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[Pazu]

Phew. I'm a bit nervous making this post, as I've been mostly lurking this forum for years and keeping my posts to the indie game development thread now and then. But we just launched a Kickstarter for Chiaro and the Elixir of Life, my tiny studio's first VR game, and we're super proud of it and I'm really interested in talking with the community about it (and about VR dev in general). It's a pretty wild and crazy time in the development of VR as a medium for interactive entertainment, and I know how central a role this community has played in the evolution of video games as a whole... so it just feels right to have some sort of conversation about what we've built and why we put our hearts into it. This place means a lot to me in many ways that are hard to articulate, but it's not overselling it to say that I have learned so much about video games and how much people around the world love them -- and why -- from NeoGAF.

Three years ago, I was living in Austin, TX making independent films. I loved playing games all my life but I'd never thought to try to make one until I tried HBO's Game of Thrones VR experience and had my mind completely blown to pieces. My younger brother and one of my long time friends had similar experiences independently and we all came to feel like this was our calling -- trying to find ways to create meaningful experiences for this revolutionary new medium. What if you could literally step inside the Legend of Zelda or the films of Studio Ghibli? What would that feel like, and look like? How would the story unfold, what would make it fun and engaging and emotionally involving? These were some of the questions that we've now been obsessing over for the past several years. They put us on the path we're on now, spending 80+ hours/week designing and directing VR games.

How did we go from noobs to competency? The law of equivalent exchange. We locked ourselves in a room and failed again and again, day by day, trying to close the gap between the visions in our head and our actual skills at game dev, until UE4 node by UE4 node we began to see 'parts of the Matrix', understand the game we were making, and how to pull it all off. We convinced an extraordinarily talented bunch of artists and programmers to join us along the way (and we learned tons from each other), and in December of last year, after demo-ing Chiaro at many festivals around the US and Canada, our team won the NVIDIA Edge Award from NVIDIA and Unreal Engine.

So yeah. Chiaro and the Elixir of Life. You'll build a steam powered penguin robot called Boka and bring him to life, and the two of you will be swept into an epic story that will decide the fate of human and machine life in the world of Neverain. You'll meet a piano-playing pig, get an ancient knife that lets you cut portals into the fabric of reality, form an unbreakable bond with a character you built with your own two hands, and really, so so much more. Happy to answer any questions, and if you've got a Vive or Oculus please consider supporting us on Kickstarter as we build a community of players leading into a full release this summer.

Cheers

 

[gspat]

Will this end up on PSVR as well?

What amount of playtime do you expect a casual player would get out of this game?

 

[Pazu]

Will this end up on PSVR as well?

What amount of playtime do you expect a casual player would get out of this game?

We plan to release on PSVR (Sony was good enough to send us a dev kit), but it's probably going to be a few weeks or a month or so after we ship on Oculus and Vive.

As for playtime, I'd say about 3 hours if you zip through, 4 or 5 hours if you take your time to explore and look for the collectibles and easter eggs we've hidden

 

[gspat]

Awesome news! Really enjoyed Moss, and your game looks to be along the same lines.

Would you consider a tier for PSVR owners, with the understanding it will be delayed?

Also, what did you find to be the biggest hurdles in developing for VR?

 

[Pazu]

Awesome news! Really enjoyed Moss, and your game looks to be along the same lines.

Thank you! Moss is awesome, Quill is such a great character.

Would you consider a tier for PSVR owners, with the understanding it will be delayed?

We are strongly considering this, we'd love to get PSVR owners involved so it'd be great to hear if there's a lot of interest here!

Also, what did you find to be the biggest hurdles in developing for VR?

We faced endless challenges, as I'm sure any game dev can relate to, but three of the biggest ones that come to mind that are unique to VR:

1- Finding an aesthetic and technical solution to reaching 90fps in an enchanted forest. From our first moment of inspiration we knew our story would be about a young man returning to his home in the forest at night to build a machine and bring it to life. We vaulted into that idea headfirst with no understanding of the technical challenges, and it took over a year for our artists to find a way to create a beautiful forest environment to explore that doesn't lag when you look around and feels alive, familiar, mysterious and strange. Most VR games don't do expansive exterior environments for a reason, but overcoming this challenge allowed us to achieve an art style that we think is quite memorable and unique, and the techniques we developed extend through the other environments in the game (some of which you can see in photos on the Kickstarter page).

2- We developed a really intuitive and comfortable rowboat as a means of locomotion to explore Blue Crab Lake, a key level in the first act of the game. Standard systems for VR locomotion are still in their infancy, and when you move in VR by any means that isn't your natural body movement (like in a vehicle, or with analog sticks), it does all sorts of interesting and uncomfortable things to your inner ear/vestibular system. It was extremely important to us to make a game that was accessible and comfortable to as many people as possible, but we also wanted a unique mechanic for exploring the lake, so figuring out how to code the rowboat interactions (and again deal with an exterior environment with lots of foliage and water) took a long time and a ton of playtesting and tuning. Simulator sickness is a real thing, but we think we developed something memorable here (and there's still an autoboat mode for those who would prefer not to go full rowboat )

3- Some of the hardest and most interesting challenges have been finding ways to help the player emotionally connect to the story and our characters. When you can move anywhere at will and reach out and touch the characters in a story, when you are actually part of that unfolding story, how do the characters respond, and why should you care about what's happening? Can different types of players care about different elements, and if they do, how do you deliver the same story to each of them? And do you even have to? Things we're constantly talking about and trying to find the sweet spot for. We found that staging animated sequences can be made A LOT better by grounding them with interactivity, and so we've tried to tell a story that compels you to engage with it with your hands as much as we can. To use Moss as an example, they did an incredible job creating this relationship between the player and Quill by creating a game in which they need to help each other overcome challenges to advance. Our game is a first-person adventure, so we found our own ways to anchor the characters and the player, but it's really an enormous challenge in VR and one that I think is going to present some absolutely incredible experiences as the medium evolves and more developers and players buy in.

 

[oxrock]

We faced endless challenges, as I'm sure any game dev can relate to, but three of the biggest ones that come to mind that are unique to VR:

1- Finding an aesthetic and technical solution to reaching 90fps in an enchanted forest. From our first moment of inspiration we knew our story would be about a young man returning to his home in the forest at night to build a machine and bring it to life. We vaulted into that idea headfirst with no understanding of the technical challenges, and it took over a year for our artists to find a way to create a beautiful forest environment to explore that doesn't lag when you look around and feels alive, familiar, mysterious and strange. Most VR games don't do expansive exterior environments for a reason, but overcoming this challenge allowed us to achieve an art style that we think is quite memorable and unique, and the techniques we developed extend through the other environments in the game (some of which you can see in photos on the Kickstarter page).

What were the solutions found to be able to keep 90 fps? I'm assuming low poly count would be one. Probably have keep real time lighting to a minimum as well. As you said, expansive environments aren't things you see in VR games often so I'd like to know more details if possible of how your team was able to tackle this problem.

Also, what led to the choice of developing this game in Unreal as opposed to any other engine like Unity? Not trying to start a game engine war or anything, just wondering what features felt most important to you going into developing a new VR game and if you still feel the same way about it.

 

[Pazu]

What were the solutions found to be able to keep 90 fps? I'm assuming low poly count would be one. Probably have keep real time lighting to a minimum as well. As you said, expansive environments aren't things you see in VR games often so I'd like to know more details if possible of how your team was able to tackle this problem.

Moving from a deferred renderer to a forward renderer allowed us to use multi-sample anti-aliasing and render all geometry and lights in one pass, which greatly reduced our draw calls. There are tradeoffs (added specular aliasing, foliage began to look plastic in some cases, could no longer use atmospheric fog, limited number of dynamic lights -- often only a single one per scene!) but we saw huge performance gains here. From there we developed an LOD/occlusion system, worked with the roughness and reflectivity of surfaces to remove the mesh specular value, and were extremely strict with our polygon budget across the entire art production pipeline. Our technical artist and environment artist really went deep and tried a variety of tactics (there was some promising work they did with leaf cards, flipbooks and imposter sprites that we ultimately abandoned when they got bottlenecked by memory consumption) to get the result, they learned a lot and are hoping to push what we learned even further in the future.

Also, what led to the choice of developing this game in Unreal as opposed to any other engine like Unity? Not trying to start a game engine war or anything, just wondering what features felt most important to you going into developing a new VR game and if you still feel the same way about it.

We started prototyping in Unity but saw that Oculus Story Studio and ILMxLAB were making great looking content using Unreal Engine and felt that all of the early VR games made in Unity looked pretty similar and uninspiring (not necessarily the case anymore, but this was 2014/2015). And UE4's blueprints were a hugely powerful tool for us, when we started we had minimal coding ability but blueprints allowed us to rapidly prototype gameplay ideas and level designs and eventually build some pretty complex systems. We really love using Unreal Engine and they keep adding new useful features to the engine, absolutely happy with our choice.

 

[Chaostar]

Count me in for a PSVR tier!

 

[GrimDarkDarrel]

I don't think it's a good idea to lead with "Inspired by Zelda" like that. Kind of like name dropping that doesn't add anything. It may be a succinct way to communicate something about your intended tone but it sounds like you aren't proud enough to be your own thing if that's what you lead with.

It's cool though, hope it works out.

 

[Pazu]

I don't think it's a good idea to lead with "Inspired by Zelda" like that. Kind of like name dropping that doesn't add anything. It may be a succinct way to communicate something about your intended tone but it sounds like you aren't proud enough to be your own thing if that's what you lead with.

I hear you! I just love the Zelda games so much and hope players who love those games like I do and have VR hardware are as excited as I am by the possibilities of a VR experience that tries to capture some of that tone. I think one of the most amazing parts of the story of Chiaro is that we took that inspiration and learned how to do it all from scratch, maybe that will inspire some others who never imagined making video games to go for it too.

It's cool though, hope it works out.

Thank you!

 

[Pazu]

Bumping this as there are 24 hours left in our Kickstarter and we are extremely close to hitting the goal! For those of you who asked about PSVR support, it is on our roadmap but I unfortunately don't have a timetable yet, since we are such a small team we are going to launch on Vive and Rift and then turn our attentions to the PSVR port.

For those of you who do have a Vive or Oculus Rift, we plan to release a playable demo of the game to anyone backing the Kickstarter at the game level or higher, that way you can try a small taste of the experience and be able to weigh in with thoughts/feedback as we enter the final period of development.

some cool links
tiny peak at recording the Chiaro score
UploadVR coverage
interview about Chiaro's development
bringing a machine to life

VR dev is a wild and crazy thing so thanks for reading, asking questions, commenting, and so on. Cheers from Montreal

 

[kaczmar]

Count me in for a PSVR port as well. Your game looks really interesting.

 

[VindicatorZ]

looks great! lots of interest from me for a PSVR version down the line. Keep it up!

 

[ilfait]

Haha I like the trailer. Odd combination of things going on there. I don't know why nobody's thought to make a game about building a steam-powered duck son to play catch with you in the backyard. And I hope to see more of that interpretive dancing pig.

And good music.

 

[mckmas8808]

Count me in for a PSVR port as well. Your game looks really interesting.

Im interesting in the PSVR version too. Please make one.

 

[Osukaa]

Awesome! That robot duck hybrid instantly bought a smile to my face. Hope we here can help with the kickstarter. I dont have a VR system yet but id gladly support your game still. Hope us Gaffers can give the push financially you need to make your KS Goal. Here's hoping for success and for a bright future for your team.

 

[Pazu]

Haha I like the trailer. Odd combination of things going on there. I don't know why nobody's thought to make a game about building a steam-powered duck son to play catch with you in the backyard. And I hope to see more of that interpretive dancing pig.

And good music.

Awesome! That robot duck hybrid instantly bought a smile to my face. Hope we here can help with the kickstarter. I dont have a VR system yet but id gladly support your game still. Hope us Gaffers can give the push financially you need to make your KS Goal. Here's hoping for success and for a bright future for your team.

Boka actually thinks he's a penguin, it's a sensitive subject.

Just having Gaf's support is inspiring, so thank you all. And very glad to hear there's so much interest in playing on PSVR.

 

[Darias]

I am so looking forward to seeing this game succeed. The amount of detail and variety in the artwork of the locations is amazing. How large are these different environments? For example, are the puzzles and such limited to a "VR Home" type area, or is it more of an open world area?

 

[oxrock]

Game looks great so I wish you all the best on with your kickstarter campaign. I can't say that I've seen a VR title quite like this one before, hopefully enough people can appreciate what you're striving for to help hit that goal. It looks to be yet another incentive for me to renew my contacts prescription so I can enjoy playing it on my rift.

 

[Osukaa]

Boka actually thinks he's a penguin, it's a sensitive subject.

Just having Gaf's support is inspiring, so thank you all. And very glad to hear there's so much interest in playing on PSVR.

LOLOL A penguin? I dont know how I didn't catch that haa haa even better!

 

[Pazu]

I am so looking forward to seeing this game succeed. The amount of detail and variety in the artwork of the locations is amazing. How large are these different environments? For example, are the puzzles and such limited to a "VR Home" type area, or is it more of an open world area?

Thank you, Darias! There are 12 chapters and 8 major environments. Some are small, a few are huge and could take you an hour to explore fully. As a player you'll always have a main quest goal that you can track in Chiaro's journal (one of the five key items Chiaro will obtain and bring with him on the journey), but we've hidden some fun minigames and collectible coins in each level which will pay off exploration and reward you if you manage to find them all.

In terms of puzzles, the game starts out by dropping you into the world in motion, teaching you basic interactions and allowing you the freedom to explore to learn more about Neverain and who Chiaro is, why you're there. The puzzles are always building on what you have learned and the items you've got (in this sense, we really were inspired by Zelda), and we've tried hard to keep challenging you with new ideas and moments the further you get. Once you find the Janus Knife (the knife that lets you cut portals!) the world really opens up, before you know it you're climbing a mountain and spelunking down a tower made of ice. We really wanted to deliver as much variety and detail as we could, both in how the environments look and feel and what Chiaro's tasked with doing. And now that we're polishing everything we're still looking to pack more of these moments in wherever we can.

 

[Pazu]

I was on DLC podcast with Jeff Cannata talking about Chiaro and VR design, I go on at 1:35. Was really fun to talk about VR storytelling and our thinking about how to make an adventure experience!

 

[iconmaster]

Good on you guys for taking a risk and putting in the work to make your dream happen! Hope it pays off.

 

[oxrock]

It looks like you guys hit your goal, congratulations!

 

[Dr. Claus]

We plan to release on PSVR (Sony was good enough to send us a dev kit), but it's probably going to be a few weeks or a month or so after we ship on Oculus and Vive.

As for playtime, I'd say about 3 hours if you zip through, 4 or 5 hours if you take your time to explore and look for the collectibles and easter eggs we've hidden

That is awesome news! I am definitely interested in your game and I need some more quality PSVR titles.

 

[CloudStrife_ca]

I'm hopefully jumping in on the PS VR this week and pick one up, I will watch for this game as from what I've seen the VR genre seems to gravitate towards the horror genre which is awesome for me, cause I do love horror films/ games but fantasy adventures and RPG's have always been my go too.

 

[Pazu]

It looks like you guys hit your goal, congratulations!

Thanks!!! Would not have gotten there without a late push from Twitter and the support from GAF in this thread. Really gives us the push we needed to finish polishing the game and bring it to market, and helps a ton to have a small community of players excited about what we're doing (plus get a test run at marketing a VR game, to see what worked and what didn't and adjust before we launch the full game).

Really excited! Tons more work to do -- I'll keep you all updated about the full release along with the launch trailer and the PS VR version.

 

[Pazu]

I'm excited to share the full trailer for Chiaro! Hope you all enjoy, we are releasing the game on 9/13 for HTC Vive and Oculus Rift.

Chiaro and the Elixir of Life - Trailer



PSVR and Windows MR versions will be out by the end of the year (probably late December)!

 

[RokkanStoned]

It's just on Steam or it will be on the Rift store as well? Looking really interesting, will buy it if it doesn't get overall bad reviews or impressions. Looks really ambitious and that's always a nice thing to see in the VR sphere. There's so much potential and VR really is a mind blowing thing when it comes to gaming. Hopefully more cheaper VR sets come out, allowing more and more people to experience how great VR is. And allowing VR developers to really thrive, especially new and smaller studios.
The really big next thing is if a good MMORPG comes out, one that's ambitious, but not trying to be AAA.

 

[Pazu]

It's just on Steam or it will be on the Rift store as well? Looking really interesting, will buy it if it doesn't get overall bad reviews or impressions. Looks really ambitious and that's always a nice thing to see in the VR sphere. There's so much potential and VR really is a mind blowing thing when it comes to gaming. Hopefully more cheaper VR sets come out, allowing more and more people to experience how great VR is. And allowing VR developers to really thrive, especially new and smaller studios.
The really big next thing is if a good MMORPG comes out, one that's ambitious, but not trying to be AAA.

Thank you! It will be on Steam and the Rift store. We'll have a Coming Soon page on Oculus up very soon.

I totally agree with you, having developed in VR since the DK2 days I truly believe we are just at the beginning. There are so many crazy interesting ideas and possibilities. The hardware is getting cheaper, more comfortable, higher res displays, better controls and wireless. The content is getting much better quickly. The future for VR seems bright.

 

[Pazu]

We just launched a Discord channel where we're hosting a beta test for Chiaro over the next few days, if you have PC VR and want to participate would love to get some GAFers involved. Just drop by and say hello!

Neverain Woods Hideout

 

[Spukc]

Any planned demo ?

 

[Pazu]

Any planned demo ?

No demo, but if you're interested in checking out how the game plays you're welcome to participate in the beta!

 

[Spukc]

No demo, but if you're interested in checking out how the game plays you're welcome to participate in the beta!

Sure nice

 

[Pazu]

WHooo! After an absolutely insane, 48 hour sleepless marathon and nearly 3 years of development, Chiaro and the Elixir of Life is finally live on Steam and Oculus Home!

Initial impressions seem to be positive!

Thank you all for the support, would love to hear what you think should you play and I will keep this thread updated as our plans for PSVR firm up!

 

[mindfreak191]

Can I be the "game code provided by developer for honest review" guy in the steam reviews? Looks great from the trailer