For Ryan Payton, the moment of truth is drawing near. A few years ago, he convinced
Jay Ong, the head of
Marvel Games, to entrust him with Iron Man.
Payton’s studio,
Camafloj, finally revealed what it was doing this week
with Iron Man VR. They have been trying to perfect Iron Man’s flights of fancy in the three-dimensional spaces of virtual reality. I tried it out, and the experience is immersive.
You point the PlayStation Move controllers, with your palms down and pressing buttons so that you can fire your thrusters and move upward in VR.
You can point a palm at an enemy and fire your Repulsor Beams. The motions are a lot like the fantasy of being Iron Man, and that’s the way Payton wants it. I talked to him at a recent Sony event about making the Iron Man of his dreams and bringing it to the world. The game debuts in 2019 on PlayStation VR.
GamesBeat: How did you get connected with Marvel?
Ryan Payton: I was a journalist way back in the day.
One of the folks I used to work with was Bryan Intihar, one of my best friends. Eventually, he became creative director on Spider-Man. Around the time they announced at E3 2016, he introduced me to Jay Ong, the head of Marvel Games, in the Marriott lobby, where all biz dev happens at E3. From there it was a snowball effect. I knew I’d love to work with Marvel and it seemed like they wanted to work with us on a VR game. One thing led to another, and next thing I knew we were working with Marvel on Iron Man VR.
We eventually created a partnership with Sony, and they’ve been extremely supportive. They’ve always been about wanting to enable developers like Camouflaj to make not just an experimental game, but a full-fledged real game for PlayStation VR. That’s what we’ve been doing for the past two-and-a-half years
GamesBeat: What had you done before that? Have you done anything else in VR?
Payton: Our first foray into VR was actually doing a VR port for our first game a company, which was called Republique. We did a game called Republique VR, which was a launch title for Oculus Go. We were working on that with a small team while the majority of the team
— it’s a 50-plus person team up in Seattle — was working on Iron Man VR.
If you include contract help at the moment, we’re well over 60 people on the game right now.
GamesBeat: I wondered how you did that, because the sensors don’t usually allow that.
Payton: We have some absolute wizards working at Camouflaj and our development partners at Dark Wind in New York. They weren’t intimidated by the challenge of having only the single PlayStation VR camera.
We designed the game so players can move around 360, uninhibited, and not have to worry about where they’re looking and whether they’re facing the camera. There’s a bunch of tricks underneath the hood, a dozen or so unique things we’re doing that are predictive, that use the gyroscope in the Move controllers.
There's more of the interview of Ryan Payton and GamesBeat in the link. This game is shaping up to feel like a great Fall PSVR game that will be packed in. What do you guys think?
I had a smile on my face the entire time, and the music is great to 
