Okay, let’s take a deeeeep breath and get ready. There’s a lot to say!

First of all, the most drastic news: the members of Defective Studios have gone our separate ways geographically. WHAT?! I know! We’ve gone totally virtual! This means that our fine ol’ apartment in Watertown, MA is no longer our center of operations. Yes, we’ll miss the place, but it’ll allow us to follow what our hearts truly desire. All in all, going electronic is a thoughtful move that we knew would benefit us in the long run. We’d like to make it clear that our current projects are being continued with as much gusto, and future projects are still in incubation, as you will soon find out – so keep reading!

 The DX11 Project

To move out of the apartment, much needed to happen…but in true Defective spirit, we embarked on a project shortly before moving day. With the announcement  by Unity3d of a competition to show off the newest DX11 capabilities, Matt Schoen and Danger Donaghey decided that starting a project to test out their tech mettle would be a great opportunity to refresh themselves and push the Unity community forward. They developed a particle direct compute shader, procedural mesh quadralizing, quad mesh tessellation, distance based tessellation, and vector displacement maps. This video from the Defectube will show you some of what they worked on.

The project ended up being a tessellated dragon, a volume filled with direct compute particles, and a cinematic recorder which is a lite in editor animation editor. The project is still being worked on for public consumption with assets streaming in. Danger, overall project manager, has the following to say: “I would like to send a shout out to two artists that helped in the project in a pinch – Raya Wolfsun and Chris “Carnage” Murray, a concept artist and a foley expert respectively. Also, a shout out to Deja Merenkov for excellent coordination, research, and a general all around help.” How nice of you, Danger! 🙂 I know I am glad I worked on it. It was indeed a team effort that pulled from all of our respective strengths, and it’s not ending just yet.

 What are we going to do now?

Right now, Defective Studios is working on Gimbal Cop, creating a more complete experience out of the DX11 Dragon project, and experiencing new technology that has come our way. Jono Forbes is putting some of the finishing touches on Gimbal Cop while having many adventures in Japan (lucky him!). Danger received an invitation and a device from the Leap Motion team and is starting to toy with the future commercial product excitedly. Matt Schoen has made his way over to settle in New Mexico, where he will work on finishing up the DX11 project for now, and then – who knows. As per the way Defective Studios has always worked, we will always end up switching gears, even for a short moment, to help out on each other’s projects.

In terms of the future, we are looking forward to two large events in the next few months: a Beta release of Gimbal Cop, and the delivery of Oculus Rift Dev kits to three of our members. Although we’ve had people play iterations of our progress from time to time, we want to give you guys a game to play as soon as we can. Of course, we also want to put out a quality product (so rushing would suck), but we want it out within the next few months. As our first commercial release, it’s pretty exciting that we are so close. So awesome!

When it comes to Oculus Rift development, we have so much to feel pumped about – with VR in our future, the tessellation and displacement we work on will provide invaluable depth to a VR experience, making 2d surfaces pop in a 3d environment based on what you are looking at and what is close to you for optimization’s sake. Also, having voluminous particle direct compute shaders will provide a stereoscopic particle option with a smaller budget. Finally, we are constantly talking to our community of peers in Unity, VR, and Leap development circles, to a point of future possible collaboration with indies, developing the future of gaming. Agh! Even MORE awesome!

 Let’s crack those knuckles…

Many exciting technologies are coming together, and with some finesse we plan to move into the future embracing the new and innovative with a fresh feature set and interesting, unique ideas. That’s what we’ve always been about, and so far, it certainly looks like everything 2013 has thrown at us is right up our alley! Look out for Gimbal Cop and other projects coming your way.

~ by Khadeja on January 29, 2013.

Posted in Life, News, RL happenings, Unity