timed to capitalise on the growing popularity of mobile VR. It’s no surprise that after a difficult first couple of years, Resolution has been turning a profit for the last five – coincidentally since the Oculus Go appeared in 2017.
DEGREES OF CONTROL While it’s possible to line Demeo up alongside Resolution’s other games and recognise the same strand of DNA in all of them, Demeo stands apart. For one thing, it has endured a far longer period of development than any other title at the studio. Like a number of Resolution titles, it’s been a collaboration with famed US designer Mike Booth (of Left 4 Dead fame), who quickly came on board to the idea of a VR RPG-style board game. Again, as with Resolution’s other games, the concept was nailed down, refined, and Demeo slowly but surely took shape without too many problems to speak of, aside from the time that’s been necessary to get things down pat. “It has changed a little bit along the way,” says Palm, “but it has pretty much kept to what we started out with three-and-a-halt or four years ago.”
Those “little changes”, as you might expect for a VR game, especially one as tactile as Demeo (which requires the careful picking up a placing of miniatures, throwing of dice and turning of cards), have very much been one of perfecting the control systems and getting the user interface right.
opinion that something fundamental was being missed. “I was always disappointed with how far the role playing game was from what I was hoping for” he says, “which was this social experience.”
Palm, who came to find fame (and no small amount of fortune) as one of the creators of Candy Crush Saga, co-founded Resolution Games in 2015 “around the notion that it would probably be a lot of fun to work with VR games.” This was when virtual reality was very much looking like the next big thing in the wake of Sony revealing Project Morpheus (soon to become PlayStation VR) and Facebook acquiring Oculus for the then eyebrow-raising amount of $2bn.
While other studios chased the hardcore end of the VR market and seemed to flounder in the wake of VR’s slow but steady uptake, Resolution recognised early on that amiability and replayability were what mattered, impressed more by the promise of the untethered Sansung Gear VR than by the vastly more powerful and expensive VR options offered by Vive. As such, with games such as Bait!, Cook-Out, Angry Birds and Acron, Resolution soon became synonymous with bright and breezy VR games that were easy and fun to play, each seemingly perfectly
“I tend to be very focused on UX challenges,” chirps
in Demeo’s producer Gustav Stenmark, “and this was - and still is – one big UX challenge to me, translating six degrees of freedom. Like, how do you control this game? How do you control the camera and make it feel natural? How do you control your character in game and make that feel natural? How do you play cards? So it’s been trial and error, a lot of play testing, a lot of redoing and also, of course, looking at best-in-class games to get inspiration. It’s up to us to make sure that it works. For the most part that’s a big part of the challenge.”
BYO beer and pretzels
March 2022 MCV/DEVELOP | 67
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