Hello, my name is Richard. I am a software architect and technical artist at Blue Brain Games. My role involves extensive research, assessing our technical capacity, and building the foundation of our games. Since I was the initial programmer at Blue Brain Games, this responsibility has always been mine.
Let’s look at the story of our first VR title from my perspective:
A whole decade ago, the startup company Oculus made waves on the internet by promising accessible virtual reality. I quickly became an avid fan, following every update and closely monitoring developments in this space. In 2015, I ordered the Oculus Rift Development Kit (DK2), thinking the future was here. Oh boy, was I wrong. There was no support for game engines, and programming was very low-level. I was way over my head, and during this time, I had just become a new member of Blue Brain Games. Because of this, my only active experience with VR was experimenting with various tech demos I found online.
Years later, while working on The House of Da Vinci 2 during the day, I enjoyed using my first official consumer version of the Oculus Rift headset in my free time. Noticing significant advancements in developer software and game engine integration, I wondered if I could take another shot at VR development. With permission, I brought my headset to the office and created a simple demo. I took the final graphics from a scene, placed the player in the middle, added VR integrations, and voilà - as Peter mentioned in the previous dev log - it was a great success. Everyone in the company was excited to experience the grimy canal beneath the Castello Estense.
We knew we had something special, but the time wasn’t right yet. There were too many unanswered questions, and my responsibility was to find answers.
After finishing House of Da Vinci 2, I was feeling mild symptoms of burnout. Completing a project can sometimes feel like a never-ending story. To rejuvenate, I decided to deepen my knowledge of VR development with a side project in my spare time. This project was a space-themed game involving resource management and epic fleet battles.
Have a look at it:
I worked on this project for a year, but I underestimated its scope and realized I couldn’t complete it alone. So, I shelved it, but the experience I gained was invaluable.
Our next milestone came after completing House of Da Vinci 3 when our company had more resources. The Oculus Quest 2, a standalone wireless device, was emerging as the primary VR direction with a substantial potential customer base. Game engine integrations had also become solid. With my accumulated experience, I was ready to take on the task, and thus, the pre-production phase of House of Da Vinci VR began, focusing on Oculus Quest 2 devices.
Sometimes, even serious research can look quite silly:
The biggest question was how can I squeeze the most performance out of this device. A significant technical milestone for our game was the use of Asynchronous Spacewarp (ASW). This technique almost halves the CPU/GPU time required to produce nearly the same output. Of course, there are drawbacks to this technique that need to be considered during development.
What was more concerning was that I didn’t know of any games that used it. However, I decided to take the risk, and it paid off. Just look at it; such beautiful visuals on Oculus Quest 2 are very rare.
We are working with real-time lights that produce beautiful specular highlights, but sorry, no real-time shadows yet. Now that we are in the finishing stages of our production, I know of only one major game that uses this technique (If you know what to look for, you can't miss it).
Well, for now, that’s all from me. I look forward to bringing you more interesting technical details from behind the scenes in the future.
Richard
Software Architect, Technical Artist
Blue Brain Games