I interviewed Riven‘s creative director Eric Anderson and development director Hannah Gamiel ahead of Venice Immersive 2024 since it was being featured within the Best of Selection. See 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. So I'm going to be diving into my coverage from Venice Immersive 2024. It's going to be around 36 episodes and over 30 hours worth of coverage and I'm actually going to be starting with a piece that you can watch at home. It's called Riven. It's by Cyan. It's an expansion of the Myst universe and the sequel to Myst, and originally a point-and-click adventure with slideshows, and then they remastered it to be both a 2D game and also a virtual reality game. Lots of really amazing open-world explorations and puzzle games that are really quite difficult, but I've got a link in the description, a video that I happen to use to help me along with I think the open world exploration that they have and the puzzles are top notch in terms of experiential design and world building that they have in this piece and definitely recommend it. I played it on the Quest. I happen to enjoy what they're able to do in terms of pushing the edge for what's possible in the Quest. There's also PC VR versions that you can also play if you want a little bit higher fidelity graphics. Definitely worth checking out. And we dive into a little bit about the process of reimagining the series and relaunch it and translate it into virtual reality. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Hannah and Eric happened on Wednesday, August 21st, 2024. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:40.592] Eric Anderson: I'm Eric. I'm the creative director at Cyan. I've been making video games with these kind of games for a long, long time with Cyan mostly. I also contributed to Jonathan Blows the Witness as one of the artists there. Not VR related, but game industry related. And we have been doing VR sort of mixed titles where you can play them in 2D and in VR now for a little over 10 years. And it's kind of our core competency, I guess, as a studio is trying to build games that bridge the gap between 2D and VR. Hannah, go.
[00:02:15.165] Hannah Gamiel: That was a great intro. I keep forgetting I have to go first before you because your experience is like whoosh and mine is like a fraction of that, relatively speaking. But my name's Hannah Gamiel. I'm the development director at Cyan. Eric and I have been heading up Cyan lately for the last few years. And I studied computer science and math, went to Scion initially as a programmer and did audio programming and general programming for Abduction, our first title, our first VR title, I should say, that came out in 2016, which was also a 2D VR game. And then I left, went to Tekla, dragged Eric with me. He had already worked at Tekla, but I dragged him back. I worked a little bit on The Witness, some other non-VR titles, including... Great Anniversary Edition, which came out a couple months ago as well. And also consulted for some VR companies like Phenomena, worked on some unannounced titles at that point for VR. And then Eric and I came back to Cyan and someone decided it would be a good idea to put me in charge of business and production and engineering. So Eric's got the art side and design and I've got the other things. We've shipped how many titles since we came back here? We shipped Myst for 2D and VR. Then we shipped Firmament for 2D and VR. And now we just shipped Riven for 2D and VR, all within like a four-year period.
[00:03:46.055] Eric Anderson: It's been a little breakneck lately. Yeah.
[00:03:49.717] Hannah Gamiel: But here we are, talking to Kent Lai.
[00:03:53.579] Kent Bye: Great. Well, maybe you could each give a bit more context as to your backgrounds and your journey into specifically working with virtual reality. Yeah.
[00:04:00.948] Eric Anderson: Sure. For me, it was Abduction, the Abduction project. We were in sort of early ideation on a new project when we announced, you know, we ran a Kickstarter back during the heyday of Kickstarter. This was shortly in the wake of Double Fine's Double Fine Adventure, whatever that ended up getting called. And VR, the Oculus, not even the Oculus Rift. What was what was the first one called? The DK1. DK1. Thank you. The DK1 just the previous year had done a Kickstarter as well. And so a few of us on the team had been toying with it just kind of as a interest, you know, oh, interesting hobby kind of thing. And it was during those discussions about what would become Abduction, that we were like, well, maybe we should consider fully supporting VR, not just playing with it, but actually making it a feature. And I think we were in one of the first, I don't want to say we were one of the first VR games, because that's not true, but we were one of the first VR full-size games, like a full-length game that could be played fully in vr if you want and we it was sort of trial by fire so it was hey let's try this thing and then before we knew it we were up to our eyeballs and dealing with all the realities of that that's a it's not a very sexy like origin story for how we got started in vr it was just kind of a whim and then like oh man this is really hard followed by oh i think we got the hang of this and we sort of kept riding the wave hannah you have to have a better answer than me for the story of our lives though oh this is really hard and then we just keep doing the really
[00:05:34.150] Hannah Gamiel: I came to Cyan after I graduated college when Abduction, I think it had already been decided it would be a VR title. So I was just kind of along for the ride initially. And one of the things I worked on with the engineering team was how to balance 2D and VR gameplay where you could hot swap a headset on off in the middle of gameplay, which was amazing. very hard and difficult to do. So that was my initial experience in VR, generally speaking, is solving really difficult problems like that. We wanted to make sure that the game was accessible, first and foremost, to anyone who wanted to play it, especially if you didn't have a VR headset. Since at that point, I don't think the retail versions of them were really out yet. It was just the development kits. And additionally, touch controls were not a thing at that point either. So we were designing for the Oculus Remote and Xbox GamePad to be qualified.
[00:06:37.862] Eric Anderson: To clarify, the remote, the thing that looks like a TV remote. Yeah, exactly.
[00:06:43.504] Hannah Gamiel: Yeah. It looks like those Chromecast remotes or something now. But yeah, so we were initially designing for that. And we were on Unreal 4 at that point. So even the basic building blocks of support were very, very limited in Unreal at that point. And eventually we moved to touch controls, wands, all of that. But that was more, I believe that was like end of summer 2016 and December 2016 that those things came up. Potentially check my dates on that. So it was like we released the game with this initial support for GamePad and oculus remote followed up by patch support for vive wands and oculus touch i believe so that was my intro
[00:07:31.246] Kent Bye: Okay. Well, I've been covering virtual reality for over a decade now. And I remember running into Rand Miller at PAX where he was showing Abduction. And at that time, though, it was starting in 2016 of January is when I started to really pivot into focusing more on storytelling rather than gaming. And so I never actually did a full playthrough of Abduction. And then when this came out, I was like, oh, this is a classic game. I'm going to try it out. And then I think I jumped in and lasted for like... 15 or 20 minutes. And I was like, oh, this is hard. I don't know if I have the patience for this. And so I never actually finished it. And then the Venice Immersive Festival is coming up now and you got selected to be a part of the best of selection, highlighting some of the best experiences that have come out over the past year. And so I usually like to be a completionist and see all the different experiences. And then, so I jumped in, someone had done a walkthrough playthrough that was like three hours. I was like, oh, okay, I should be able to to get through this. And then, you know, I, whenever I got stuck, I would turn to his walkthrough and then the puzzles had changed. And then I was like, oh my God, it took me around nine or 10 hours to get through it all.
[00:08:40.193] Eric Anderson: We got him. He fell for it.
[00:08:43.613] Kent Bye: And so, uh, yeah, I just, I, I kind of surrendered myself to just, okay, I have to see this through after completed. I have to understand what's going on here. So maybe we could go back to like, was you said you had like three different releases over the last four years was missed the first one of those and then ribbon or what was. What was kind of the next phase of doing this update of previous IP and having both the remastered version for 2D and VR? Maybe take me back to that point after Abduction. Catch me up a little bit as to like what the plan was for bringing up these classic titles into either remastered versions and or VR.
[00:09:20.313] Hannah Gamiel: Sure. So Eric, do you mind me taking us?
[00:09:22.895] Kent Bye: No, go for it.
[00:09:23.896] Hannah Gamiel: Dive in. Eric and I returned to Cyan, at which point Rand and Tony were like, please come and just usher us into the future. So we were like, of course, sure, we'll do that. We came back and by then they had completed the Kickstarter for Firmament, which was kickstarted as a VR game. And we needed to figure out what the plan was moving forward for us. We decided that the things that typically were successful for us at Cyan included the missed IP and Firmament was not missed IP. So we were like, how can we smartly integrate leaning on this old IP whilst betting on new IP? And that's where the plan for remastering or remaking really the old versions was birthed. And 2019, in December, Meta came and took a look at Myst running on Quest. And that was kind of like our first foray into VR, other than Firmament, but especially for the old IP in like a really meaningful sense, I should say. And Meta was like, amazing. We want this. This is great. By then, the Quest 1 was only out. So we took a bet. We were like, all right, let's make this thing for Quest. Let's make another VR and 2D game because we're insane. We like to do both. And that kind of became our strategy moving forward. So we were alternating old stable IP with new IP. So it started with Myst being released on Quest in December, 2020, followed by the PCVR or PC2D console version, I believe August, 2021. Then it was followed by Firmament. Firmament in 2023 and now Riven in 2024. So at this point, since Eric and I came back, it's been old, new, old, and now question mark.
[00:11:24.104] Eric Anderson: I've been sort of piggybacking back and forth. I was going to say, it should be stated that bringing Riven and Myst to VR was something that Rand had wanted to do ever since the advent of the modern VR era. He's a big booster for VR initiatives in general, and that was something he had always floated as like, yeah, and telling our fans and everything, like, oh, we're going to bring them to VR. It's inevitable. It's going to happen. And of course, Hannah and I are in the background trying to keep the machine running like, oh, I guess we're doing that too. So it was actually really fortuitous, I guess is the word, as we were trying to figure out how to best navigate through the Firmament project, which was a big Kickstarter project. And yes, we did get some Kickstarter funding for it, but that was not enough to see it to completion. A lot of people don't understand that like video games are very expensive to make. And so the Myst VR push came at the right time and it was an opportunity, like to Hannah's point, we sort of looked at our options and we're like, well, it means taking on another project, but, you know, we know Myst is going to do well with our fan base and that could help us fund, you know, other projects. And so that's how we've been kind of I guess, rationalizing it. Not that we don't want to re-release Mr. Riven because we love those projects and it's been fantastic to get those out in front of modern audiences. But it's also a way to sort of balance the risk with new IPs that may not do as well versus the missed Dunny IP in-universe stuff. Yeah.
[00:12:55.769] Kent Bye: So it sounds like there might be a kind of a dual track of the pragmatic financial realities of sustaining yourself as an independent development shop, very beloved IP that could have audiences for both 2D and VR. But I guess the other strand I'm wondering is like, how much was VR a part of like, because there is VR and because there's this new platform, was there excitement that really catalyzed this reimagining of VR? Both missed.
[00:13:19.740] Eric Anderson: Oh, yeah. Definitely. I feel like we're giving you like the most clinical reaction to VR that we possibly can. We're like, yeah, VR is really hard. Games are hard. No, let's we should wind. We should rewind a little bit because I feel like we're burying the lead here, which is that like there's a lot of people in our studio. Very, very passionate about VR. doing what we do in a way that you can only really do in VR, right? Riven's a good example. So Riven was originally a slideshow, point and click, pre-rendered stills. And even playing the original, as those of us in studio have been sort of going back to it repeatedly throughout development, It's easy to get lost, which seems weird for a slideshow, but it's easy to lose your way. It's easy to not know where you are. And solving puzzles while also trying to keep track of what direction north is is just really, really hard sometimes. And it's amazing how the simplest thing, like putting a person with presence in VR fully immersed in the world, fundamentally changes the experience, like for the better in every way. So it's something we've always been passionate about, really trying to convey the feeling of actually being in that place. Because people talk about Mr. Riven, our legacy games is like, oh, it's a world I want to live in. Well, we're trying our best to give people the opportunity to, you know, put on a headset and really go and be there for a little while. And yeah, Hannah, jump in because I know you're super passionate about it.
[00:14:42.749] Hannah Gamiel: Yeah, I had a pretty core memory formed, funny enough, at PAX West. I can't recall if it was 2016 or 2017. It may have been 2017 at that point because we had Touch Control or Vibe Wand support in for Abduction, but we were showcasing Abduction at PAX West one of those years. there were people who would come up to the booth and be really excited. They'd recognize Cyan. They'd be like, oh, I played Myst. And they'd put the headset on for abduction and people would just start crying. This is before it was like maybe slightly less acceptable to like share VR headsets, but yeah, pre-COVID era. So like the crying part, I wasn't like super grossed out by.
[00:15:30.192] Eric Anderson: I think back now I'm like, oh, that was a whole different time, man.
[00:15:32.754] Hannah Gamiel: We were, of course, like wiping everything down and stuff, but I wasn't like, oh, my God, COVID is going to get in my eyes if I put this on. But there were people who had put on the headset and start crying, saying, it feels like I'm really here. It feels like I'm really in a Myst game now, even though abduction has nothing to do with the Myst IP. It made a really big impact on people just being in a world that felt real and And to just to kind of like agree with Eric on a certain point before where he said like, this was kind of like one of the first like fully fleshed, like hours long experiences that wasn't constrained to like a room. You could tell that like people, it wasn't just about play that they wanted in VR, they wanted an escape too. and we were able to offer people and i think we still are able to offer people that kind of escape that they want and i think that's what we've like that's what's driven me at least through the years especially with mist and ribbon like knowing that people have always wanted to really feel like they're in the world that's why we put so much time into our art production efforts and that's why we put so many little details in the environment that you can inspect To some extent, it isn't so much about making new and novel interactions for us in VR. Because honestly, there are people who are way better at that than we are. And we'll leave it to them to do that. But for us, it's more about providing that kind of form of escape. And that's what I'm really excited for.
[00:17:06.678] Eric Anderson: I think I would agree with all of that. I think we also got really lucky in that the particular brand of whimsy that we try to put out into the world fits really well. Like the idea of having a space in a game that's literally just a rocky shoreline next to the beach And you're just watching the waves come in and listening to the wind and being there. It's not about crazy interactions. It's about just building a space for the player and putting some beauty there and giving them an opportunity to absorb it. I think it was a really, really good fit for what we happened to do. And we thankfully were looking for that sort of a platform at the right time. And now we sort of came along for the ride, but yeah. To Hannah's point, I think there are plenty of studios out there that do VR interaction and VR gameplay a lot more impressively than what we do. We're all about the world building, replacing your reality with
[00:17:58.345] Hannah Gamiel: Yeah, I was telling Eric earlier, it feels like, in my mind, the future of VR, XR, AR, in my mind, even if people don't like this future, but I feel like it's inevitable, is kind of like the brain dance form of future from cyberpunk, where you put on a headset and you are suddenly seeing the world through someone else's eyes or experiencing something completely different. And that's what drives me. If you just forget about all of the awful things that come along with like what brain dance might mean from cyberpunk. But that's what I find like really compelling with our games.
[00:18:35.373] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, after having a chance to play through all of Riven now, I can really understand how there's a completely different paradigm for how you are starting to think about the scale and scope of puzzles across geographic space, mostly in VR games that I've played. It's much more constrained to smaller regions of a space to solve a puzzle. In this way, playing through Riven felt like, okay, this is the hardest puzzle game I've ever played, but also like some of the most rewarding because I'm rewarded by exploration and having a choice and having the ability to decide where I want to go. And also there's narrative elements that are woven into this deep lore of this space. So it was beautiful to look at and there's interesting, mysterious narrative that I'm figuring out. And even though it was incredibly difficult, I was still motivated to figure out some of the more intractable problems of the piece to be able to continue to explore. And so I had a moment last night where I told my wife, I was like, I got to finish this game because I'm talking to a super famous developer tomorrow. And she's like, oh, and she's not really a gamer at all. And she said, oh, who are you talking to? And I'm like, oh, I'm talking to the developers who created Myst and Riven. And she's like, oh, I played Myst. And I was like, what? Hell yeah.
[00:19:51.244] Hannah Gamiel: Didn't even know that about your own wife? Oh my gosh.
[00:19:55.612] Kent Bye: So I think it speaks to how far reaching this IP of both Myst and Riven have gone because there is this genre defining new paradigm that you've really helped to pioneer with the point and click adventure and then kind of expand it out into now these 2D forms. What could be in some ways called a walking simulator or puzzle game. I mean, there's other genres that have come up afterwards, but I think within VR, it feels like it's something different than I've seen from other programs. And I think it has to do with that scope and scale But yeah, I'd love to hear some thoughts or reactions on that.
[00:20:27.901] Hannah Gamiel: Oh, I was just going to make a comment that's like, I know you didn't mean it in this way, Kent, but the term walking simulator kind of drives me crazy because it points to like the assumption that every game should just be like an action game to some extent. Whereas it's like, can't we just take a nice walk in the park where mayhaps there is a puzzle as well? I can see some people calling like Dear Esther, for example, a walking simulator. I'd like to think that Myst and Firmament and Riven especially are like, it's like a world that someone has lived in and you get to experience it. And it's very difficult, like you said, to like figure out what the next steps are. But I love that things aren't always the way they seem in our games. There's always more under the surface to dig into. And for me personally, my curiosity is driven by like, okay, but what's on the other side? of this thing. And I think that's what has been pulling a lot of people into our games too. I think it's surprisingly, I used to think that our core audience would skewed older also, especially when it came to like newer, older games we made. But Eric and I at Mysterium, which is like the annual fan gathering last year or a year and a half ago, asked the audience like who here is here because you're a fan of like this older stuff. And like, really the majority of people who raised their hands, raised their hands for the newer things we were making, which was incredible. Anyway, it was kind of just like a big thought bubble, I just said.
[00:22:05.780] Eric Anderson: No, I can't, I think you summed it up really well when you were describing the feeling of playing through Riven. I mean, that's the secret sauce of all the games we try and make. We always endeavor not to build a game, which sounds stupid because of course we're building a game, but we really do try and approach it from the world building first. We want to build a space that the player has to at least try a little bit to think about the why. Why is it like this? Why am I running up against this puzzle? And if the answer is, oh, it's just arbitrary puzzle friction to slow the player down, okay, that's the wrong reason. Not working. Not working. It can't just be a puzzle for a puzzle's sake. It's got to tie in to the story of the people who lived here or the people who used to live here or the antagonists of the story. What are their motivations? What are they after? And of course, you know, that's what all games and films are really about. But we try our best to make the player forget that they're Playing a silly video game and we really want them to try to absorb as much as they can of the space and think about it like a real space. It occurs to me this is not a question that you have asked, but I'm going to throw this in now. It's I think one of the reasons I'm not super fired up about AR. in general is because AR is about augmenting the world that you're already in with extra stuff, adding a layer on top. And I think we're more interested in completely wiping the slate clean and giving you a new world to inhabit. And so I think VR, like fully immersive i get more fired up about that than i do about the idea of you know overlays of the real world to hannah's point i think that escapism is a hugely motivating factor and you brought up the sense of scale like i want to be able to bring people into a world where they look up and they see something that just makes them feel like an ant and it's like nothing they've experienced or could even experience in the real world or maybe you know they only on a vacation destination or something like that like that's a cool feeling to be able to give somebody a place that they can go visit. I don't know how many different ways we can restate the same point, but like that's yeah, that's a hugely motivating factor.
[00:24:11.161] Kent Bye: Mm hmm. Yeah, we'd love to dig into kind of the old and the new in terms of comparing like how things were modified or adapted to both have the experience, work on 2D with kind of updates, but also work within VR. But I haven't had a chance to play through the original versions of Myst and Riven. And I'm very curious to hear from each of your perspectives, like your first encounter to this IP and what your experiences were with the very early beginnings of both Myst and Riven. Yeah.
[00:24:41.013] Eric Anderson: I have to answer that question first then, because I don't think Hannah was. Were you alive then when it came out? Yes, I was. Oh, my gosh. I was in high school when the original Mist came out. It was formative. It was a big deal. Anybody over about 40, I would say, probably remembers it in some fashion if they had a computer at the time. And it was the first game that felt like it could be a work of art. And then the narrative was especially missed. The narrative, looking back now, is like, oh, it's very simple. But at the time, it felt new and fresh and unlike anything I'd ever experienced. I was in college when Riven came out, and then I went to work for the company shortly after that. So... Both hugely formative. I'll let Hannah go now because her stories are very different than mine.
[00:25:28.775] Hannah Gamiel: Yeah, mine's much shorter. I was one year old when my mom played Myst with me on her lap. I have vague recollections of her playing Riven too with she returned to Temple Island. Spoiler alert, by the way. And the big door rises and Gen is like his projections like peering at you through the temple. And I was terrified. So I never wanted to watch her play after that. But I played it on my own when I was older, certainly like college aged, and was really, really just like stunned by how sucked in I got, despite it being effectively a slideshow, like Eric said. So I would consider it my, Riven is certainly my favorite game in the entire Myst series, I would say.
[00:26:17.244] Eric Anderson: But now in terms of bringing it from original to 2D, I mean, graphics aside, that's a whole other thing. Interactions had to be modified. And actually, Hannah, I'll have you talk about the interaction stuff because that's a deep well of topics. From the graphics perspective, the one thing I will say, though, is that When we brought Myst from 2D into VR, we had a lot more room to maneuver because the graphics on Myst were so much less fidelity that we had to fill in a lot more. It was like, okay, what goes here? I don't know. Let's look at the original. Oh my God, that looks terrible. Let's figure it out. With Riven, I think there was a little bit less of a gap between what was and what we wanted it to be. But in both cases, our objective was not to photorealistic like per pixel recreate what was there. Our objective, we said it internally all the time was to recreate what you think it looked like, like to recreate your memory of the place. And we've had a lot of people who play these games say that they're like, oh my gosh, you built what I remember this looking like, but then I go look at the original and it's nothing like it. You know, even even in Riven, even in Riven, the rocks and stuff, we spent a lot of time really trying to get those just so and plausible. And if you go look at the original, it's just a very simple hype map extrusion of the rocks and capturing sort of that emotional feeling about what it was like to play Riven. That was the goal. But we did have to change a lot, too. So, Hannah, I tried to cue you up to talk about interactions a little bit, because that is actually a really interesting topic when it comes to. Yeah.
[00:27:53.898] Hannah Gamiel: Yeah. I should probably start off by saying we took a different approach almost like backwards from what Eric said about like Myst having more freedom graphics wise. Myst had less freedom kind of like movement wise, I think, than I think we made for Riven. In Myst, we were trying to be really, really careful about motion sickness, especially. So we had modified certain key elements of the quest version of Myst. what we love to call the dentist's chair, for example, in the planetarium. And in the original game, it literally was like a dentist's chair. Like you put your feet up sort of deal and then look at a panel toward the ceiling.
[00:28:38.219] Eric Anderson: You'd like recline and your whole view would shift upward.
[00:28:41.563] Hannah Gamiel: And in this new version, the VR version of Myst, we instead kind of made it like a vertical chair where it looks like you would probably kind of like relax against the back while you're still standing. Because at the time, based on what we had learned so far from VR, it was uncomfortable for people to go in real life standing to suddenly sitting in the game. And as the years progressed, we saw that games were becoming more and more forgiving, I guess, about that and making assumptions that indicated maybe your average VR player nowadays doesn't care so much about that disconnect between standing in real life and sitting in the game. This is just, like, one example, really, that I'm using. But it applied to a lot in Riven. And when we made the Myst VR version, like... I know there were a couple people on the team kind of unhappy that we had to compromise some of the really essential aesthetics of the Myst game. For Riven, it felt like we made significantly fewer compromises. It felt like... For one, we just decided that people were going to have to be comfortable with suddenly, if they were standing in real life, they're suddenly going to be placed seated in a chair in the maglev, for example, which I'm sure you experienced and the spider chair, for example, you're just like placed in the chair, your legs, if you're standing in real life, they're clipping through the chair, technically.
[00:30:11.087] Eric Anderson: And like the maglev, when you get in, you actually move, you know, sort of through the back of the chair. And we weren't sure how that was going to land with people.
[00:30:18.032] Hannah Gamiel: Exactly. So we decided to leave the essential aesthetics in, hoping that people would be comfortable with it. I will say not a single person so far, and I read like every review, by the way, has mentioned this to be a problem. So I feel like my confirmation is there now that people actually don't care about being forced to sit in a VR game if they're standing at this point. And specifically what I mean by forced to sit is being placed in a chair in the game every now and then. When it comes to a few other things in the game, we were very, very, very careful again to like, keep the original aesthetic in of Riven because so many visuals from that game are seared into people's brains and additionally our brains. Like we really didn't want to compromise anything about the visuals. What we did instead was try and think as creatively as we could to figure out ways to make it as accessible as possible in VR. So we did have to change a few puzzles compared to the original. Some of these puzzles include almost like a famous puzzle at the very, very, very beginning of the game, where in this new version, you have to go back around to the other side of the rotating room on Temple Island. It's the first puzzle you're basically able to do. And you lift a little like locking mechanism thing from the door and it falls to the ground and then you push the door open. In the original game, you were supposed to somehow surmise that you're supposed to climb underneath this like, I don't know, it felt like it was like a one foot space, Eric, in the original game underneath that door. You're supposed to click on that space and then you crawl through. Yeah.
[00:31:58.866] Eric Anderson: Even the original players of the original hated this puzzle because it wasn't telegraphed very well. You just had to click on the floor in front of the door and then magically you'd climb under. But one of the rules that we had was that all interactions must be reachable to a VR player.
[00:32:14.644] Hannah Gamiel: And we should come back to that too.
[00:32:16.546] Eric Anderson: I was actually going to say, to me, that's like maybe the primary compromise. Is that the right word? Between VR and 2D was literally just getting, like, I'll go back to Myst for a second. In Channelwood, which is one of the most iconic puzzle sequences in that entire game, there's little valves that you need to switch the state of and the valves are at like foot level, which in the original game, you look down, you see a valve on the floor, you click it, it changes state. It's very, very simple. But as soon as you start thinking about having to reach those in physical space for VR players, that was one where we were like, ooh, how do we feel about putting an interactable literally on the ground, right? Well, that's a whole conversation. Like, let's figure out what our rules and regulations are in terms of interaction regions. And so we came up with like a really concise, like all interactions, you must be able to reach them within this volume if you're standing at, you know, the neutral spot or whatever. Go ahead, Hannah.
[00:33:12.335] Hannah Gamiel: Yeah, that really was the basis for... I don't want to say a lot. It's really just a few changes, really, that stand out in Riven to make the game playable in VR. There's also a sequence previously in the original game. In order to enter Gen's lab, you have to go through some tubing through the ceiling. You have to look up and decide to click through the tubing and somehow, with godly strength, lift yourself into the tube and... Move through it.
[00:33:41.624] Eric Anderson: It was like crawling through an air vent, effectively.
[00:33:43.705] Hannah Gamiel: Yeah, the player character lift day was every day for them. So that was the way that originally worked in the original game. For the new game, we decided to add a whole new area, which Kent, you experienced. That's the mining cave in particular. Spoilers! And we just chose to make the player go up on an elevator instead from the mining cave to Gen's office. And that sort of change was like very much rooted in like, okay, if Gen actually spent a lot of time here and worked here and lived here in this world, what would it mean for him to enter his office? Would he really have this exhaust pipe? I mean, he's not climbing through it. The original game doesn't make an assumption that he's climbing through it. But surely there are other ways he could be using this space that would make it more accessible to the player in this new version. So that was the approach we took with a lot of these. And actually, to bring it back to the door behind the rotating room, it was really important to us to start communicating to the player things that they should pay attention to that were related to the moiety the rebels on the island and that newer version of the puzzle shows a good example of like the symbolism you see around the world and i don't want to spoil it for anyone but like it does give you a very direct hint as to like what you should pay attention to on that door that's used everywhere else in the game now too and it points to that little walking mechanism so
[00:35:14.105] Eric Anderson: It gave us an opportunity to really make a lot of that hidden puzzle language a little more cohesive than it even was in the original.
[00:35:21.510] Hannah Gamiel: Cohesiveness is a big theme for this version of Riven. I think a lot of people, they go and play the original game and they get frustrated at one or two puzzles in particular because it is so difficult. And although this new version is difficult, we tried to tell more of the story and reasoning in the world so that the player could put the pieces together maybe a little more easily.
[00:35:46.103] Eric Anderson: Yeah, and Hannah and I, while we didn't work on the original, we did have Richard and Rand, who did work on the original, two of the directors of the original game, And if they were here right now, I bet they would say it felt because they say this all the time. And, you know, modern interviews, they'll say we really did take it as an opportunity to refine things that we didn't like about the original. And it's they almost got a chance to revise a classic. And, you know, thankfully, the fans seem to understand the changes. They seem to be behind them. They seem to be in support of the changes for the most part, which is nice. Yeah.
[00:36:23.100] Kent Bye: Yeah, I found myself, I don't know how many other people played it the way that I did, which was one marathon nine to 10 hour session.
[00:36:29.989] Hannah Gamiel: Oh my, wow.
[00:36:33.974] Kent Bye: I did not leave VR. I started at 7 p.m. and ended around 4 or 5 a.m. Whoa. And I... Oh my gosh. would pause the game, bring up the browser, and see a walkthrough. Because I vastly underestimated how difficult this experience was going to be. I saw that there was a 45-minute slot that was going to be at Venice, and I was like, oh, okay. I was like, okay, I'll budget that around an hour or so, and then it ended up being... I very quickly learned that, well, first of all, that I had made myself to prison Island and then know how to progress. And then kind of missed that. There was like, I think this happened to me a lot of this experience of being in VR. I think you have a full field of view. And sometimes when you have like a 2d version, your field of view is a little bit more limited and you can maybe direct focus a little bit more about what you should be focusing on, but you don't have that forced focus ability in VR. And so. either you see it or you don't. And there was so many times where I missed a button or I missed like, Oh, Hey, there's a, there's actually a pathway there that you can go through or, or, Oh, you, you flip this thing around and you go through the other side and there's another door there. And so a lot of times it was stuff like that. And there was like whole other times that was something completely different where I'll pull out my notebook and, you know, have all these notes about, we love to see people's notebooks. Because there was, I guess, a brilliant insight in the way that you designed it was that, yeah, you can watch a walkthrough, but unless you understand the mechanics of how some of these puzzles work, the puzzles are going to be different for every playthrough. And so if you're trying to just use the exact inputs as to what this person did, which is what I did and discovered many different opportunities that I needed to actually figure out how to do this puzzle and not just copy the answer off of somebody else. And so it kind of forced me into this situation of, like I said, it was in VR for nine or 10 hours straight playing this game. Technically not because sometimes I would actually have to lift up my headset to like look at my notes or, you know, I was trying to kind of peek through the bottom of my headset to make notes. But that's probably like one of the biggest complaints that I have is that like there isn't some sort of like system internal to VR to do that. And that would require like the whole innovation to do that. But I found that I needed to actually have some paper to write down stuff. because I could take screenshots, but I still needed to annotate them and really puzzle through how to solve it and figure out this numbering system and kind of speak another language in some ways. It felt like there's a lot of linguistic and other language-based puzzles that were included here that required me to actually make some notes and puzzle through things outside of the game, which I think when you're in VR, that's one of the things that was probably the most frustrating thing for me was that it wasn't easy for me to do that in the context of the game.
[00:39:15.899] Hannah Gamiel: That's where I feel like if there was ever a device powerful enough to render Riven in MR plus show like what's immediately surrounding you, like your notebook. So you never have to take the heads out.
[00:39:29.747] Eric Anderson: Mask out just the notebook.
[00:39:31.048] Hannah Gamiel: Yeah, exactly. Like that is like... Because then it's like you're really, really in that space. You don't have to peek. I do that all the time, by the way. And our QA team does that all the time. They're like peeking through the bottom of the headset or like lifting it slightly to take a note of something.
[00:39:46.416] Eric Anderson: That's one of the most common bits of feedback that we get. I mean, obviously. And it's one of those things where we're a very, very small team. And so it's been difficult to say like, hey, let's put a whole bunch of resources into coming up with an in-game note. I mean, clearly some games have solved similar problems. I'm thinking of Half-Life Alyx with the whiteboard markers and, you know, being able to write things in-world would be cool, but that's a lot. That's a lot to solve.
[00:40:14.787] Hannah Gamiel: We aren't Valve, I guess. Yeah. And... Yeah, that's another thing, too. I'm glad you brought it up, Eric, because we're a really small team, relatively speaking. I'm sure in the VR space, we're probably larger than your average VR team, to be fair. Definitely not Endream size, but we're a team of 30 people who made Riven, Myst, Ferment the last four years, five years. And people expect a lot from us, especially considering our pedigree and the kinds of games we have been able to ship with this size team in the last few years. More often than not, people are thrilled with the game. But then there are minor bits of feedback are, man, I really wish the characters could look like The Last of Us, though. or like Baldur's Gate. And it's hard to hear that. I mean, I'm so used to hearing it by now, but it's still hard because it's clear that people want the highest quality from us. And it's just like, unless someone wants to give us, I don't know, $200 million, it's not something we're going to be able to perfect or reach. So I do like, I feel like the solve for what you're looking for, Kent, in note-taking, it's probably going to come one day. And I'm very excited for Meta to spend that money to make it happen.
[00:41:32.758] Eric Anderson: That would be a case to go to my previous comment about not being super jazzed about MR. That would be a perfect use case where MR would bleed into that VR experience that I chase in a really positive way. Like, oh, I could see solutions that could come out of that.
[00:41:48.789] Kent Bye: Yep. Mm-hmm. Well, more and more, they're able to, like, I was able to pause the game and bring up the browser and watch the YouTube video walkthrough to be like, okay, where am I getting stuck here? Because I want to see, like, I was more interested in getting that dopamine hit of the next world, the next adventure. And when I get stuck in a puzzle that sometimes requires me to navigate the entirety of all these five islands to kind of somehow figure out what to do next and then come to find out I just missed a button that was sitting right there and killing me the whole time. Yeah. To come back to that point of like sometimes with the 2D version, I think you're able to either create and design things in a way that is still in the field of view or maybe make sense in a way that people are seeing on a 2D screen. And sometimes in VR games, it's like, oh, there's a big shiny object that you know you can pick up. Yes. You know, sometimes I would have to go and put my hand over the objects to see if it turns yellow, to see if I could pick it up and interact with it. And so there's a spamming of the environment. So there's this trade-off between like handholding of like, Hey, this big shiny object over here, come interact with me versus, you know, the kind of having to search a little bit and do a little bit of work. But yet at the same time, having to spam the entirety of an environment, trying to figure out if there's some clue that you can get in order to get past this puzzle that, you not even have a solution in that room because the scope of the puzzle is the entire island, like all these five islands that, so the scale of that is like completely different than any of the other games. So I just, as I found myself in this position of like, at what point am I going to pause and just like look at what the answer is so that I can progress in the game versus like go on a, what could be a wild goose chase for hours and hours. And, you know, for some people they play through like that. But for me, my patience for that type of open-ended exploration that could just be something that I missed, I would rather watch a video and figure out what the answer is so that I continue to progress through the game and look to see the different environments and the storytelling and kind of just progress to the end.
[00:43:45.930] Hannah Gamiel: Totally hear you on that. We actually, it used to be worse, believe it or not. We had a playable version of Boiler Island in 2022, maybe 2023, that we got some play testing feedback on. And it started you at the beginning of Boiler Island, you solve the puzzles, you actually skip the mining cave because it wasn't built at that point. And you head directly to Gen's lab and then you can exit. And the feedback we received, because at the time we had a lot of stuff on the desks in Gen's office and all of it was interactable at the time. Like you hover your hand over it, your hand glows yellow and you get to pick up the thing, whatever it is, like a pen, an inkwell, a jar, a frog floating in like mysterious fluid, like whatever it is. And yeah, the feedback we got most overwhelmingly was like, I couldn't tell if there was a puzzle here. It was all red herrings. Yeah, it was all red herrings. I was able to interact with all of it. What, like, I'm not sure if I did the right thing, really. So we had to take a step back from there and sort of evaluate like, okay, this is interesting because, you know, a lot of people when they play VR games, they expect, especially in abduction, we got feedback that was like, I really wish that I could have like picked up the things on the table. Like I could do that in job simulator. Why can't I do that here? So that was our initial line of thinking, which was like, well, we'll just make everything that looks interactable be interactable. But we didn't consider the fact that that could suddenly turn into a huge environmental red herring. But we had to draw the line somewhere because again, like someone lived in this world and someone who like works in an office isn't going to have pristine desks with nothing on it. There are going to be things that exist on the desk that aren't necessary to the puzzle. So we just decided, all right, we'll let them live there in VR, but you just can't pick it up. I think there's maybe only one thing on that desk that looks like things that can't be picked up that technically does roll away once you hover your hand over it, which is like, I have some personal thoughts on maybe ways we could have made that better. But I also know it was like very, very important to like Richard and Rand to keep the sort of aesthetic of the original and what it meant to like have people live in an environment.
[00:46:12.362] Eric Anderson: I think it's a lot harder with Riven too because we were remaking a game that already exists and people have affection for it and we have affection for it. So we only had so much leeway we could push things. We were kind of painted into a corner. Whereas like Infirmament, which was a brand new game, it wasn't a remake, We had conversations all of the time about like the red herringness of interactables. And in that game, we pulled out a lot of them. We didn't even include non-interactable items. It was just like, well, let's try to keep that to a minimum because we don't want to fill the world with a bunch of stuff that distracts the player. But it has sparked a lot of interesting conversations moving forward, you know, about... does it make sense and we haven't come to conclusions this is sort of an ongoing conversation but like does it make sense to do 2d vr titles or does it make more sense to focus your efforts on vr only and 2d only to avoid a lot of these exact Because it's frustrating to be in the middle of a development cycle and be like, ah, crap, I really want to do this thing, but I can't because the decision making is so divergent between 2D and VR that either way it feels like a compromise. No matter what you do, you feel like you lose control.
[00:47:22.682] Hannah Gamiel: Yeah, I wanted to actually go back to something you said, Kent, too, about in 2D, you've got the screen and you have more focused visuals. It's interesting because I agree with that, first off. And second, people who've played the game in VR, live streams, friends, family, et cetera, they put on the headset and the first thing they do is go, whoa! And they're just like looking at everything and also nothing at all, right? They're just like taking it all in. And I can see that. It's like a lot for your brain to process. Like you're physically in this world now and it's hard to focus on like a specific thing in the environment now. So yeah, in that sense, like in 2D, you've got this rectangular vision, maybe even like, you know, some of the graphical settings in... in 2D, like make things pop out a little bit more than they would in VR as well. It is a different experience for sure.
[00:48:21.094] Kent Bye: Yeah. There was a number of times where when I would get stuck, the solution was, oh, you need to click on this book and it will open or you can flip the pages. Like when I first put my hand over it, I didn't put my hand in the right hotspot and it didn't turn yellow or I couldn't pick it up or I just kind of grabbed at it. And so I think designing for both 2D and VR, sometimes you have this situation where it's optimized for 2D to have the interaction. The person who was playing the 2D version didn't have any trouble at all. Just clicked right on and it worked. And like, for me, I was like kind of spamming around and, you know, trying to like get that thing that I know is supposed to be the thing I'm supposed to hit on to progress, but it wasn't, you know, the Collider or, you know, Job Simulator is a good example from Alchemy Labs where they have everything be highly interactable. And that type of design framework is a lot more complicated than what you have to do on a 2D point and click version of that.
[00:49:09.091] Hannah Gamiel: The book thing sounds like a bug, potentially. But I will say, yeah, like, Alchemy, a lot of their games focus on, like, playable physicality. Like, everything feels very, very physical in that game. And you can just, like, drop things on the floor, let it roll around. Quest has its limitations, I will say that. For a game the size that we were making, I so badly wish we could have made a game where you could just pick up a book from any position and open it and then toss it to the side or whatever. But yeah, we had to make some very deliberate decisions to make sure the game, well, one, wouldn't break, and also two, like... didn't cause a massive amount of rework to systems. So I don't know, Eric, if you wanted to add anything to that.
[00:49:57.697] Eric Anderson: No, I'm just yes to all of that. We're asking that little device to do a lot more than I think most sane people would. And it's hard for me to feel super awesome about the Quest version of the game when I know that the PC version just looks better. It just does. The rendering pipeline is more powerful. And back to the point about, you know, weighing between 2D and VR, the idea of developing a game specifically for a target platform, whether it be Quest or PC VR or whatever, is really appealing because then you get so much more leeway to pick your graphical target, right? And we're not, just full disclosure, we're not talking about a specific project or anything, but if we were to do a Quest-specific title, choosing a graphical style that leveraged the rendering pipeline of the Quest and didn't rely on some of the more higher GPU features that we normally would lean to on a PC, that would make the development cycle a heck of a lot easier if we just picked our battles. Same thing on 2D, right? So it's an ongoing conversation. I have very mixed feelings about it because I love VR, but I sometimes hate having to compromise during the development process. It seems like it's just nonstop compromise. And so we're definitely looking at like maybe picking our target platforms a little more carefully and trying to keep ourselves from getting underwater on things like that. Hopefully that makes sense. I don't know if that made sense.
[00:51:21.402] Kent Bye: Yeah, yeah, totally. So I'd love to share some of my final thoughts or reflections on it and then kind of have some wrap up. So I'm really glad that I surrendered to the process of playing through the entirety of Riven last night in a nine to 10 hour marathon session.
[00:51:36.209] Hannah Gamiel: My condolences. Yeah.
[00:51:38.590] Kent Bye: And I did choose to do it on the Quest because I kind of wanted to see what was possible with what's already out there. Because I know what you can do on PC VR and I could have played it on PC VR and streamed it to my Quest since I was already playing in my VR room. But I chose to play it on the Quest and I really enjoyed the process of Adventure and discovery. There was so many times it was like, oh, I can go left or right. Oh, I don't know. I'll go left. And then there was another choice to go left or right and another choice to go left or right. And then I was like, oh, my God, this is really like I feel like I'm actually exploring around and on an adventure. And I have to go kind of figure out this map of all the things. And you kind of have to remember where to go back to. And this game is is really interesting. pushing the limits of your spatial memory and your puzzle-making contexts that go over a huge, vast geographic space. It's got linguistic things where I'm translating things between different languages and trying to figure out codes. And sometimes I feel like I'm taking an SAT test right now, trying to figure out the number patterns of how to figure out this thing. I can definitely see the allure that fans have had for Cyan with both Myst and Riven and this whole IP for challenging people and having people have a proper adventure and a proper puzzle game. And it wasn't easy. And I had to resort to looking at the video a lot of times, but I was okay with that because I felt like there was a, even when I was watching the video, I still had to figure out the puzzles. Even though I wanted to skip past stuff, I still had to go back and figure it out myself and still do some Googling. And now on the Quest, you can pull up a browser and have all these things right there within the game. And so you can have a consistent experience where you're able to maintain an experience within the headset and still go through. So I'm really glad that I made it to the end. And it felt like, okay, now I've been initiated into what's happening here. And I can fully appreciate why the fandom for Myst and Riven goes so deep.
[00:53:34.785] Eric Anderson: That's really nice to hear.
[00:53:35.646] Hannah Gamiel: Yeah. Thank you for that. That's great. And I'm so sorry it was not the 45-minute experience you were looking for. That, for Venice, we are going to be showing a demo that lets you play all of Temple Island, basically. And then as soon as you hop on the maglev, it's like, thanks for playing. So...
[00:53:54.622] Eric Anderson: I have a question for you, which was like, it's inevitable, I think, for every player to our games to get stuck at some point and just be like, well, I don't know what's next. I guess I'll just wander around. And I'm curious, I know you've talked about the frustration of like, I don't know where I'm supposed to go and missing a button or a lever always sucks. But like, how did it feel to be stuck and then have this space to wander around?
[00:54:16.397] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think for me, I think there's this mental friction that happens where you're like, you want to get to the other side and solve the puzzle. And there were certainly moments where I was able to figure out and puzzle through. And that did feel very satisfying. I think the frustrating thing was that it was so large of a space and there's loading screens in the Quest version that... may not be on the PC version. So you're almost like penalized for like going to another context because you have to sit there and wait for the waiting screen to load in. And so there is a little bit of like the hardware limitations of playing it on the Quest meant that it wasn't like as a seamless experience to just hop over into this island or hop into the dome and teleport around. I mean, when I was watching people play the PC version, I was like, for one, they had transitions that I wasn't seeing. I had turned off because of the... kind of a comfort. So I felt like the 2D version was getting a little bit more fluid integration from world to world with transitions that felt like you were also going on an extended amount of that adventure that you don't get as much in just playing the quest only version. And so I think some of those frictions of like, if it didn't have those like long loading times or felt like it was more seamless to go from world to world, then I would have probably been more open to surrendering to like, let's have a walk about the entire island and see where to go next. I think it was like, there's so many puzzles that are like a long game of like, here's a puzzle that you're going to solve when you are finished 75% of the entire experience. And that versus like, here's a puzzle you have to solve to get to the next area. And to kind of know those long game puzzles and to not have a clear vision for where the output of some of that would be until you get so far into it that you've just... aggregated so much data that, you know, you kind of get paranoid until like what you do and don't need to know, like start copying down everything. And so I think by watching a walkthrough of someone who had already played through it and said, okay, here's what you need to do. Here's the system and core fundamental mechanics of. the numbering system that I like was completely lost on me the first time. And I don't know how long it would have taken me to figure that out. So, so there's some parts of it that I robbed myself of that genuine experience of like completely being lost and having to puzzle it out all by myself. So yeah, but I knew I was doing this interview today and I had less than 12 hours to finish it. So I had to, you know, you're a,
[00:56:37.845] Eric Anderson: You're a machine. That's impressive.
[00:56:39.346] Hannah Gamiel: That's impressive. Yeah. You bring up another good point of the transitions too on Quest. I believe Quest in particular, we enabled hide vehicle transitions by default because by default, we wanted the experience to be listed as comfortable in the store, we wanted anyone any age to hop in even if it was their first vr experience to go in and feel comfortable playing the game but that does rob people by default of like the experience of riding the maglev for example and in some like reviews or whatever people are like i wish there wasn't a loading screen you know riding the maglev and that's one thing everything's learning experience right for us like this is our fourth 2D and VR launch. And I would also say the audience for VR has changed too. And we've already decided to design our experiences to be less comfortable by default. I think vehicle stuff is one that even I personally have a hard time after developing in VR for eight years now. I have a hard time riding the maglev in Riven. And I don't know if people would be happier with having that shown by default or just showing a loading screen. I don't know. There's so many tough decisions for this kind of game that we're making, generally speaking. And it's exciting to see how the industry has evolved over time to accommodate it.
[00:58:07.152] Kent Bye: I was okay with having it off by default. I was doing a 9-10 hour marathon session.
[00:58:12.833] Eric Anderson: The last thing you needed was to get motion sick during that.
[00:58:16.194] Kent Bye: Motion sickness. Already going up and down can be a bit of a motion sick trigger. There is already a lot of stairs and going up and down. I would squint my eyes to help with the self-imposed tunneling effect as it were in some areas. And there's also ways to run. And so sometimes I would run in VR, but then again, that would also be more motion sickness inducing.
[00:58:37.881] Hannah Gamiel: Did you enable the vignette option?
[00:58:40.444] Kent Bye: No, I didn't because I didn't want to, because I do that in VRChat where I don't have vignettes. Oh, okay. It was mostly when I was running that it would be a little bit more motion sickness inducing.
[00:58:49.973] Hannah Gamiel: Got it. Okay.
[00:58:50.874] Kent Bye: Because there is a lot of area to cover and you do walk pretty slow by default. When I watch someone online be like, oh, you can just start running. I was like, oh, I wonder if I could run. Oh, yeah, I can. Oh, wait, this is maybe not so great for motion sickness inducing. Yeah. Yeah, well, I guess as we start to wrap up, I'd love to hear what each of you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality might be and what it might be able to enable.
[00:59:16.520] Eric Anderson: I'll go first. It's going to be the generic answer, but I mean, when I was coming up through high school and art school, I was reading William Gibson and Neal Stephenson and Snow Crash and all the like the future of the metaverse fiction. I don't I don't know. I don't know how I feel about it now because I feel like all these big companies have been chasing that dream for a number of years now and What we've seen has not been the dream that I was promised as a young person. I think for me, my wish would just be more interesting experiences that are fresh, that aren't just another rhythm game or another job simulator toy type of thing, but like a really robust experience. story that I can get lost into and have my world temporarily to Hannah's point about escape, temporarily have your world replaced by a really cool simulation. And I'm not necessarily talking about a metaverse where, you know, I'm going to go in there and spend nine hours like you did wandering around a fake city, talking to fake other people or whatever. I don't know. I guess for me, that's not a driving factor. I think we all spend so much time plugged into a device. The last thing I need is to spend more time plugged into a device. But yeah, When I wanted to go on vacation and play a game, for me, it would just be... I'd like to see more games like ours on the platform, to be honest. I'd like to see more adventure games where the focus is on the space and less on the one mechanic that you repeat. Yeah. I want more people doing the kind of stuff we're attempting to try. That's my wish for the medium. Go, Hannah.
[01:00:54.304] Hannah Gamiel: Yeah, I was going to say it's almost like a hard ask for some studios because although we are small, we are larger than your average studio and we've got a really strong art team. I'm so thankful for that. So that was kind of an aside from what Eric said. Also, I'd like to just add on quickly, like I'm good friends with the Job Simulator people or ex-Job Simulator people, Alex and Sai, like... I think when Eric and I talk about toy-like playfulness or gameplay, Job Simulator isn't just entirely that. It has really fun mechanics. I think we just mean that you can play the game in a very playful manner. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:01:34.021] Eric Anderson: I should clarify, I'm not looking to take anything away from their game or games like it. Those are fun too, but they're a fundamentally different experience than I think what we're striving for. Yeah, exactly.
[01:01:43.365] Hannah Gamiel: Yeah. Anyway, just throwing Eric under the bus a little is what I'm trying to do here. But for my future potential, things that I'm really excited about, not so much the dystopian part of brain dance, but like the escapism that like, Braindance from Cyberpunk offers. I think that it's almost like inevitable. That's like the inevitable feature for this platform. But I also, on a more positive note, am really excited for the utility of something like that for medicine, for research. I can imagine it will only enable us further to be able to practice doing things. 10,000 hours makes someone a master of something. If a doctor could hop into a brand dance simulation, some mixed reality thing where they're operating on the same patient over and over again and just perfecting the art of that before robots inevitably replace surgeons or
[01:02:45.865] Eric Anderson: We already have that. We have surgery simulator VR here. I don't know what you're talking about.
[01:02:50.129] Hannah Gamiel: Yeah, but also like just utility like that. I want to believe that humanity is capable of things like that. I'd really hate for a platform like this to just even, I mean, I love the fact that mist and ribbon and firmament and abduction are in VR, but like VR, AR and MR really shouldn't just be for games. It should be for society and to better ourselves. and i really i have hope that that is the ultimate potential of vr not just play but like making humanity better so right so anything else that's left and said that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community Riven is a hard game, but you won't regret playing that. So buy Riven anywhere, really. Steam, GOG, Quest. I know the whole team is incredibly proud of what you made, and it's very exciting and humbling and cool to read comments that are like, this is my new Half-Life Alyx. It's... We are being held to a very, very, very high standard, and I'm so thrilled that people overwhelmingly seem to have enjoyed their experience, even when it is difficult and you have to stay up all night like can't buy.
[01:04:02.351] Eric Anderson: Eric, to you. I was just going to say, for anybody listening to this who has tried it, even just tried the demo, or I guess we only did the demo in 2D, but anybody who's played it, especially those of you who played it in VR, thank you so much. Yeah. We're a small studio, all things considered, and it is word of mouth and passion from the players that lets us continue to put stuff like this out into the world, and we want to keep doing it. So, thank you.
[01:04:28.425] Hannah Gamiel: I've said this before, too, but I'm glad that we live in a timeline, you know, in the multiverse, in a timeline where we've been able to make Myst and Riven again for everybody and bring it to 2D and VR. Like, I'm glad that we live in the timeline where Eric and I are, like, that crazy to do this sort of thing. So... Thank you all for believing in us.
[01:04:48.315] Eric Anderson: Yeah, people keep offering the opportunity to do it again, which is a mixed blessing. We're like, oh, crap, we got to do it again? Okay, well, I guess I'm happy to be doing it again. Yeah.
[01:04:58.200] Kent Bye: Well, I think the kind of genre defining DNA and lineage of both Myst and Riven are carried forth within VR and offering something that is new and different from what I've seen in the industry and how you can take this type of impeccable world building and environmental design and environmental storytelling and also like storytelling that's kind of more woven in, I'd say more towards the end that you get more of those more explicit narrative beats. A lot of the stuff you're kind of puzzling together what this world is about and it does definitely feel like it's lived in. But for me, the overall thing that kept me going again and again was unlocking a new area to explore and a new overlook that blew my mind and the vastness of what can be achieved on a Quest. I mean, for folks that want to see the cutting edge of state of the art for what's possible on the Quest, play the Quest version. But if you want to see even more higher fidelity, then play it on PC VR and stream it to whatever headset that you're using. So both options are there for folks to dive into. And I highly, highly recommend doing it. I think it's one of those pieces that is challenging. And my advice is if you do get completely stuck, I would rather have folks take a look at a walkthrough that gives you some of those clues and I'll, I'll link in the show notes what I used in order to make it through. But yeah, even despite that walkthrough, you still have to puzzle through some things and you'll have to figure out some stuff on your own and actually you can't fully escape doing some of the puzzles. And so I definitely appreciated that. that kind of commitment to this rigor of, of the experience of asking people to do a little bit more of themselves to get through something. And I think by the end of it, you feel like you've been initiated into like the club of cyan with all these IPS and mist and ribbon and that you're a part of understanding why people are treat this IP so belovedly over many different generations.
[01:06:49.355] Eric Anderson: So that's the greatest feedback you could have, you could have given us. Yeah. Thank you so much.
[01:06:54.237] Hannah Gamiel: Thank you.
[01:06:55.267] Kent Bye: Yeah, so Hannah and Eric, thanks so much for joining me today to help give a little bit more of the history and evolution of this reimagining both in 2D and VR and sharing some of your own journeys and just unpacking a little bit more about the intention for designing both NIST and Riven and your other VR games as well. So thanks again for joining me here on the podcast.
[01:07:15.139] Eric Anderson: Thank you, Kent.
[01:07:15.559] Hannah Gamiel: Thanks, Kent. Get some sleep.
[01:07:18.901] Eric Anderson: Maybe take a couple of days off from VR. Rest up. Yeah, yeah. No, I really appreciate it.
[01:07:24.827] Kent Bye: Thanks again for listening to these episodes from Venice Immersive 2024. And yeah, I am a crowdfunded independent journalist. And so if you enjoy this coverage and find it valuable, then please do consider joining my Patreon at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
