You can tell when the November cold snap comes around to Edinburgh. Here in the office, it means that the winter charcoal hand-warmer comes out…

So, it seems in a staggering degree of competence, the three lengthy rants on crunch I wrote and queued for posting didn’t in fact get posted, and just sat around in WordPress till now. So much for my good intentions on blog posting. They’re up now though, so please do scroll back and take a look. Those who know me know I’ve a bee in my bonnet about both crunch and the underlying viability of games development, so those thoughts have been bubbling up for a while.

Since NASCAR: Redline shipped I’ve been busy with various different things that I’ve been neglecting, not least of which is looking ahead to see where to go next. While I’m still positive about smartphone development, I’m conscious now that the market is rather saturated, and I feel like we have missed the window where a small team can do great things and get noticed for it. That’s entirely my fault, focusing too much on work-for-hire development and neglecting our own projects, but I stand by the choices good or bad.

Recently though I’ve been investigating the resurgence of Virtual Reality tech, specifically the Oculus Rift project and castAR. Both are using modern technology to revisit the old holy grail of immersive digital realities, but unlike previous attempts at it, these project really feel like they are breaking through and making this a real possibility. The enthusiasm around both projects is real and infectious, and having gotten a hold of a Rift prototype in October, I confess that I joined in. Potential projects, interesting research opportunities, titles that you just couldn’t do before, they’re all bubbling up and out of me, and I’m enthused about getting my hands dirty in a way I haven’t been for games development in a long time. What’s clear to me is that many or most of the existing techniques we use, both for user input and for user interfaces, just don’t work in a VR setting. We’ll need to throw a bunch of our old preconceptions about how to build games out and learn them anew; as well as conquer a few more problems which are unique to VR. I have plenty of ideas on that front, but will need to try them out to see if I really understand the problems, let alone the solutions.

My Rift prototype turned up earlier this week, and I find myself massively frustrated that I’m busy with other more pressing projects and can’t get started. I’ll hopefully rectify that soon enough, and you should probably expect a bunch more posts around my experimentation with the kit. I’ll have to wait until next year for a castAR kit, but that will open up even more possibilities in a different way to the Rift, and I think the final solutions will draw on the lessons learned from both systems.