maybe the... mean area of your room or the general average width that that path has, because sometimes the laser patterns will force you to zigzag through your room, for example. So that's dynamically set to give you an extra challenge. That's also something that, through playtesting, I have to figure out what's the right average time there, because that's something I'm figuring out, how people progress through the game like this. My main goal is definitely to try to keep it a good entry-level experience. If people can have a good, short, introduction into what immersive mixed reality can be, I'm already pretty happy with that. I do hope that there's enough challenge there in the final game for people to continue to engage with it. But my main priority is always to keep it simple. I think I definitely would want to add anything to the game that would add complexity to learning how to engage with the game. I like the simplicity of putting a headset on someone and saying, press the red button, and then immediately knowing what to do. And then if they want to go deeper, there's those extra challenges there to help engage them. But yeah, the core idea of the game still is to keep it simple, for sure, and to try to make it as accessible to a lot of people as well. Something I haven't really mentioned at this point, the game tries to adapt to different spaces, but people themselves are very different as well. And for a game that requires so much motion, like this game, that's actually something you want to try to account for as well, as best as you can. There's always a limit, of course. But there are accessibility settings in the game right now where you can set your height and your shoulder width and also how low you're comfortable going. And then in the same way that the levels will adapt to the room, they will actually try to adapt to those values as well. And that's also something that I'm learning as I'm testing to see what are the extremities where you want to be able to take that into account in the level design. And sometimes that comes up in very unexpected ways. I was recently playtesting at an event where some people who are really tall are playtesting the game, like over six feet, I guess. And there's certain levels in the game that have these, it's basically a tunnel of lasers that swings side to side. So you have to sort of lean left and right as you progress through this tunnel. And what I hadn't accounted for is if people are really tall, they proportionally have to lean way more, right? to the point where they cross their center of gravity and tip over. So I've actually seen like, OK, I need to take that height value and try to make sure that the lean is proportional to the height of the player as well. But yeah, that's an ongoing process. And again, a process of playtesting with a lot of people, not only to test against very different spaces, but to test against very different people as well. Like, when I started the game, I thought, OK, this is like a simple, not overscoped concept that I can build a mixed reality game around. Like, just laser patterns, and you go back and forth between the buttons, easy. But as I'm building it, I'm sort of finding, like, OK, building all the tools to be able to test against very different rooms, to be able to test against very different people. As I'm developing this game, there's a lot of layers of complexity already trying to build against this medium. And so I'm self-imposing, like, not complicating the game too much. Beyond that, because just the base game is a really interesting, but also very challenging design challenge for me right now.
[00:43:41.115] Kent Bye: Yeah, I noticed that there were some times where I had to get down on the ground and crawl through. And so I imagine that you'd want to have those accessibility options so that people could opt in or opt out of how low they're getting, whether they want to crawl or if they're able to even crawl and have a way for them to progress without having their own bodily limitations prevent them from being able to complete the game.
[00:44:03.615] Thomas van Bouwel: There's actually one level, I think the second level, where you have to get pretty low. There was the final stage of that level actually had you boot camp crawl underneath a bunch of lasers, where if you set how low, there's that value you can set where the minimum height that you are comfortable crawling under, that actually affects that level as well. But Maria, who creates Raindance, actually asked me very kindly, like, could I please remove that line, that final part? Just because not everybody will be comfortable crawling on the floor, which I completely understand. So I did remove that for the laser dance, for the Raindance demo.
[00:44:37.898] Kent Bye: Yeah, especially in a public exhibition context. Yes. The name of the piece is Laser Dance, and I was halfway expecting that there was going to be a little bit more musical components or at least like a rhythm game aspect of like maybe music that was really driving or timed to the lasers. And is that something that you're also exploring to make it a little bit more of a musical or dance experience, kind of like leaning upon what you were able to do with Cubism, but into a little bit more of an action thriller type of context?
[00:45:07.463] Thomas van Bouwel: It's definitely something that's being explored, but it's too in the early stages to really have that in the demo at this point. Ideally, the music would be something that is really in sync with the gameplay. It helps people get through the levels as they rhythmically have to dodge the patterns that these lasers are moving in. Yeah, and that's something, because level design is iterating so quickly and changing so quickly and still very much in development, it's sort of this, how do you say, it's like a scaffolding, right? First, you need to build all the systems to be able to design levels. Then you have to design a bunch of levels. And then you have to figure out how to plug music into that. And there's probably some back and forth between the level design and music design that will come in there. But unfortunately, that's something that's further down the process. So that's still something that's in development, but right now not in any of the public demos.
[00:45:51.744] Kent Bye: Okay. And I had a chance to talk briefly with Doug Northcook, who has got a new venture called Creature, who I know that they've been involved with both working with you, LaserDance, Thrasher, and Starship Home. And so maybe you could just give a bit more context as to Creature and how they were involved as the label to help produce this mixed reality game.
[00:46:13.737] Thomas van Bouwel: Yeah, so Creature is representing Cubism and Laserdance. And I've been very happy to work with Doug, basically, as I've been developing Laserdance, mainly because Creature is both a label and a studio. So they represent different games. Not quite as a publisher, but I think, as Doug described it, as a light publisher. but especially like helping with the platform relations and coaching through like various aspects of you know marketing and business development and things like this but they also run a studio right the creature studio which is building starship home also a room scale mixed reality game where you turn your room into a starship basically go into adventures and so it's been really good to work with them because we're definitely facing similar issues, but on the platform side, building against these new technologies, and then just also the design aspects of building a game like this, but also very practical things that you don't really think about initially, but are very much part of a game design process. you know, if you're building a mixed reality game in room scale, how do you capture footage of this in a way that's compelling and interesting? So we're like both also exploring like what's the best way to capture mixed reality footage in a way that people understand what the game feels like and where you can actually capture on device in a way that's like authentic to the experience. And so we're definitely like exploring how to do things like that as well. So it's been a really great collaboration in that we're sort of exploring similar things and sort of helping each other out and sort of navigating designing for mixed reality in that sense. Yeah.
[00:47:42.377] Kent Bye: Yeah, I can imagine that there's going to be lots of little nuanced things, like even like your home where you have your slanted ceiling and a stairwell. And so you have these little nuanced things that are going to be unique for each of these different spaces and how the gameplay changes for different spaces. I know for my space, the two walls, like where I placed one of the buttons, there was stuff on the ground. And so I ended up having to lean over and touch it. And what I noticed was that sometimes when I would start the next level, my body wasn't fully within the quote unquote safe space. And I'd push the button, I would immediately die because I was already being exposed. And then eventually I realized, oh, I'm actually supposed to like be inside this little safe space when I'm touching the button to start. But imagine there's going to be lots of like little nuanced things that that's probably something very specific to my location and my place where I was facing that and not realizing that I needed to act in a certain way, or maybe put the button in a different place or maybe clear out that space so that there's more room. And so, yeah, just to take each person's location and dynamically adapt and shift, there's an infinite number of different things that could be. And so just finding those archetypal design patterns of what the most common patterns are going to be as you launch a game like this and to have someone like creature who is working across the different games that are also facing the exact same thing. I could see how that would be a real help to trying to navigate some of these things and to try to share some of the information that you may be learning from each of these different games that they're working on.
[00:49:17.823] Thomas van Bouwel: So some of the tools, as you mentioned, like trying to figure out these different spaces and how to design against that, some of the tools to try to deal with that, I'm also building internally. And it's something where I'm very openly sharing that with Creature as well. But there's actually tools in the game right now to, as you capture the room, a player can voluntarily choose to push a button in the settings to basically send the JSON file of that room to me. So I can try to emulate that room in my editor, in the Unity editor. And so if somebody is having an issue with a specific space, I can try to recreate that locally, which is something that, of course, spaces are so different. To be able to troubleshoot is a very difficult thing. So you really need to build custom tools to be able to handle things like this. I've also traveled quite a lot and been able to scan different spaces. So I now have this collection of a lot of different rooms and spaces. that I can use as I design levels to test against. So I'm trying to build this little catalog or understand a little bit what the differentiating factors are between spaces and how to categorize that as I design levels. And it's definitely a challenge, but where it definitely helps to be able to ping pong back and forth with other developers within Creature, for sure.
[00:50:22.202] Kent Bye: Nice. So you're going to be having a brief little demo exhibition here at Rain Dance next week at the time of this recording. And then what's next for you as when it comes to laser dance and anything else that you may be working on? What are some other things that people should be aware of if they want to check it out?
[00:50:38.908] Thomas van Bouwel: Sure. Blazendance is definitely my full focus right now. And so it's great to be able to do events like Braindance and other events like that to be able to playtest in person. I think there's always a playtesting a lot sort of remotely with a lot of people. But there's always something that you learn by playtesting in person, by observing people in person. So I think it's really good to do events like this. Yeah, it's a game that's very much in full swing development. If people are interested in playtesting, you can actually sign up on the website itself. So it's something where, as I'm designing levels, I'm trying to run people through this demo on a weekly basis to get first impression feedback and see where people are struggling and then try to improve it incrementally. So it's basically my full-time occupation right now is level design and playtesting and incorporating feedback.
[00:51:30.287] Kent Bye: Nice. Yeah. So a little bit of a distributed play testing where people who have VR headsets with the quest three, they could sign up to get an early build and check it out and give some feedback.
[00:51:39.693] Thomas van Bouwel: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, if people go to laser dance game.com, that's, that's basically where you can find a set of information for that.
[00:51:46.457] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, yeah, as we start to wrap up, I'd love to hear what you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality, mixed reality, all these things with spatial computing and XR might be, and when might be able to enable.
[00:51:59.781] Thomas van Bouwel: Sure. To bring it back to when I was still working as an architect and my first motivation to get into VR, back then, I think my original interest definitely still stands that VR hopefully can humanize certain design processes and put the end user more central to processes of design, especially for architecture and for built environments. I hope that's still the case. It was something that as I worked at Resolve and as I've worked in that industry, I noticed that it was quite hard to sort of sell architects and the early stages of design of architecture, especially incorporating VR into the design process, because it's a whole other story that we can get into a different time, I think. But it's, how to say, the incentives of how the industry are currently organized are real lines to get people to use VR early on to incorporate design feedback of end users. They're more aligned to get sign-off clients quickly so you can get into the construction phases where more of the budget tends to be but my hope is that as vr becomes more and more part of the you know architectural design practice then it becomes more and more part of the actual design methodology as well and you know like the experiences i had with my dad early on where he would like point out a bunch of issues that i didn't think of because i was only designing on plan i hope more and more practices will have something similar like this in the future where Because they're working more and more in VR, they're noticing issues and potential user issues or design issues earlier on in the design process because they're using VR. So that's my hope for VR and the architectural practice. And more in general, Raindance has been a real... Great experience and a real eye-opener for me, especially for the VRChat community. I haven't really used VRChat that much. I was definitely aware that it's a very active community, but at most I would have been in a few public instances and not necessarily had the best first impression of VRChat. But participating in Raindance and seeing the things that people are making and the way that people are connecting in VRChat to make things together has been really inspiring. Like last week, I went to a jazz concert in VR where people in different places in Japan were playing together, and the music was really good. And it's great to see that VR really can be at its best when it can connect people and create community like this and help people lower the barrier of entry for people to find community and create culture. and find each other through different interests like this. So I think for me, in general, the ultimate potential of VR still is to lower the barrier of entry for people to work together, to make culture together, and to find community.
[00:54:32.065] Kent Bye: Yeah, totally agree with that. And I've always loved the rain dance when it comes around each year, because I know that Maria Jo and the other curators have been really focusing on trying to highlight some of the bleeding edge of virtual culture and the different creative projects that are happening there and the different performances and the live dance and music and yeah, just all the different things that are happening in that community. So it's always a great opportunity to check in and see what's happening. And I've signed up for around 20 events that are happening over the course of June. And so, yeah, just really enjoy seeing not only the experiences that are curated there, but also the immersive narratives and games of which the laser dance is going to be a part of. And there'll be a physical exhibition of that here at the end of the month as well. So yeah, I just really enjoy playing it. I do think that this is going to be one of those types of experiences that people want to share with other people to show them, hey, this is what is possible with this medium. And I know I'll be showing it to other folks as well, just to get some of their feedback. But yeah, thanks, Thomas, so much for joining me here on the podcast to help share a little bit more about your process of creating both Cubism and LaserDance. And yeah, just a little bit more about your journey into XR.
[00:55:43.297] Thomas van Bouwel: Absolutely. Thank you so much. And thank you so much for doing the show, by the way. I hope you don't mind me mentioning, but I've been listening for quite a while and I think there's a better and more complete sort of archive of what's been going on in the XR space. So I really appreciate the work that you do and I really appreciate you having me on here.
[00:55:58.573] Kent Bye: Awesome. Yeah, it feels long overdue, but it was great to catch up and dive into what you've been doing. So yeah, thanks again. Thank you. Thank you so much. So that was Thomas van Bouw. He's got a couple of games that he's been working on. One is Cubism. And then we talk a little bit about this mixed reality game called Laser Dance, which was featured at Rain Dance Immersive 2024. And you can wishlist it as it's coming out sometime here soon. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that, first of all, Well, the fact that we kind of started and ended with architecture is something that I'm reflecting on just because, you know, architects have to think about how to design things with space. And I think both cubism and laser dance are drawing upon this kind of spatial reasoning, spatial representation, shape designs, but also space. this challenge of how to deal with different architectural spaces with mixed reality so there's this challenge of like how do you take a space and then come up with some default paths that are going to make it interesting or fun so essentially with the laser dance you scan your room and you put two buttons on two sides of the room or the minimum distance has to be around like 10 feet and you have to get from one side to the other and you have to avoid the lasers that's the basic gist of it but there's so many different kind of nuanced complications to account for and so thomas has been gathering and capturing different archetypal representations of different rooms and then As he's iterating through, there's just a process of trying to figure out if he's able to design a default space that works in each of these different spaces. Iteration was something that was a theme that came up again and again, having people playtest things, but also like in order to do the game progression curve to say like, okay, this is how the next puzzle have this path of difficulty. He was doing this online user testing for people to play it to see like what was the percentage of people that were able to complete this puzzle and then how fast did it take them. And so he's been using that iterative game design to create Cubism and to slowly add new features like to simplify the design. So it's just a single button click to then hand tracking and then mixed reality design. And so he's continuing that and laser dance of having lots of different folks play tested and to get lots of feedback and i think what i saw at rain dance was a lot of fun i think there's a very solid foundation that i think that this will be one of the type of experiences that people want to get just to show people what's possible with mixed reality gaming it feels like richie's plank in a lot of ways like okay you want to show people what vr is you can put them on this vr experience that puts them at a very high height and gives them the sense that they're actually on a plank And this is just something that feels like, okay, here are some of the key affordances of what we want to see in a mixed reality game. They've got this kind of as your body moves, then you have the world is moving. So this kind of super hot mechanic, but also like you have to contort your body in different situations. So you really have to use your body as a controller. It's using all the tracking of both your hands and your head and upper body tracking. And so there's ways that it's modeling to see if like one of your shoulders are hitting some of the lasers. So pushing forward what's even possible on the Meta's presence platform. And, you know, because it's so on the bleeding edge, that means that there's still a lot of things that are being worked out. You know, just even when I was capturing my room space, there was just kind of like weird user interface things where it like captured it much quicker than I was expecting. And I had to like recapture it. So all those types of things are going to be sorted out as, the platform continues to iterate. And that's one of the things that Thomas had said is that, you know, you really have to have game developers like himself be building different experiences that are pushing the limits of those different APIs. And you'll have a continued evolution of that. But I think it's a very solid foundation from what I've seen and looking forward to see how he continues to flesh it out and to add more mechanics or just ways that people can come back to it over time. Or it may be just one of those things where you play through it and it's just a lot of fun For me, I had these moments of like the VR giggles that I get sometimes when something is just so novel and interesting and just clicks and lands. And I feel like I got that in this experience. And I feel like it's got a really solid foundation. And it's just a really great idea when people will see it. It's just like, yeah, of course, you want to have that type of experience because we've all seen in the movies, people going into these banks and avoiding all these lasers. And so It's a little bit less intricate than that. It's like a time pressure that you're facing. And sometimes when you move faster than the lasers move fast and then it actually becomes difficult and then you end up dying and going back to the beginning. But it's just one of those experiences that it's just a lot of fun to play through. Thomas has some behind the scenes tweets that he had announced that it was being opened up to wishlist at the Upload VR Summer Showcase event. So he actually had to create a whole 3D mount that he put onto a film gimbal. So he's mounting a Quest 3 headset onto a film gimbal and then putting like an iPhone camera that's also mounted that's going to be able to shoot through the lens to be able to capture this mixed reality footage. So capturing the mixed reality footage to be able to even show and market it through the trailer is something that he's also been iterating and working on. Also, Creature is something that came up. Doug Northcook is the CEO and co-founder of Creature, which is representing both Cubism and LaserDance and also Thrasher that is coming out tomorrow. And then they're also working on Starship Home. So I had a chance to actually catch up with Doug to get a little bit more about Creature and all the ways that they're a publishing label that is representing all these different organizations. really independent innovative games that i feel like they've got a really solid lineup here with laser dance as well as with thrasher which is a really amazing game it ended up being the game that won the top prize at rain dance immersive and we'll be diving into much more of that uh since i was you know one of the judges and i feel like it's really innovative in the way that it's using hand tracking and just creating this really like kind of ribbon dance controllers really exploring the potentials of you know using your body as a controller you know it's creating this level of abstraction so that when you're moving your hand around it's like you have a stick and there's a ribbon on the end of it and that's kind of the mechanic and with the apple vision pro it actually was able to compensate for some of the lower refresh rates for hand tracking so i just found that it actually was a super compelling game mechanic so i will be diving much more into thrasher tomorrow as it's launching and then we'll be talking a little bit more with doug nothercook just to talk about creature and it's representing all these different really innovative independent vr and mixed reality games and yeah A little bit of a sneak preview of the flagship mixed reality game that Creature is working on called Starship Home. So that's all I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoyed the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a listen-supported podcast, and I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
