Blair Renaud is the lead developer for Technolust, which is a cyberpunk VR adventure game. He talks about what it took to make his Kickstarter successful, what motivated him to get into VR development, and how his game development background influenced his VR experience development.
He also discusses the process of making predictions for how technological advances will unfold, and the intention behind incorporating other dystopian, cyberpunk elements like the impacts of government and corporate corruption — as well as the benefits of technology like the proliferation of 3D printing, VR/AR, and the terraforming Mars.
Blair talks about his plan for using photoscanned NPCs through the process of photogrammetry & 3D scanning, and what he’s doing to make that a comfortable experience while avoiding the uncanny valley.
Finally, he talks about avoiding things in VR that bother people while not being afraid to make them feel unsettled, and his future plans moving forward with Technolust and VR development in general.
Reddit discussion here.
TOPICS
- 0:00 – Intro to Technolust
- 0:26 – Coming off of a successful Kickstarter. Modest goal of $30k, and more than doubled that. It took a lot of PR and work and didn’t get any development done during the month.
- 1:05 – What was the turning point that convinced you to get into VR development? Took money from Second Life, and didn’t see any demos that demonstrated what was possible with VR.
- 1:45 – Game development background
- 2:54 – Lessons from Technolust – Always wanted to do everything. Learned as much as he could by working in the video game industry and went from intern to level designer and technical director
- 3:56 – How is VR level design different than regular 2D game design? VR is very different. Design from inside the game, it’s more enjoyable, and more like being interior decorator, set designer and lighting guy all in one.
- 4:43 – How do you bring in those sci-fi technological advances into your game beyond just flying cars? Good sci-fi is predictive. Predictions of the proliferation of 3D printing & government corruption. Being able to tell the future of VR and AR itself within a VR experience, layers of VR
- 6:14 – How do you deal with the polarity between future visions of utopia or dystopia, and how you’re deciding how you’re going to portray the future? Has a pessimistic predisposition. Not a happy ending, but it’s an enjoyable experience. Like the idea of making people feel a little disturbed and unsettled. It’s like a call to action to change the real world when you take off the Rift.
- 7:22 – Have you considered how you could included technology that makes the world a better place within your story? Cyberpunk genre has a common theme of corporate greed and how much control they have. Technology is awesome in Technolust. You can print whatever you want, but the corporation is the bad guy. People will enjoy the AR components within the game as well as terraforming Mars. There are benefits to technology in the game.
- 8:26 – What are photoscanned NPCs? Photogrammetry & 3D scanning allows you to get a highly detailed representations of real objects into VR. Making the models viable for a game by rigging them up and reducing the polygon count. It’s ambitious, but they’re partnering with another team who is collaborating to showcase their work.
- 9:26 – How will you deal with the uncanny valley with these photoscanned NPCs? Don’t feel bad about making people feel a little bit unsettled. Try to make it as comfortable as possible. Integrating video of the real characters via video projection. May obscure faces with cyberpunk fashion and intend on doing good facial animations.
- 10:21 – Things that you tried in Technolust that didn’t work at all? Tried out a number of things pointed out in the Oculus best practices guide, and generally they were right about things like avoiding feelings of falling and taking away the control of the camera. He might need to change some elements that he got feedback on. Still trying to figure out what bothers people like the particle effects in the jacked in VR made people feel like they were falling.
- 11:36 – What’s your timeline going forward? Pre-release beta when DK2 is released for people to enjoy positional tracking. Release date originally set for September, but that may get pushed back.
- 12:40 – Where do you see VR is going? Everywhere. Wishes that he had some clones. Has other project ideas. It’s the final media. No reason to buy other media gadgets. Trying to catch the wave.
Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:12.078] Blair Renaud: I'm Blair Renaud, lead developer of Technolust. It's a virtual reality adventure game set in a dystopian cyberpunk near future. People seem to be enjoying it, which is good.
[00:00:26.315] Kent Bye: Yeah, so you just came off a very successful Kickstarter. Maybe you could start off there in terms of that process and where you ended up. Sure.
[00:00:32.861] Blair Renaud: Well, I think very successful is a relative term considering our initial funding goal was 30 grand, which is not enough to make any video game. Really? So yeah, we more than doubled our goal, which was the minimum. It was a lot of work. I didn't actually get to develop at all during the month because it was all PR, doing interviews, podcasts, responding to comments, responding to messages. It was a lot of work. But yeah, it seems to have paid off. It's good. Feedback's been amazing.
[00:01:06.097] Kent Bye: And so what was the point when you decided to jump into VR development for the Oculus Rift?
[00:01:12.333] Blair Renaud: Well, I had $300 saved up in Second Life funds, cashed those out, figured that was a good excuse to get a Rift development kit, the DK one. So I did that, and it arrived, came with a Unity key, tried it out, tried out all the demos, realized there wasn't really anything out there that I was expecting to see, you know, like, It's just something crazy that really shows off what VR is. So I dove in and tried to do that myself. That's basically it.
[00:01:45.603] Kent Bye: And so you're coming from a game development background. It's not like you're not coming from zero. So maybe you could talk a bit about your history in terms of what type of games and titles you've worked on.
[00:01:54.383] Blair Renaud: Yeah, well, recently I haven't been in game development about, let's see, 1997 I started at Rockstar Games, back then it was Game Tech. We worked on Grand Theft Auto 1, the first digital expansion pack for a console game actually called London 1969. Grand Theft Auto. We did a lot of stuff on that, like the entire map of London, sound design, mission design. We did a couple other, like a real-time strategy game that was a lot like StarCraft and slightly before StarCraft, but not as well received. Yeah, I worked there only for about six years. I left when I was 23. I'm 36 now. And since then, I've worked on odd things. I did some level design for N+, for PSP, and some indie projects of my own that never got completed because I was doing other things, trying to make money, web design, visual effects with my partner Chris.
[00:02:57.296] Kent Bye: And so I guess, what were some of the lessons of that previous game development experience that you're able to bring into Technolust?
[00:03:04.782] Blair Renaud: Well, I always wanted to do everything. When I first started at Rockstar, I was just a tester on contract. And when the project ended, I said, I'm not going anywhere. I'll go get coffee. I'll do whatever you need, but keep me on. And I started just doing that, shipping and receiving, and watching what everybody was doing in the office. learning over their shoulder, regardless if they wanted me there or not. We were using Lightwave 3D at the time, so I learned that side, all of the technical aspects of everything. And I took all that, and at Rockstar, I kind of moved up the ladder from tester to level designer to technical director, etc. So that kind of gave me a base of knowing a little bit of everything, which I think paid off, especially for Technolust.
[00:03:56.895] Kent Bye: And so how do you do a level design when it comes to an adventure game like Technolust, or is it a completely different model?
[00:04:03.188] Blair Renaud: It's very different in the Rift, or in VR in general, because with VR, I can actually walk into the room and decide from inside what needs to happen, right? As opposed to kind of a top-down approach, where I just build everything and be like, OK, that looks good from this angle. I can actually go in to where I'm designing, look around and say, what's missing? What do I think belongs here? It needs to be dirtier in this side of the room. The light should be different over here. It's really enjoyable, actually. I prefer it to standard game design because it's more like being an interior decorator, a set designer, and a lighting guy all at the same time, which is fun.
[00:04:43.782] Kent Bye: I see. And so being a cyberpunk novel set in the future, I'm curious about some of the things that are so paradigm shifting that we may not even realize it. For example, who would imagine we'd be where we are with virtual reality 10 years ago or with the mobile industry? curious about that leapfrogging of technologies and how you're able to bring that extra element of sci-fi into your game beyond just flying cars.
[00:05:10.862] Blair Renaud: Right, right. Oh, well... The thing about good sci-fi is that it's kind of predictive, right? So, like, all of the good sci-fi novels have generally... Something from them has come to fruition. So I keep that in mind. So, in Technolust, we've got, like, 3D printing has become ubiquitous, which is happening right now. Government corruption based on corporate takeover and whatnot. So that kind of near-future sci-fi stuff, it's a no-brainer right now, right? And it fits well with cyberpunk. And as far as the game goes, the technology of virtual reality itself affords a lot of opportunities to do things that you could never enjoy or even think of in a standard game like jacking into virtual reality from within virtual reality and then having like a back end into the program inside that secondary virtual reality, right? Like layers of reality, which I think is gonna be really neat and a little mind-blowing for some people, hopefully.
[00:06:14.466] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think there's a duality there in terms of a dystopia and a utopia And I'm just curious about if you're sort of having an intention to kind of bring forth a happy Vision of what the future could be rather than just it's all going to hell.
[00:06:26.333] Blair Renaud: I Don't know. I'm a pretty pessimistic guy Yeah, well in the end of like the story I don't want to spoil anything but No No It's not going to be like... No, it's not a happy ending. It's not a happy ending. I'm not going to lie to you. But at the same time, it's an enjoyable experience, right? Like, it's not horror, but people enjoy horror. And they shouldn't, technically, right? But I like the idea of making people maybe a little disturbed, a little unsettled. So I'm okay with ending the story like that. Because it's kind of like a call to action as well, right? Like we can change these things in the real world when you take off your rift. So it's kind of my vision of the future.
[00:07:22.507] Kent Bye: Yeah, I definitely see value of things like 1984, how many things have come to pass. But also that other things like aquaponics are things that, you know, technologies that are amazing in terms of what that could do for food production and everything. So, I don't know if you've considered that more higher end of how technology could evolve to the point of making the world a better place.
[00:07:42.444] Blair Renaud: Oh, definitely, definitely. And I think the cyberpunk genre is basically, there's a common theme of corporate greed and problems with the structure of corporations and how much control they have. And the technology is great in Technolust, like the ability to be able to print whatever you want. And the problem is the corporations. The corporations are the bad guy. I don't know if that conveys my political views a little bit too much. But yeah, the technology is still great. And people can enjoy things like the augmented reality aspect of virtual reality inside the game and stuff like that. And terraforming Mars and things like that. There are benefits to the technology in the game. The corporations are the issue.
[00:08:26.134] Kent Bye: I see. And so you raised enough in Kickstarter to do photo scanned NPCs. Maybe you could explain what that is.
[00:08:33.188] Blair Renaud: Oh, yeah. I'm not really the guy to explain what photo scanning is, but it's photogrammetry and 3D scanning basically allows you to get a high detailed, accurate representation of real-world objects inside the game world. So, using people is an excellent example of that. Infinite Realities has some good demos out there for VR that show the technology, but We're taking it one step further and making these models actually viable for a game. Rigging them up for animation, reducing the polygon count so that they still look hyper real but the ability to interact with the player and animate and stuff. So it's a bit ambitious but we're partnering with another team that's purely working on that side. So it's a give and take. We're going to showcase their work and then they're going to do their own thing at the same time.
[00:09:26.791] Kent Bye: I see. Wow. And so there's this whole thing of the uncanny valley, and I'm curious if you've been able to wire up one of these photo-scanned NPCs and interact with it in a way, whether or not you feel like which side of the valley this is on.
[00:09:40.336] Blair Renaud: Well, like I said, I don't feel bad about making people feel a little unsettled. But yeah, we're going to try and keep it as comfortable as possible. The way we're doing that currently is integrating real video of the characters. So when someone is speaking they might do so through a video projection and then when their character interacts with you in the world they might have you know a dust mask over their mouth or something cyberpunk that fits. We are going to try and do some good facial animation and if we can avoid the uncanny valley then that's the way we're gonna go but it's still early days like the photo scanning thing is just starting up for us right now.
[00:10:21.702] Kent Bye: Is there anything that you tried in Technoless that just didn't work at all, and you said, nope, that's not good?
[00:10:28.227] Blair Renaud: Yeah. Technoless has kind of gone through some different phases. Originally, it was going to be just a purely seated experience, which I think would have worked out great for the idea I had in mind. But it wasn't enough for me. I wanted to get up and move around in the world. So it's not anything specific I can point to that it was like, no, that's not going to work. The things with, all the things that are in the best practices guide, of course, you try out some of those things to see if Oculus was right, and generally they were right. So there's feelings of falling, taking camera control away from the player, things like that, that I'm trying to avoid now, more than ever. There's some things that might change. I've had some people in the hacking experiences in Technolust, we've got particles coming up from the bottom that kind of make the player feel like they're falling and some people have had some issues with that. I've tried adjusting the speed of the particles and stuff but it's hard. Different things affect different people differently and I think we're still trying to nail all that stuff down, like what bothers people.
[00:11:35.116] Kent Bye: Maybe you could just sort of lay out your game plan from this point until the first release of Oculus' DK2 and how that kind of impacts your timeline.
[00:11:44.301] Blair Renaud: Sure. Well, the original plan was to, and it stayed so on the Kickstarter, that One of our slightly higher tiers was to get access to the game, like a beta, when the second development kit launches so that we can have positional tracking in there for people with their DK2s to enjoy the new features. That hopefully will still happen. It's not going to be a full version of the game in beta. It'll be closer to an alpha. But I might release one a little bit further down the line, like just a updated beta for those same backers. The release date we slated for September, but not knowing the exact release date of the Consumer Rift, that might be pushed back a bit as well. Not just because of the release of the Consumer Rift, but because, you know, it's a lot of work. It's a lot of work to make a game. But hopefully this year at least, like I'd hate to push it past December.
[00:12:41.478] Kent Bye: Do you have any other final thoughts about VR and where it's going?
[00:12:45.402] Blair Renaud: It's going everywhere, man. It's awesome. I wish I had some clones because I've got a couple other projects that I'd love to start on, some great ideas sketched out with things that I've learned from the development of Technolust and Mind. Yeah, I think it really is the final media in the end, you know. You watch a movie in this other reality on your 4K screen in there, right? Like, there's no reason to go out and buy anything anymore, like, media-wise. So, yeah, I think this is it. I'm trying to catch the wave.
[00:13:18.386] Kent Bye: Great. Well, thanks so much. Awesome. Thanks.
