We caught up with Nick Pittom and John Hibbins of Psytec Games at EGX 2015 to dig a little deeper into the story behind the virtual reality retro-styled dungeon crawler Crystal Rift, set to release alongside the first wave of VR hardware next year.
EGX is UK’s biggest games show and as good a place as any to gauge the country’s awareness of virtual reality and if that is the case, England is absolutely ready for VR. EGX 2015 was dominated by VR gaming this year, and in particular Valve’s HTC manufactured Vive VR headset, which was almost literally everywhere you looked at the show.
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The stand that held the lions share of HTC’s much anticipated VR hardware though was perhaps unexpected; a small indie development studio named Psytec Games had not one, not two but four HTC Vive’s dedicated to demonstrating their new made-for-VR title Crystal Rift.
Given the youth of virtual reality’s most recent renaissance, game development projects with gestation periods of more than 12 months are still quite rare right now. Crystal Rift however has now been in development at one stage or another for a little over 2 years. So how did it all begin? “We were both at a VR event at Bossa Studios,” says Nick Pittom, and Jon Hibbins continues “I was showing a really early build of this [Crystal Rift] … everyone was really into the game, I knew at that time I had something that was looking cool, VR was cool and it was starting to work.” Did their eyes meet across a crowded demo floor? “[Laughs] Ironically the deal was done over a MacDonald’s in
Liverpool Street Station,” says Hibbins, “I knew Nick’s work, I’d downloaded his Ghibli stuff. There was something we both knew about VR.” Pittom offers “I think ‘cos I’d done a couple of demo things, and that was great but they were quite short experiences that I’d spent a few weeks on, and I knew that I wanted to work on something a bit bigger, a bit longer. I’d not had much experience with Unity at that point, not enough to make my own game.” The Ghibli VR experiences were essentially the first time Pittom had ventured into the coding space at all, “Pretty much! I’d started doing a tower defence thing, but then VR came along and I was like ‘Oh I should do that!”
See Also: We Preview ‘Crystal Rift’ on the Oculus Rift – Now Available on Steam Early Access
Crystal Rift struck both developers as a good fit for VR “It works really well for VR, just from the point of view of movement and everything like that being quite good for VR,” says Pittom. The pairing Pittom’s and Hibbins’ skillset also seemed to make perfect sense “I’m really proficient at engines and project management and business and those types of things, then I’ve got somebody like Nick who’s awesome at animating and storytelling … all the opposites. So it was pretty much a match made in heaven.”
Hibbins has been around gaming his whole life but fell out of it after having his first game, Squiggs, published on a cover disk for UK’s Amiga Power magazine. “Not because I didn’t love gaming, but there just wasn’t an industry then.” Since then he’s kept busy in business, as a CTO of a company, employing 100s of developers on what Hibbins terms ‘real-world serious stuff’ and even worked on an IOS published title. As such, Crystal Rift it turns out is a much older title than you might imagine. “I had a prototype for Crystal Rift called ‘Dungeon Director’ 10 years ago … so I always wanted to do this game.”
Crystal Rift‘s look is fairly unique, minimalist and abstract to an extent, I wanted to know where this had stemmed from – resource constraints or concious design direction? “It’s a mix of both,” says Pittom, “at the time [beginning development] VR was very performance hungry, and it still is. I think that we were very aware that we wanted to be performance effective and so we weren’t throwing a lot of geometry at the problem, we were being very efficient with our design. We’ve always tried to keep it nicely streamlined.”
Virtual reality offers a level of immersion beyond that of traditional games of course, so I wondered how the team had handled the risk of scaring off it’s potential customer base. “We don’t want to be a horror game!” Hibbins states succinctly, “I don’t like horror games, we’re trying to be a tongue-in-cheek ghost train scenario where it’s fun and you never feel like you’re actually going to die. We’ve got the different scare [menu selectable] levels.” Hibbins says that “VR is a very complex thing because it’s more in touch with humanity than I realised it was. There are very, very different people out there, we want to give them all something they’re comfortable with.”
Today, Crystal Rift is on the cusp of a full release, with a 5 man team now in place at Psytec, it’s already on Steam’s early access platform. Psytec are busy polishing Act II of the game right now and were proudly demonstrating the latest build at EGX on no less than four HTC Vive Developer Editions, quite an impressive array for a small developer. By chance I ran into Chet Faliznek, Valve’s developer relations for the SteamVR platform, at the Crystal Rift stand and when I asked him how they’d managed this, his response was simply “They asked nicely”. However, whilst the idea that traditional British politeness was to thank for Valve’s flush of generosity is quaint, Hibbins says that the gaming giant seem to be quite taken with the title. “[Valve] are interested in content and they want to speak to us and they personally like what we do.” It seems that Crystal Rift‘s excellent ‘in VR’ map editor, modeled for the Minecraft generation, may have played a bit part in currying favour. “Chet [Faliszek] told me personally that the editor was the driver for this, because creating and driving new content in VR is interesting. They [Valve] want a variety of content.”
Our thanks to Jon Hibbins and Nick Pittom for being so generous with their time and don’t forget to check out Crystal Rift on Steam Early Access right now, with a full release coming alongside the HTC Vive. A date we may not have that much longer to wait for.
