Hooo big news time! 1) We’re well underway to launching a Kickstarter for VRMT this fall, and 2) with that, it’s time to outgrow the working title and get a real name: ‘Archean Worldbuilder‘!

Of course we’re super excited to finally share this news (it’s been a long time coming), and many more details will come shortly, but for now, we just wanted to get that out there. Kickstarter. Archean Worldbuilder. It’s happening.

We’ll be at Boston FIG tomorrow demoing the latest state of the project, come say hi!

Long time no see! We’ll get better about that one of these days 😉 This’ll be a very short post, but just wanted to let any anxious onlookers know: things are going very well, and we have a lot of exciting stuff to share very soon, with a few excellent tidbits right now:

• VRMT is up and running very nicely on the Project Tango tablet devkit, and we’ve released that app on the Google Play Store!! Here’s Google’s post including VRMT, and if you’re also working with a Tango tablet, you can officially download the build here. VRMT on Tango is pretty rad if I may say so myself, but we also have some updates in store for it that I think will blow minds.
• The Proto Awards selected VRMT as an honoree for Best GUI and Most Innovative! That honestly came as a shock, and we’re very honored to be included among Skyworld, VRChat, Virtual Desktop, World of Comenius, ElemenTerra, Surgeon Simulator, and Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes (seriously I’ve been obsessed with Keep Talking since it released. #1 couple’s therapy app ever). Those are all fantastic VR apps from some of the best developers out there, and I still haven’t internalized that we get to sully their ranks!
• Boston Festival of Indie Games has included VRMT in the Digital Showcase! It’s on September 12th at MIT, and we’ll be there in force, showing the latest version, including various surprises. We’re very happy to have VRMT at FIG this year, since it was exactly a year prior, at FIG 2014, that VRMT made its public debut!
• Schoen will be talking at Unite 2015 about developing and supporting UniMerge! And the cherry on top: Unite 2015 is in Boston! His talk is titled “Creating UniMerge: What happens when you fill a feature hole and put it on the Asset Store”, and is full of great info and experience from building, publishing, and supporting UniMerge, which we hope other developers will find very helpful. And of course we hope for it to be a nice shot of publicity for UniMerge, which we can’t imagine working without!
• I (Jono) have taken the helm with a new sub-group of Boston VR: Boston VR Devs, a monthly VR development hackathon! We had our first official hackathon last month, where we had a great time and made some sweet stuff. I jammed on a very exciting new VRMT feature, which we’ll share next month. If you’re in Boston and doing any level of hacking with VR stuff, join us! The next hackathon is September 13th.

There’s more great news that we can’t wait to share, but that’s probably enough exclamation points for one day. Schoen and I are both away for the next week spending some time with our families, and will hit the ground running in September — which is poised to be Defective’s most exciting month to date!

We’ve at least been getting a little better about being alive on Twitter, and most of this news was announced there as it came up — so if you Tweet, join us!

VRMT v0.3 is up, adding wall-building tools, Leap support, a beautiful new artpack, and many little fixes and improvements! Here’s the viddy overview:

Continue reading ‘VRMT v0.3: Walls, Leap, and New Art!’

Huzzah, it’s out-into-the-wild day for VRMT!! A build of v0.1 is now officially live and ready for your downloady goodness, and of course your invaluable feedback. You can grab it right now at defectivestudios.com/vrmt!

Continue reading ‘VRMT: Get it now!’

Rejoice!  Today we officially take the wraps off VRMT (working title), a new VR creation game and worldbuilding tool we’ve been working on for a couple months. Aiming to be something between Minecraft (a little creation game you might’ve heard of) and Maya (more what I mean by “worldbuilding tool”), VRMT gives you a set of props and tools with which you and your friends can create environments. Much inspiration comes from Bruce Branit’s short film Worldbuilder.

Continue reading ‘Unveiling VRMT!’

Hmm, it’s been a bit, eh?  Looks like it’s time for another Defective recap post!  In fact, a lot’s happened and we have a lot to say about it all, so here today we’ll lay out the broad overview of what’s been going on, and soon, we’ll be putting up individual blog posts about a few of these things.

Onlookers prepare to have their minds (and chunks) blown at BFIG

Continue reading ‘Newness inbound! But first, a look back…’

If anybody else out there is as much of a performance snob as I am (or if you’re seeing certain frames taking 250ms or more on mobile platforms), you might have noticed (or researched) that no matter what you try, string.Format and StringBuilder.ToString() will always create a little bit (sometimes a lot) of garbage. I came across this issue a little over a year ago in CosmoKnots when trying to serialize replay and analytics data for web storage, and it pretty much killed that feature for mobile devices (which is a real shame, because I pretty much designed the performance analytics system specifically for mobile builds). I had resigned myself to this fate… until now.

It is time!!  Time for a CosmoKnots update, this one focused on improvements to the controls. Generally, the inertial gamepad controls are much improved, we’ve added the ability to look around with a gamepad or mouse, and the control settings screen finally lets you choose and tune which kind of control you want.  We’ve also cracked the lid on reactive music, and made oodles of fixes, tweaks, and improvements all around.

New feature: know where you’re going!

Read on for details:

Continue reading ‘CosmoKnots v0.3.2: Control Upgrade, Looking Around, Knobs to Diddle, Reactive Lose Tunes’

Why hello there, long time no chat. Worry not, all is well in the virtual Defectivehaus: we’ve been hard at work for a few weeks on a small VR contract project, which, at least in its first phase, we’re wrapping today. We should be able to say more about it soon, but for now suffice it to say it’s something of a best-of-all-worlds situation: we get paid to work on a cool project in our favorite new emerging tech.

There’s also a pretty beefy CosmoKnots update, mainly controls focused, that we just barely weren’t able to get out the door before going all-hands-on-deck on this VR project, but that update will come very soon (dare I predict within a week), with more CK updates in queue just behind that one. And if that weren’t enough good (if not vague) news all in one post, we’ve also been jamming on a handful of little game jams, at least some of which should see the light of day before long.