The Phoenix Gene has been about four years of work from concept to creation. It's a VR game, a book and it's even existed as a screenplay for a feature film along the way. It started life as an idea in 2013. I developed it as a variety of short form films, before working with my partner, Julie, as a film screenplay. Along the way we invested in artwork to make the pitch deck everything it could be, and when we fell in love with VR and we were looking for a project we could bring to market everything fell into place. I had a vision for a gameplay mechanic I wasn't seeing on the market that felt like it needed to be made, we had the world, characters and story from the screenplay and work started on the VR game now known as The Phoenix Gene. 

I had to learn Unreal, which began in 2020. I've worked in games for over a decade prior to this so I was familiar with a lot of the elements required to make the game from game design to real-time limitations and now I was pairing it with over two decades of experience in animated filmmaking. There were a series of technologies that were emerging that also made the project viable, from Meta's Application Spacewarp, allowing us to reach viable frame rates with more impressive visuals on mobile chipsets. Foveated rendering, keeping the hardware's resources focused on the screen area that matters. Camera based motion capture, making human performances viable without costly hardware. Unreal blueprint, making it possible for a non-programmer to make a game almost from start to finish.

Julie was also writing books now, and we decided to turn The Phoenix Gene into a series of novels. We worked on ideas together and she ran with them, expanding the universe and enriching the story far beyond anything I could have imagined. We have big plans for where it’s all going, and the beginning of the first novel is already available in the VR game.

Back to the game, and of course a project of this scale doesn't happen entirely solo, and fortunately I've built teams in the past for a variety of different mediums, supplementing who we can find with my skills, and learning what needs to be learned to get the job done. Along the way I worked with talented artists, performers, programmers and game designers doing everything they could with limited resources to make something amazing. It was a big task but we delivered and went on to get some great reviews.

The game features a new control scheme that takes full advantage of 3x 6DOF controls... i.e. you can freely move your head and two hand controllers around a space. We use this to control a character in third person viewpoint through a constantly engaging environment, making the player dodge, reach, aim and shoot while following the story taking place around them in a completely immersive experience. We had to be mindful of what causes player nausea and avoid it completely, while also ramping the player up from little experience to master over the course of the game. This meant limiting our strength early on while they were acclimatizing to the new format, then expanding on its strengths one step at a time, delivering new thrills.

One challenge we have faced was that this is such an innovative new take, pushing the wireless VR in new directions that take advantage of the medium, that it requires players to un-learn some of the things they're accustomed to in order to experience the best of it. And changing people's habits and expectations is hard! If we have had negative responses to our game that's typically why. Usually if someone takes a fresh look at it they will see the value, but the world bombards us with content so fast it can be hard to harness people's attention for that long. Fortunately we have had some really good responses, and they have outvoted the negative in our store reviews. But we still need to reach a wider audience.

This will be a long journey to spread the word and recoup the investment, but it'll be worth it. The game is amazing and deserves its place in an exciting growing medium.

Copyright © of HEROmation