There were a whopping 3 games that came out in 2016 that I worked on. I’ve talked about Ratchet and Clank already, the others are both games that were published by Oculus for their Rift VR headset.

Edge of Nowhere

The first is Edge of Nowhere a horror-ish adventure game inspired by Lofecraft’s Mountains of Madness. It came out last June, not too long after the launch of the Rift itself.

I joined this project about halfway through its development schedule. There were a lot of problems to solve at that time and it was pretty tough to sort out what needed to be done the most. In the end I feel like there are a lot of things we could have done better, but still, we broke a lot of new ground and some parts of it are really cool. Even more than before, my role on this game was focused on managing production; trying to make sure that all of the designers had clear direction, properly scoped and scheduled work, defining the development process, good communication between departments, etc.

I was able to get my hands dirty a little bit. I worked on the design and implementation of the enemy vision visualization and the hero’s observation mode visualization. I wish I had some cool videos or screenshots, but it’s kind of hard to take screenshots of VR stuff and have it make much sense compared to seeing it in-game.

Anyway, if you have a rift, definitely check it out. Also, if you are ever going to play it, don’t watch the spoiler-heavy launch trailer!

The Unspoken

As Edge was wrapping up, I transitioned to another Oculus project; The Unspoken. This accompanied the launch of the Oculus Touch controllers, released on December 6th 2016.

You too can be incinerated by 3 colossal lava cobras and an anthropomorphic crow

Again, I came on about halfway through development. Again, I was mostly a manager and didn’t have time to own specific features. I did make a big push for organizing our telemetry efforts so that we have a much better sense of how people are playing the game and what sorts of issues are common and that effort has really paid off. For a fighting game, I feel like we made a well balanced game for competetive play which isn’t easy!

The Touch controllers are pretty awesome. If you are curious at all, you can set up a demo at select Best Buy locations. The Unspoken is part of the demo (or so I’m told).

Maybe next time I can talk about some new hobby projects :)