Schlagwort: white elk

  • Asymmetrical Heist Co-op Meets PS VR with Covert, Out Now

    Asymmetrical Heist Co-op Meets PS VR with Covert, Out Now

    Reading Time: 4 minutes

    Hi everybody! My name is Jonathan Hawkins, and I’m the founder and creative director at White Elk. This week we launched Covert for PS VR, and we are excited to not only share a new VR game with you but also help you share VR with your friends and family!

    Covert is a unique co-op game that pairs the PS VR with a smartphone or tablet. The player in VR is a thief; their job is to sneak through enemy bases to complete different mission objectives. The mobile player is a hacker; they guide the VR player through these secure locations by using their birds-eye view perspective; they can see where guards are located, and they can crack safes, and hack into computers! They connect to the VR player through our free companion app (available for all the most recent iOS and Android mobile devices.)

    The game features eight unique missions, six hours of gameplay, and an engaging story filled with a cast of colorful characters. Your guide on this journey is Stacy, a gadget genius. She is the last known member of the infamous League of Thieves, a world-famous thieves guild, that steals from the rich and gives to the poor. They have been double-crossed by their old hacker, who put the League’s former leader and master thief, James Bourdain, in jail. Stacy recruits you and your friend to join the League of Thieves, to get revenge and pull off the heist of the century!

    After working on Eclipse: Edge of Light, which is a game about being alone in an alien world, I wanted to create something social. I noticed that when I shared VR with my family and friends, everybody wanted to try it out, but there weren’t a lot of games that allowed you to have a shared experience with the person in VR. I wanted to create a VR game that I could play together with my wife. So, I challenged myself and the team at White Elk to create something unique and explore a brand-new gaming genre.

    This proved to be quite the challenge as there wasn’t anything like this ever created before. A lot of the different ideas, mechanics, and scenarios that we tried out didn’t work, but we learned from those failures. Ultimately, we had to focus on creating simple communication tools between the VR and mobile players so they could smoothly play the game in the same room or across the country.

    For example, the hacker can guide the thief through the level by double-tapping on the map to create markers that the thief can see in the world. They can tap on hackable doors and devices to draw the thief’s attention. A fun “blind gadget ” also provides them a way to give the VR player a “Get Out of Jail Free ” card, so they can escape tricky situations when facing multiple enemy guards.

    Once we had created these tools, it was a lot easier for us to design many different fun scenarios. I can’t count how many times I heard, “No, the other left. ” Communication is hard!

    Ultimately, I feel we were able to overcome these challenges and accomplish our goal of creating a social VR game. We have received many emails and messages from people who had a fantastic time sharing Covert with their kids, parents and significant others.

    It’s a fun couch co-op game, where you can take turns passing the PSVR back and forth, or reconnect with an old friend in a different city. My wife and I had a great time playing, and I hope you all do too! 🙂

    Thanks!
    -Jonathan Hawkins

    PS: We have a patch for Eclipse: Edge of Light with Move support coming soon!

    Website: LINK

  • Asymmetrical Heist Co-op Meets PS VR with Covert, Out Now

    Asymmetrical Heist Co-op Meets PS VR with Covert, Out Now

    Reading Time: 4 minutes

    Hi everybody! My name is Jonathan Hawkins, and I’m the founder and creative director at White Elk. This week we launched Covert for PS VR, and we are excited to not only share a new VR game with you but also help you share VR with your friends and family!

    Covert is a unique co-op game that pairs the PS VR with a smartphone or tablet. The player in VR is a thief; their job is to sneak through enemy bases to complete different mission objectives. The mobile player is a hacker; they guide the VR player through these secure locations by using their birds-eye view perspective; they can see where guards are located, and they can crack safes, and hack into computers! They connect to the VR player through our free companion app (available for all the most recent iOS and Android mobile devices.)

    The game features eight unique missions, six hours of gameplay, and an engaging story filled with a cast of colorful characters. Your guide on this journey is Stacy, a gadget genius. She is the last known member of the infamous League of Thieves, a world-famous thieves guild, that steals from the rich and gives to the poor. They have been double-crossed by their old hacker, who put the League’s former leader and master thief, James Bourdain, in jail. Stacy recruits you and your friend to join the League of Thieves, to get revenge and pull off the heist of the century!

    After working on Eclipse: Edge of Light, which is a game about being alone in an alien world, I wanted to create something social. I noticed that when I shared VR with my family and friends, everybody wanted to try it out, but there weren’t a lot of games that allowed you to have a shared experience with the person in VR. I wanted to create a VR game that I could play together with my wife. So, I challenged myself and the team at White Elk to create something unique and explore a brand-new gaming genre.

    This proved to be quite the challenge as there wasn’t anything like this ever created before. A lot of the different ideas, mechanics, and scenarios that we tried out didn’t work, but we learned from those failures. Ultimately, we had to focus on creating simple communication tools between the VR and mobile players so they could smoothly play the game in the same room or across the country.

    For example, the hacker can guide the thief through the level by double-tapping on the map to create markers that the thief can see in the world. They can tap on hackable doors and devices to draw the thief’s attention. A fun “blind gadget ” also provides them a way to give the VR player a “Get Out of Jail Free ” card, so they can escape tricky situations when facing multiple enemy guards.

    Once we had created these tools, it was a lot easier for us to design many different fun scenarios. I can’t count how many times I heard, “No, the other left. ” Communication is hard!

    Ultimately, I feel we were able to overcome these challenges and accomplish our goal of creating a social VR game. We have received many emails and messages from people who had a fantastic time sharing Covert with their kids, parents and significant others.

    It’s a fun couch co-op game, where you can take turns passing the PSVR back and forth, or reconnect with an old friend in a different city. My wife and I had a great time playing, and I hope you all do too! 🙂

    Thanks!
    -Jonathan Hawkins

    PS: We have a patch for Eclipse: Edge of Light with Move support coming soon!

    Website: LINK

  • Eclipse: Edge of Light Lands on PS VR Today

    Eclipse: Edge of Light Lands on PS VR Today

    Reading Time: 4 minutes

    Hi everybody, my name is Jonathan Hawkins and I’m the Founder of White Elk and the Creative Director of Eclipse: Edge of Light. Originally showcased as a PS VR demo at PlayStation Experience 2015, the team at White Elk grew to fully bring the game to life as a magical 3+ hour adventure through a strange and foreboding world.

    Eclipse is a first-person exploration game set on a sentient planet with a dark past. Crash-landing, you awake to find yourself in a dreamscape environment, littered with the remnants of a failed civilization. It’s a world filled with discovery and wonder but shrouded in tragedy and mystery.

    The game features many game mechanics that create fun sci-fi exploration — jetpacking through massive canyons, discovering holographic memories, scanning ancient cryptic ruins and throwing a magical artifact to solve puzzles.

    First released on Daydream in 2017, it went on to receive many nominations and win three mobile VR game of the year awards. We are now very excited to finally bring the game back to PlayStation as both a PS4 and PS VR title with updated graphics.

    Before founding White Elk, I worked at Sony Santa Monica starting off as an intern and leaving as Lead Level Designer. Over those many years, I helped to create God of War I, II & III with an awesome team that I loved working with. It was always my dream to bring the team back together, so we could continue to create new games for players.

    With the original Eclipse demo, I started to fulfill that dream. Pitching my good friend and former colleague Cecil Kim on this strange idea for the game, he fell in love. Cecil was the Visual Development Director on God of War, and I loved working with him as he is a visual genius. I knew he could help me realize the vision of the world, with its massive scale and beautiful environments. He art directed the demo and went on to create the full game with his talented team at Section Studios.

    On God of War 1, I helped to implement the game audio and music. There I learned that half of a game’s experience is audio. So, I reached out to another friend and colleague Mario Lavin who was the Lead Sound Designer on God of War: Ascension. With his help, we brought the world to life, with detailed sound design and technical 3D sound implementation that creates a huge impact on any game, but especially for VR. His audio design helped to establish the mood in the demo and through the rest of the game.

    Even early on there was a tone that I felt we captured in the PSX demo. A strange eerie feeling, a sense of impending doom but beauty. This feeling was originally inspired by a beautiful track “How We Left Forlandia” by the late composer, Johann Johansson. I collaborated with composer Andrew Prahlow on the music as we were both huge fans of the Johansson’s music and especially of the Fordlandia album. When the game was released in 2017, we both got a chance to see Johannson play a concert on the day the game was originally released. Funny how things work out. Andrew also composed the music for our second game Covert and went on to write the award-winning soundtrack for Outer Wilds, which was released last year on PS4.

    The final piece of the team-building puzzle was technology. So, I reached out to another God of War alumni, Matt Arrington. He helped to code the original God of War engine from scratch and he brought his amazing talents to single-handedly program Eclipse, by adding new features and expanding the game design pillars. We worked for months to get the feel of the Artifact throw and its many mechanics perfect. Without his help, I would probably still be coding the game today.

    The path of creating Eclipse was long, challenging, and filled with many setbacks. However, we persevered together. It couldn’t have been made without our fantastic team, partners, and others who worked so hard to bring it to life. We are ecstatic that after all this time, Eclipse has returned to PlayStation and more players will have the chance to experience the magic of this world that we all helped to create.

    Website: LINK