Rick & Morty Chap Exploring VR With Stanley Co-Dev
Strange and exciting
The co-creator of splendid Adult Swim cartoon Rick and Morty (also the voice of their words and belches) Justin Roiland is planning some sort of virtual reality game thing for HTC Vive, working with folks including one of the Stanley Parable chaps. It's a bit of a mystery for now but he's a funny chap and Stanley's pal William Pugh is too, so that's nice. One preliminary design looks like... some kind of space prison game, maybe?
Roiland told the folks at cheery RPS fanzine PC Gamer all about it, and showed them a few sketches. He's working with William Pugh, one half of the Stanley Parable team, and StressLevelZero, the folks making VR racing game Hover Junkers. Whatever they're making (Roiland says he has loads of ideas, and the two sketches shown to PCG look pretty different), they're planning to make it something designed from scratch for HTC Vive - that's the VR headset made with Valve, which lets you move around inside a space.
That covers a large part of why this latest VR craze feels like a fad to me: so many VR games are plain old regular video games simply put on your head. None of the experiences I've had with Oculus Rift have been special enough that I'd want to buy and wear cybergoggles. Vive and its magic cyberroom technology is far more interesting to me, but devs will still need to think differently.
I'd be up for visiting a weird creature prison, though.
It won't be a Rick and Morty game, but Roiland says he'd like to get some of the show's voice actors in. If you want to see those two in a game, hey, they do have a browser-based adventure game and are also Dota 2 announcers.
[Disclosure: I'm friends with William Pugh. Am I? I mean, if you'd asked me a month ago I'd have said "Yeah! That little scamp means a lot to me" but now I'd be more "I... that little scamp means a lot to me." Look, it's weird and unpleasant and I don't want to be the person who did what I did. In short, I can be a callous shithead, but I think we're cool. Yeah, we're friends.]