Waggle Words VR at PAX East

PAX East is a gigantic consumer facing video game conference that descends on Boston, MA each spring.  Pax East attendance is estimated to be greater than 100k over the traditionally 3 day event; this year Pax East organizers threw in a 4th day to expand their offerings to the exuberant gaming communities. Vermont Digital Arts wasn’t going to pass up on the opportunity to attend such a monumental gaming event, yet we opted out of demoing Waggle Words in a traditional expo booth for four days (right after spending a week at GDC). We accessed a great alternative for demoing at the conference: MassDiGI’s Made In MA at PAX East 2018 Party!

Elliott Mitchell (Co-Founder of Vermont Digital Arts) traveled to Boston’s District Hall for the Made In MA Party to demo Waggle Words on iOS and to demo an alpha build of Waggle Words VR in development for Valve’s Steam PC platform. Waggle Words VR leverages the HTC Vive Virtual Reality system (HMD, controllers and lighthouses) to deliver an immersive and extremely comfortable VR experience. Waggle Words VR also currently supports the Oculus HMD and Touch controllers in Steam as well.

Elliott Mitchell [Co-Founder, Vermont Digital Arts] demoing Waggle Words, – Photo courtesy of Luke Hollis

Elliott Mitchell [Co-Founder, Vermont Digital Arts] demoing Waggle Words, – Photo courtesy of Luke Hollis

After a great night at the Made in MA Party, Elliott put on his Boston Unity Group (BUG) organizer hat and spoke with other Boston game dev community leaders on a panel entitled, “We Created Game Dev Communities – And You Can Too!” The panel discussed the different focuses that game dev events can have, how to find external support, the ins-and-outs of creating a welcoming environment, and much more.

Adri Mills [Organizer, WIG Boston],Craig Herndon [CEO, BostonVR],Oleg Brodskiy [COO, BostonFIG], Caroline Murphy [CEO/Founder, BostonFIG], Seth Alter [Organizer, Boston Indies] & Elliott Mitchell [Co-Founder, Boston Unity Group], – Photo courtesy of Rydia Vielehr.

If you are looking for smaller events within the 100k people of PAX East, attending talks and finding concurrent events like the Made in Ma Party are great ways to connect and network with your community.

Waggle Words iOS with ARKit Enhanced AR Mode – iPhone Teaser Trailer

With all the excitement around Apple’s much anticipated announcements today, we thought it’s a perfect time to unveil Vermont Digital Art’s Waggle Words iPhone teaser trailer (featuring ARKit enhancements for iOS 11).

Besides conveying Waggle Words being a lively game with lot’s of character, We want to communicate that Waggle Words for iOS will run on devices that support AR, as well as devices that don’t support AR. Players may choose to play in whatever mode suits their fancy (and hardware)!

Subscribe to our Vermont Digital Arts YouTube Channel for more Waggle Words trailers, tutorials, game play and platform announcements!

More exciting Waggle Words announcements to come later this week!

Waggle Words with AR Mode for iOS 11 Development Update

Waggle Words continues with a few more updates as we get ready to launch! Thank you all for your overwhelmingly positive feedback on our last post. Your positivity has given us that extra momentum to work on suggestions from designer, developers and play testers to make our UI even more slick and intuitive. We’re honing our tutorial to make it playable as well as instructable. We are definitely feeling the 90-90 rule.

The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.
— Tom Cargill, Bell Labs

We are hope all of you are as excited for the release of iOS11 and ARKit as we are. Waggle Words AR is pretty cool as we play it with the Vermont fauna and flora in the background and we think it will be fun you city slickers too.

Follow Waggle Words on Twitter: @WaggleWords
Follow Vermont Digital Arts on Twitter: @VTDigitalArts

Waggle Words iOS Beta Now Leveraging ARKit for a New Augmented Reality Mode

We’ve been talking about both iOS and SteamVR versions of Waggle Words for well over a year; today we’re announcing Waggle Words for iOS now features an Augmented Reality mode for supported devices!

Since we are very close to releasing Waggle Words for both SteamVR and iOS, and given the advent of Apple’s upcoming iOS 11 release (which introduces ARKit for Augmented Reality), we thought we’d apply our accumulated knowledge of working in both VR and iOS and try our hand at Augmented Reality. We have been thinking about AR all throughout Waggle Words development and have intentionally architected our project in Unity to take into account future platforms and modes of play.

Waggle Words AR Mode is still a work in progress. We’re continually iterating our design to be intuitive and fun. We plan on continuing playtesting and implementing UI/UX revisions up until we launch Waggle Words. We’ve included some recent previews of Waggle Words for iOS with both AR and normal modes of play in this post. These samples are already a little out of date, but we thought we’d share our process nonetheless.

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We have some TestFlight slots available for serious people in the press, and video streamers, who are interested in Augmented Reality and ARKit.

Stay Tuned!

More to come shortly!

Waggle Words is Coming!

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You and me and baby makes three. And another baby makes four. And two cats and two dogs and six chickens makes fourteen. And then Mama decides she wants honey bees and the total soars to somewhere around 25,000. That’s the family that makes up Vermont Digital Arts.

You could say that we are all the worker bees. Papa is an artist and programmer and does most of the technical work at Vermont Digital Arts. Mama is the Queen Bee who sits back and is fed royal jelly all day … oh no, wait, that was my fantasy. No, Mama flits from one thing to the next, writing, designing, organizing, keeping the hive running. The two youngest humans in the family make games, stories, art and music.

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One day the youngest human thought that it would be cool to have a game that was a cross between Spell Tower (http://www.spelltower.com/) and Chip Chain (http://chip-chain.com/), so a meeting was called. Everyone (except the chickens and the bees) gathered around the dinner table and talked about what such a game would look like. Mama took notes and then a few days later made a paper prototype. Being a beekeeper, she used hexagons to make a honeycomb board and took the name Waggle Words from the movements that bees make to communicate with each other which is called a “waggle dance”.  

The family decided that Papa, a trained artist who wanted to hone his programming skills, would engineer the game himself. Learning how to program requires time, patience and extra baking. Thankfully, Papa was up to the task of learning and Eldest Child who loves to bake kept everyone happy with lots of treats.

Finally the Vermont Digital Arts family has a playable game. We are so excited about how Waggle Words is turning out. It is a super fun, strategic, single-player word game AND it will also be a groundbreaking multi-player VR game. Just wait!

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Samsquanch at Unite 2013

Vermont Digital Arts is back from Unite 2013! What a conference!

Elliott Mitchell (founder of Vermont Digital Arts) presented on Successfully Avoiding Common Pathways to Heartbreak and Disasters in Your Art Pipeline last week at Unite. Due to popular demand, keep a posted on a series of upcoming mini-posts relating to Elliott’s talk.

Samsquanch Concept Sculpt for Unite 2013

Overall I feel my talk was well received by the audience at Unite 2013. The audience was an interesting mix of artists and developers with various levels of experience in Unity and art pipelines. I realized I only had time to cover a fraction of the content I thought was important so I just went with the flow and covered what I could in the allocated time. I’m looking forward to authoring a series of posts covering my talk and points beyond!

-Elliott Mitchell (Founder Vermont Digital Arts)

Elliott Mitchell Unite 2013 talk

Also we wanted to give a shout out to Anzovin Studio for the rigging and animation on Samsquanch with TSMG!

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More to come….