Bitsummit 2023: Steam Decks everywhere, no VR, and impressive indie games
boilingsteam.com
boilingsteam.com
What really blew us away though, was the haptic feedback on the controllers. There's this one bit at the beginning where an on-screen indicators beckons you to grab and slide out a drawer. The feedback in the (move controllers?) I think they are called manage to simulate actual resistance/friction. Everyone took turns opening and closing the very same drawer, in awe. We then put it away and watched some YouTube. I might try openy closy again on the weekend.
Sounds like a very fun convention, and I'm definitely going to try and check out some of the games. Exciting time for small studio development.
What I would love to see, is a very focused "how to make your own games on Steam Deck" book/video/whatever. I know my kids are interested in making some games, but have no idea where to start. Having a very basic primer to get it up on the Deck would be amazing.
Short summary: The Deck is a Linux computer. Get SSH running on it, compile your game for Linux, copy over the files and run it. Out of the various console SDKs, Deck is probably the easiest for indies to get started on, as it's just another computer.
If they're 14+ Unity is realistic and is the same thing the pros use.
I haven't tried Unreal Engine for Fortnite but if they play it, it is probably the best option.
Minecraft, Bloons and Terraria modding is also pretty good.
You can give them a GPT4 sub and it seems to do a good job answering basic computing questions if this is going to be their first time e.g. installing a professional tool.
They are already making scratch games. Would be amazingly fun for them to run a game on the deck just like any other game. Not in a browser, which is how most of those games are executed.
I'm guessing the lack of guides for this specific thing is because it's trivial to do.
I could also dream of a path to live coding on the deck. Would be great to have a debugger hooked up for developers.
Understatement of the year. For most "consoles" (switch, PS5, xbox) you practically need to have an incorporated legal entity to even begin to do anything. I looked briefly at the process for getting started on the Switch, and it seemed to me like they either wanted you to already have a relationship with them (an existing studio) or have an already-completed game that you can show them you want to port. THEN you can enter into contracts for development-capable Switch hardware and the SDKs and etc.
Meanwhile the "linux SDK" has been available for open download via http literally since I was born.
VR is still a bit niche and only VRC actually offers an easy road to creating experiences - it's way easier to get novelty junkies on VRC to checkout a world than to try to sell or market a standalone experience. Probably easiest to just run a patreon at these levels than actually sell games, too.
Not the immersive metaworld thing that is so popular in fiction, but a real fun game that is not just about being VR.
VRChat has, I think, a more limited demographic than Beat Saber, and it is probably not where the future of VR is. I mean, it is cool, and I think it is here to stay (or if it doesn't, it will be replaced by something similar), but like Second Life today, I don't think it has much room for growth.
Pistol Whip
Audio Trip
Les Mills Body Combat
In Death Unchained
Racket NX
Ragnarok
Walkabout Mini Golf
:
A few off the top of my head...
In terms of gameplay I don't think it's that much different than other tech demo-ey VR games, it's just that the theme and writing are extremely good.
I started with controller and moved to a projector & wheel for my setup, but after years of practice the sim was good enough that I eventually bought a rally car, assembled a rally team, and placed runner up to the eventual class national champion in a full stage rally my rookie year.
One of my favorite memories was having an "off" that debeaded and blew out a tire. While driving up to 60mph on the rim to finish the stage I thought "wow the sim was really spot on with this experience"
I sold the car after getting my ARA "pro" license though, they don't simulate how you have to light dollar bills on fire to fund your hobby, nor the very real risks of serious injury or death.
Ha thanks, I have to say when I reflect on the experience it was about 10% "me" and 90% "others and the team". After towing the car home on faith that I would figure out the rest (my car maintenance experience was roughly changing tires and checking oil), I reconnected with a mentor who had decades of stage rally experience.
He ultimately invested tons of his time and effort into short-cutting me through many lessons and gotchas, even helping me rebuild the motor when it blew up before my 1st scheduled event. After awhile I called our rally team "God's Grace Rally Team" because the way it so quickly came together and succeeded so well in light of the many overcome issues was really a spiritual experience.
But yes, it can be done. Take that step of faith... reach out and ask for help too!
"Welcome to Lightfields" from Google - just blows my mind.
We often used to hang out at my old place with a few friends (often the first days of the year, but also some weekends), playing boardgames, cooking together and taking it slow. We played the game on two or three of these occasions and having one person do a full play through with the others watching/commenting on the TV worked incredibly well. Plus, spectators don't need to focus on the game. I think one time we did two play throughs back to back (different players, and I think the second one wasn't there for the first round). Though the living room at that place was huge and allowed for a 3x4m arena with only minor inconveniences. And of course if people loath R&M it's less funny I'm afraid (but still a very nice VR puzzler!).
Not that I really care, there's enough usecases where it adds value (eg simming) to support a cottage industry. And I'm not a trend follower anyway, I like to make my own choices. Most of the things I'm really into are very niche.
But it would be nice to see a bit more content for it.
Damn you, Dan Harmon, damn you.
This is actually a reason 2D games can exclude women; they get motion sick more easily and nobody tunes the games for them!
(I know like three.)
Every point shrinks the target market
Now we have apple with their exclusive vr headset and this will alienate more people until the market stabilizes - maybe like what happened with touch screen phones in the 10s
PCs are expensive. You spent ~$1500 on a good uptodate setup. Now a Valve Index will cost another $1000. Not worth it for the niche.
It's a different type of platform and regardless, the second half of your comment ruled out the value of the first.
Yes or no: can a standalone headset play games like a PC-connected headset can? If yes, it is not a poor substitute. If no, then it is a poor substitute. This is the dichotomy I established with my comment.
I also don’t understand people’s aversion to Meta over Google, Amazon, etc. but that’s a personal choice.
Objecting to Meta specifically here is a response to VR suggestions. The other two companies are irrelevant in this conversation because neither has a VR headset available for use (that I know of). It doesn't help that the Oculus Quest is the cheapest VR option out there, so it gets suggested every time the topic comes up, so those of us who prefer to avoid the three companies you mentioned tend to have a quick response ready.
PSVR only requires a playstation 4 or 5 (depending on PSVR or PSVR2)
High end PC VR is expensive, yeah - but it's not been the only or even main choice for a while now.
And you can't the graphic quality of a mobile game or need a extra PC to stream your content.
Besides even the very top end headsets are still pretty early in terms of tech. Extremely narrow tunnel vision FoV that doesn't even come anywhere close to the 210 degrees required for full human vision, pixels visible on most and if they aren't you'll need an incredibly expensive rig to run those crazy resolutions at 90 fps. Games are also really pricey for what you get since they're targeting a niche market which by definition has to be loaded to be able to afford the setup anyway and has a sunk cost to justify. It's the console experience on PC. Plus you need to mount the trackers and find a way to manage that big fat cable for the headset, it's just piles and piles of expensive hassle for what's mostly still a gimmick.
I'm pretty sure it'll be pretty good a few generations of headsets in the future though, especially once on-the-level PC performance becomes more affordable and the game UX best practices improve. I'm glad the VR games industry is at least moving away from the dumb mandatory teleporting thing and letting people walk around normally now.
The most popular games consoles are the phones everyone has already, because they do other things, the game playing is effectively free. Not to mention that the games themselves have an upfront cost of $0 as well.
"Free" is hard to beat.
The biggest problem is the lenses work perfectly in reverse, transforming the parallel rays of light from the sun into a single spot on the LCD screen, literally burning it.
Until we get a different display technology, outside usage is probably going to remain extremely limited.
- you should try it first to check how bad your motion sickness gets when playing. If you have it bad, all your bought VR equipment is unusable.
- you need specific hardware for it which (mostly) only works for gaming (and maybe porn). Putting 400+ bucks into the hardware for that sole purpose is to much for most people.
- you need a dedicated place for it. You can play it sitting down, but that's not even half the fun of VR.
I have a VR headset myself and really like it, but even for me it's a hustle to free up the space and set everything up for a session. I rather pick up my steamdeck and play wherever I might be.
I've only had a tiny exposure to VR and it was all very nice, but disorientating and I had to be stood up whilst playing. I guess the disorientation is something you get used to, but if I want to relax and play a game, I want to be sat down which would also help with not having the usual balance cues due to the headset blocking sight.
Convenience is where the Steam Deck wins - the ability to hit the power button to put it to sleep almost instantly in the middle of a game and to then just pick it up later and carry on is really nice. I had stopped playing computer games as I found it difficult to allocate time to go and play on a PC, but am now getting back into playing games as I can just pick up the Deck, and be continuing a game within seconds. I guess it's a similar phenomenon as casual phone games, but applied to Steam games.
For VR to truly take off, I reckon it'll need the headset to shrink to being like a pair of glasses and the immersion will likely suffer, but the convenience factor is what'll win. In some ways I see it as being akin to 3D films - people would rather just watch a 2D film without needing special glasses as it's more convenient, though to be fair, 3D adds very little to the film watching experience in my opinion (story and acting performances are what makes a great film, not 3D CGI effects).
Two things: Price, and VR in reality isn't as cool and sexy as portrayed in science fiction.
Apple's at least trying to improve or at least shake up the latter, albeit at the cost of worsening the former.
It's just not comfortable enough for prolonged use. As well as those issues, there's the discomfort of being so isolated from the world, especially if in a home/office with other people around. And other (more solveable) issues, such as text legibility.
Not a single game is custom made for VR except HL:A...
It's too expensive to develop for, if Roblox on Quest 2 sucks VR is over.
On the other hand if you want a action MMO (something we never succeeded in doing yet, Planetside 2 was a latency fest) you need to go vanilla C/C++.
Engines make games economical (in zero interest rate times) but the value of the games is lower because nothing is invented, they are just copying the wheel.
I never buy Unity/Unreal games or non-multiplayer games.
Well, of course that's a valid approach, but you do realize that most people playing games don't really care which engine something is developed in?
Even if this personal requirement of yours is true or not, "Not a single game is custom made for VR" couldn't be further from the truth, and the mainstream does not have anything close to those requirements. They simple buy and play games that look fun, regardless of engine.
Thats... a weird take.
lots of applications share 80% of their functionality and thus makes sense for there to be a shared codebase that engineers can start from to build their projects. thats the entire point of frameworks like ruby on rails or Django in web development. if you wanna go lower down, most people are using a library to interact with the gpu. either opengl or vulkan or metal.
Would you go as far as to say you won't play a game that wasn't built from scratch all the way to the metal?
So many low quality Unity/Unreal copies that ruins peoples lives making them indebted because they think they will make it as indie by just pasting new content into the same engine.
Content is becoming over saturated. Yet another look/sound/storyline that nobody cares about. What we need is new engines.
Unity is pure madness, so bloated not even the Unity devs. know how to progress.
Same for Unreal.
Thats because people are making crappy games. all unity and unreal did was lower the bar to making a game.
At the end of the day, its about the quality of the game + how well you market it. Sure there are a lot of shit games made in Unity. but you also get gems like cities skylines and cuphead too. The difference is the quality and attention put into making a GOOD Game. good games take worse. a platforn like unity makes creating a good game for a dev from impossible to possible.
Skylines and Cuphead are just a copies, they don't reinvent anything fundamental.
if by copies, you mean they fit in a genere? The engines are constrained by the heardware. what we really need is new paradigms for how we interact with computers before engines are going to start giving us new novel ways of doing things. at the end of the day, all an engine is giving you is a fast and performant way to draw to the screen and send audio to the speakers based on whats coming in from the input.
They are the final media/medium for humans for eternity.
I would even argue they are the final art, combining all other arts.
Eyes, ears and hands will be the interface forever.
Brain computer wont happen.
If anything, what's telling is that it's the only VR game I see getting significant traction*, which implies that VR might be a one off the way DDR was.
Anectodallish source, I teach at college where we have a public free "cool tech hub" with a bunch of VR headsets with a bunch of games that anyone can use. I'd say about 95% of the time anyone is doing vr, it's BeatSaber.
This has more to do with Beat Saber being really fun, and well, CASUAL. The majority of people who play any kind of "video game" play candy crush remember.
Nobody is going to do a run through of HL:A or a flight or driving simulator in that kind of public "tech hub".
False, there are plenty of VR only games available on Steam. There's an entire category called "VR Only".
Games like I Expect You To Die expect the player to sit (as the game character does) with only camera movement coinciding exactly with the movement of player's head -- do not cause motion sickness (unless we go into low FPS as you say).
Games like Echo Arena where the entire time you are flying around (you see the environment moving around you) with no accompanying inner-ear sensation of movement, can cause instant motion sickness in some.
And things like the Quest or Pico are just pretty rubbish for PCVR (compression, dealing with flimsy USB C connectors, Oculus software etc.).
My problem is simply that most VR games are too janky to control. Half Life: Alyx and Boneworks stood out as they were acceptable -- but beyond that, it's very hard for me to enjoy VR games.
This is the key problem for a lot of gamers. The cost issue puts more casual users off, but avid gamers are used to dropping $$$ for their hobby every upgrade cycle so as the hardware prices continue to slip downwards that is less and less their main concern. Having a private bit of space big enough and clear enough is not as those singing the virtues of VR seem to think.
> most VR games are too janky
Of course, the amount of good content that truly takes advantage of the kit is a concern when spending the $$$ even with the kit being much cheaper now than a few years ago. There might be other things that a given person can invest that resource on which will increase their enjoyment much more overall (better screens, a really comfy chair, actual games, …).
"Non-VR games, books, movies, music already get people deeply immersed without putting their head into a bucket" (Jonathan Blow in a recent stream). To me that pretty much sums it up. Your mileage may vary, but I don't think most people are actually waiting for that type of experience.
I think that’s mostly because you are doing something physical (interesting) but nobody else is allowed to participate. Which can feel kinda rude.
Compare that to normal games which you can “relax to” at the end of your work day.
I love playing beat saber myself, one of the more “casual” games, but its always been weird with people around.
Its not a coincidence that the apple vision pitch was mostly “this is the best HD screen that you’ve seen you just put it on your head” with a lot less movement emphasis, and I think it has a bigger chance of “taking off” than the current gen of vr, hopefully.
I might use VR when someone else is in the house however. That's different.
Having friends over, ignoring them and playing a game sounds rude, unless they are into it. But even then, it would be more polite to let the guests play and the host watch.
Sharing a flat with a roommate and playing a game while they do their own thing in the same room is certainly not rude.
Of course players swap and compete against each other (there is an arcade mode for that).
That's a good point but it's just a limitation with current-gen tech. There's already headsets that can 'see' other players and incorporate them into the experience. Like the HTC Vive Focus 3. This is why those are used a lot for interactive experiences at trade shows etc. They are much more suitable than an Oculus Quest.
Sharing on an external screen (on a quest you can easily stream the output to any chromecast) is something I also do when I'm giving demonstrations.
This is why most VR games are casual and gimmicky affairs that remind me of Wii Sports. Completely different audiences.
- it got very uncomfortable very fast - everyone who tried it was drenched in face sweat after ~10 minutes, not a pleasant sensation
- the games are very un-interactive compared to traditional games. Even moving about is usually very limited, it felt like playing Myst or Zork again
- when a game did offer smooth movement, the movement without moving was extremely disorienting, and would have easily caused motion sickness if I hadn't stopped immediately
Overall, the fun of looking around a VR space is completely overshadowed by the extreme limitations in control and motion and comfort. I'm much more immersed playing a PC RPG than than a VR game, and I see nothing about any upcoming headset (including Apple's) that seems to have a change to fix this. I'm not even sure it is in principle fixable, given the optical (need something to block out light to show true blacks) and geometric (need room to actually move) limitations. Probably only some kid of direct brain-computer interface could bridge these gaps.
A good game is quite immersive without needing any cumbersome goggles. I can't imagine a bad one being immersive with any sort of goggles.
To be fair, I think the same thing about fancy graphics as well; but people seem to love fancy graphics with 4k resolution and ray tracing or whatever the newest gimmick is.
In my opinion, the only significant effect of any graphics fancier than ps3 era is just increased costs, less finished/polished games, and the necessity to appeal to a wider audience.
I think about the same thing about the whole VR thing. If it becomes mainstream, I think there would be hardly any games that take advantage of it; and most of the games would just focus on the spectacle, which gets old extremely quickly.
- Motion sickness, or the fear of it. Not from looking around but from "walking" around. And the number of games which are "mainstream appalling", benefit a lot from VR and don't contain walking around are limited. Just to put it into context people getting motion sickness when stopping "walking on a treadmill while watching TV" is non negligible while at the same time people which don't have that issue often never even heard of it/considered it a thing. (Simply because in our mostly non VR world it's a non-topic.) Through at the same time it's not uncommon for people which do have motion sickness while gaming issues to still be able to use VR.
- Too little occasions to properly relaxed, and longer term (more then just 5min) try it out for yourself without buying it. For many people it looks like VR is very little value added for them (because many people don't do supper immersive gaming, but instead just want to relax a bit after work or similar)
- (potentially wrong) believe that "cheaper" VR headsets are crap
- space, it's easy to underestimate how many people live in small apartments where getting a big enough free space to not hit anything isn't easy, or if it's often in a shared space where people might find it's usage for VR annoying
- price 1, e.g. the pico 4 still cost 400€ where i live for many people this is not an amount of many they would spend just to try something out (and for many it's also not much at all)
- price 2, 400€ for something people often see as an additional investment just/exclusive for gaming, while e.g. a laptop/tablet is also seen as usable for office, and while traveling and for watching movies (with others) etc. And while some of this are misconceptions, they still are there. And if you buy something "just for gaming" and can decide between a pico 4 and a switch or playstation bundle with a grate game in it it's clear what many people will choose
- no killer use case, like VR exclusive games everyone wants to play or similar. It's a bit of an hen/egg problem. Without wide usage there is too much commercial risk for creating such a thing but without it it's harder to get wide usage. There are some thing which get close to such a thing tho, like beat saber .
- glasses/bad eyes, some people simply can't wear contact lenses and while they did add some features to some headsets to "compensate bad eyes" they have sever limitations (bad eyesight isn't as simple as you focus point being a bit off, you also can e.g. have rotations, twists or folds, and getting that just slightly wrong can be a very exhausting or even headache inducing experience for the users)
Anyway I think the main problem is "perception" in many different ways as well as eco system wrt. non game use cases.
Which is also why I think Apple did what it did, at some point you need to start if you want to succeed in a emergend field even if you loose money. The problem is you don't know when the VR field will explode and entering it too early can be too costly.
My guess is for VR to take off we need an reasonable priced headset+equipment set which you practically can use by itself as a laptop replacement for non gaming tasks and "simple/short" games.
Means:
- portable/compact enough
- usable in public (but doesn't need as fancy features as what apple did)
- ~4+h battery live for office tasks, 8h would be better
- comfortable usable when having a power supply (like similar to one from a laptop) connected
- with not too long brakes usable for 8-10h
- usable by most people, at least for office task and some simple games
- full laptop functionality, e.g. browsing or playing non VR games like idk. minesweeper
- reasonable affordable base models (as full laptop replacement that would be ~800€) and nice still reasonable priced "good" (not highest end) models (~<1500€)
- support for external displays to make it usable for presentations
- fast text input, somehow without hurting portability
Most of this is sound like something which could be archived in coming years depending on technical advancement.
Some main issues which aren't can't be solved by innovations in other sectors (e.g better batteries):
- as it's not conveniently flat and square like a laptop convenient daily travel portability is harder to archive, including the fast text input without carrying a nearly laptop sized keyboard with you
- hair + headset, people care about their hair not getting messed up
- usability for everyone, even if your head is large or small or you have some neck issues, or eye issues, or motion sickness etc. personalized devices help, but drive the price up and prevent sharing
Seriously. I have a Quest 2, sidequest and all, and the selection of actually good stuff is incredibly minimal.
I have a big picture theory about all of this; the experience of "computer entertainment" is FAR MORE STRONGLY rooted in "other humans" than many geeks would believe, and VR (oddly) hasn't really done much significant at all in that space.
For me and the family and people I know, first the Wii, and later the Steam Deck (esp with Jackbox games, that brings MY parents into the fold, and I'm in my 40s) has been SIGNIFICANTLY more impactful than an individual putting on a headset.
But the solitude of the current generation is just because most headsets can only support one player in the experience. Vive Focus 3 can do this pretty well already, I've done interactive experiences with many other people in the same space.
I think a vr headset that puts people in the world but still lets them play with controller like settings would increase adoption a bit, however the nausea part is a big deal.
So I'll try here - I have an extremely high end gaming PC and am looking for VR options to tag along with it. What suggestions for systems/games do you have?
Let's say up to $1500. How about that?
A full Vive set would also be fine for starting, but's aging (7 years old now), and you may appreciate the fidelity the Index has.
If it doesn't (for example for me, there's interference from neighbors sometimes and the signal will drop) then it's infuriating. Then you need to look into a wired option. Quest can do wired but it doesn't do it as well as others (because it's USB and the signal is compressed).
Still, my recommendation to people looking to dip their toes into VR is to get the Quest, because it's very good and it's an unbeatable value. If nothing else, it will give you an excellent reference point to compare the other headers.
There's a Quest 3 coming out soonish, you'll probably want to wait for that.
Consider RED STEEL 2 for the Wii. Motion control gun and sword play. FPS. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO91n5phQQY
To me this looks way more immersive than any VR shooter game. You can really move around and do things that you can't do irl. Even if your controls allow that in VR, it's going to feel wrong. It's going to make you think about the screen on your face. Yeah yeah you have the cool VR moments where you duck in and out of cover. Those are cool and immersive because you genuinely don't need to do anything you can't do irl. But they get boring eventually.
They're not what people really want out of VR though.
But then there's the price to value ratio. There doesn't seem to be anything that is a must-play killer app, and while the catalog seems to have some gems it still leaves me with the impression I might drop a few hundred dollars for a couple hours of entertainment. VR seems like a radical change in design philosophy from the last 30-40 years of game development, and devs are still working out the specific language and techniques that are pertinent to it as a medium
While the Quest 2 is the cheapest on on the market, I'll be damned if I'm giving money to Meta and from there headsets start to ramp up drastically in price, and still have inconveniences like needing to be tethered to a PC
Really it isn't any one thing that's an issue so much as a bunch of smaller issues that make it seem like it's just not worth at the moment unless you got to drop on an item that's still at the niche phase. This will all probably improve over time though, and more people might start adopting
You're right that VR is currently relatively expensive in terms of "entertainment per dollar" compared to other activities. If you still find enjoyment in non-VR video games for example, there's nothing wrong with continuing to doing what you like.
one of their linked youtube video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnt37hu1bRw
For me the site just went offline, it shows a 500. I'm betting it's hosted on a smal colo. They should consider cloudflare or another cdn/accelerator.
I might have a chance to visit the Tokyo Game Show in September, and I'm wondering if it's worth my time, or will it just be a purely commercial venue with no hands-on experience.
If it's even remotely like the Bitsummit described in the OP then that would be awesome.
Some background: I'm not a gamer, I simply don't have the time to be one, but I'm very interested in gaming news, game engines, and well, games. I also don't know Japanese, unfortunately, I'm just visiting Tokyo for a short time.
Anyone been to a previous Game Show (or a similar big event) and can say if it's worth it?
Business days you can do a lot more and there is a large indie section where you can meet with indies just like at the Bitsummit.
Not sure what that would look like, but that sounds fun and way more interesting than a gaming show!
But, the descriptions are quite nice already, so thanks for that.
Edit: looks like there might already be said images, just not loading for me
I reduced my own with training but one of our son has it pretty hard and if VR sessions (or whatever the name is) could help reduce it, I would be ready to invest.
> It's the sensation that you, or the environment around you, is moving or spinning.
Hmm I guess in that case then VR in general is the vertigo simulator regardless of what content is being played. Inner ear accelerometer disparity with the game world is guaranteed and something that makes some people hurl a lot.
I will ask friends having such headsets to test them. Thank you.
The Climb 2 https://youtube.com/watch?v=YSNPalIihiE
Richie's Plank Experience
In an ideal dream world this keeps going until most of gaming is on linux, at which point supporting linux proper might get to be more attractive again.
The popularity of Steam Decks means that more and more people will purposefully test against Proton and reduce the number of hacks and workarounds needed, and Linux gaming will be in a happy place.
One recent positive development was Battlebit. The main limitation on Linux gaming is anti-cheat. Battlebit were going to bring in FACEIT anti-cheat, which in its current form prevents Linux (and on Windows requires you to disable VM processor extensions in the BIOS). They have announced that in fact they're implementing a different version of it that's Steam Deck friendly. Whether they changed their minds in response to pressure or it was always the plan and was poorly communicated isn't clear, but it's a nice development anyway.
I use an Index headset with Vive components, so no Meta or PII involved.