A journey in some interesting Italian VR startups at Milan Games Week 2018: AnotheReality, Beyond The Gate and many more!

This Saturday I have been to the Milano Games Week. If you don’t know what it is, I can describe it as the little Italian brother of the Gamescom: it is much smaller, but it features anyway a lot of games, both from popular major players and from indies. I went there to try some virtual reality stuff and I can say with much satisfaction that there was a satisfying number of VR installations. They were mostly made by Italian indie developers and startuppers, but there was also the presence of some big brands like Sony that made people try Astro Bot and Moss with PSVR. The real pity was the little presence of hardware manufacturers: I enjoyed a lot trying some cool VR motion chairs, treadmills and such at Gamescom, and I hoped to see many of them at Games Week, too. Anyway, I had a pleasant day in Milan.

AnotheReality

The first startup that I interviewed has been AnotheReality, that is an interesting VR company in Milan, Italy. The CTO and co-founder Fabio Mosca has spent some minutes talking with me about his company and the game that he took at the Games Week, that is Yon Blitz. Here you are the integral video of the interview, that also includes an incursion of the popular twitcher Kurolily, that was there visiting the booth at the same time of me.

The interview with Fabio has been interesting because he highlighted some interesting points:

• At this time, in VR doing B2B is far more profitable than making video games (unless you are the authors of Beat Saber, of course 🙂 ). Maybe doing B2B is not the funniest thing ever, but it can give you now money and professional satisfaction. That’s why AnotheReality is running the Virtuademy platform, that is a training solution that makes possible the realization of VR academies for companies, to train the employees in complex and dangerous situations (e.g. operate on industrial machines, etc…). Enterprises have material advantages in using Virtual Reality, that’s why they are really interested in technology (and this is why Gartner has said that VR is a mature technology);
• In any case, follow your passion. Fabio is happy with his Virtuademy product, but he also has this big passion towards video games, so now that the B2B sector is doing pretty well (AnotheReality has also created the first mixed reality app for an important bank!), the company is returning to the videogames world with Yon Blitz, a multiplayer shooting VR game thought for location-based entertainment. Even here, you can get the practical approach of the company: now location-based VR is the sector that is earning more money regarding gaming, and so the company aimed at that and not at doing a game for home usage. So, follow your passion, but in a smart way so that it is economically sustainable;
• If you want to succeed in VR, “study video games”. With this sentence, Fabio wanted to highlight that now there are enough games on the market that it is possible to start understanding what works in VR and what does not by playing all the most successful titles on the stores so that you can start taking inspiration from other products to build yours. If you start designing a VR product (gaming or not) without examining what has already been released, you are doomed to create something unusable;
• Italian VR ecosystem is more unripe than US one and we also have less budget.

Regarding the Yon Blitz game, I’ve tried it with the other people of New Technology Walkers I went to Games Week with. It is a game that is playable in 4, 8 or 16 people and is basically a VR deathmatch game (all-vs-all or team match). In this game, all people play in the same environment, but everyone has its 2.5m x 2.5m space where other people can’t enter. So, it is multiplayer, but not an arena-style multiplayer… everyone has his/her own station. In this game, the players can see themselves inside a futuristic abstract world (there were fluorescent colors and such), where there are a lot of floating platforms. Every player can teleport to each platform, and teleporting there, he/she colors the platform with his own color, gaining the domination of that platform. While he/she moves between all his owned platforms (or the neutral one, that can be conquered), he/she has to shoot the other players with the right hand, while repairing from other bullets with a little shield installed on the left arm. Wins the game who did more kills during the game time.

The game mechanics are for sure interesting: I love deathmatches, and the platform domination stuff makes the game more tactical and intriguing. Furthermore, being the game very easy (you have only to learn how to teleport, shoot and use the shield), it is very immediate to explain to people, and everyone can learn how to use it in no time. In our team, the winner has been maybe one the person that plays VR action games the least, and this shows you how everyone can enjoy this game. At a certain point of the match, one of the employees started commenting the match live, saying who was the kills leader, what was happening in the game, etc… as it was a sport commentary in TV and this made everything more entertaining and competitive. What was bad, instead, was that the game appeared as not completely refined: shooting was imprecise, the shield appeared too little and even the graphics could be much better. Speaking with Fabio, we got to know that this is a first version of the game that has been developed in just less than 2 months, so this is perfectly normal… it is even better of what I would have expected to see developed in that amount of time. For the same reason, regarding the claim of Yon Blitz being a VR e-sport, I have to say that honestly, it is still not ready to compete with popular VR e-sports like Echo Arena.

It is anyway a cool product, and I had fun playing with it… so if you’re interested in this game, you can check out its website. Anothereality is going to perform a tour in various Italian cities to showcase the game, so if you are here around, come and give it a try.

We Arena

AnotheReality was inside a mega booth with the brands of partners like Asus and WeArena. WeArena is an interesting company focused on location-based gaming entertainment that has already opened a gaming center in the North-East of Italy and plans to open a lot of other ones in big Italian cities, like Rome and my city Turin. This company is not focused completely on Virtual Reality, but on gaming in general, but every WeArena arcade center will feature for sure various Virtual Reality attractions. Speaking with Lorenzo Speranza, business developer of We Arena, I discovered that the pilot arcade that they have opened is being profitable thanks to a smart management that does not earn money only from the entry tickets, that are also quite cheap, but from various revenues sources.

I had no much time to speak about details with Lorenzo since he was really busy in doing partnerships, but for sure I will talk about this project again, because I think that it is very interesting in teaching how to make VR profitable in this difficult moment for the technology.

Beyond The Gate

Have you ever dreamt being inside a medieval Castle, fighting a bloody battle with a crossbow? If the answer is yes, Beyond The Gate is the company you were looking for. Beyond The Gate is a company working in the location-based virtual reality edutainment and proposes entertaining VR experiences inside castles that teaches you the history of the castle and of the surrounding city. The experiences are mostly meant for families, kids, and classrooms: people go to popular castles (like the Castello Sforzesco in Milan) and can enter VR to see how it was the castle at the time when it was alive and learn something related to history, art and technology of the Middle Ages. But the company wants also to expand its horizons and in the future wants to also propose experiences regarding science, for instance, with a virtual travel inside the DNA. You can hear about this in the great interview I did with Marco Arena, the founder of that startup.

When I tried the Beyond The Castle experience at Immersive Architecture, I noticed that it was interesting but still quite rough. I was very pleased to see that at Games Week, Marco took there a much-improved version, more dynamic, more action oriented and with a lot of improvements here and there. The one that I loved the most has been the introduction of a real crossbow. They took a real crossbow and hacked it with some 3D printed elements and some Arduino magic, plus the obvious Vive Tracker to track its position in VR with maximum accuracy. So, before you enter VR, you are given this real crossbow, that you have to hold with both hands and that you can load by pulling the rope and with which you can shoot the arrow by pressing the trigger, exactly as a real crossbow works. The loading mechanism was still automatic in this demo, but soon it will be implemented and this will give you a plus in terms of immersion and presence when playing the game because you will use the crossbow exactly as it is used in real life. I also appreciated that during the game, there was a voice guiding me and teaching me stuff related to the history of Milan and of middle ages weapons: you have to remember that this is an action game, but all devoted to education, so this part was fundamental. I have to report on Beyond The Castle a feedback similar to the one of Yon Blitz: cool stuff, but still needs refinements. For people that have not tried VR yet (like happens a lot in Italy), they are great, but expert people that have already experienced VR lots of time, notice that there are still things to be improved. For instance, aiming with the crossbow, was a PITA: in the end, I started shooting arrows in whatever direction, as if it was an Uzi, hoping to kill someone this way. Not the best strategy ever, I know, but it worked.

During the interview, Marco gave me some precious feedbacks on his experience as a VR startupper. He said that running an LBVR company is like being the owner of a restaurant: you have to mind a lot of stuff: development, customers management, logistics, etc… and most importantly you have “to be sure that when the customers leave, they will come back“. So, despite the fact that all magazines seem to hint that opening an LBVR attraction is what people should do, you must be warned that it is not an easy task at all.

He also advised all people wanting to be successful VR entrepreneurs to find their little niche and become leaders in that niche. Time after time, with VR taking foot, that niche will become a big market and you will have a very successful company.

Virtew

I managed to speak a bit with Saul Clemente of Virtew, the indie game studio producing Run Of Mydan, a game that you can find on Steam. It has been a very interesting debate, since notwithstanding great reviews on Steam (85% of positive ones) and lots of compliments, the game is not performing well enough in term of sales. One of the reason may be not good enough marketing and the other one may be that the game needs a bit of time to be mastered, and so it is not immediate enough to be appreciated by players in short time.

It has been a very intriguing discussion because we are used to talking only about successful titles like Beat Saber, but no one remembers the ones that struggle to survive in this little crazy world that is virtual reality. I’ll review the game myself and I’ll interview publicly Saul on my blog to talk you about how it is really hard to be a virtual reality indie developer.

Twin Wolves Studio

Twin Wolves Studio proposes “LIZ: Before the Plague VR”, a thriller indie game that is a mix of action and investigation. To make an effective demo for the Games Week event, the studio showcased a short experience where the first part was purely investigative and the second one was pure action. In my opinion, while this was an effective mode to showcase the two main game modes to the visitors, it was also a quite confusing way of offering the game: the two parts were very loosely related and so I had the impression that the game was an assembly of non-related genres. Only after I spoke with Paola, CEO and founder of the studio, I got that the game actually had a story you had to follow and that the investigative and action parts are mixed in a coherent way. This assembly was just made for the exhibition and so I felt relieved.

In the game, you are Elizabeth, a female agent that has to go to a pharma research center where two of her colleagues have disappeared. So you go there and you have to investigate what has happened. The original stuff is that you do that with something like a multi-analysis tool that you have in your right hand, through which you can find shreds of evidence, analyze objects that you pick, make phone calls, access databases and so on. This tool has various functionalities and you have to use all of them to understand what is happening and so find your lost mates (the reconstruction of what happened through evidence reminded me a lot Blade Runner 2049 Memory Lab). In the demo, I wasn’t able to move in any way (apart from moving in place through room scale, of course), and I could advance to the next room only after I had found all the pieces of evidence in the environment I was in. This made the game a bit more static, but at the same time, made sure that it was not frustrating (I could move on only when I was sure to have not left anything important behind). Of course, you are always connected to the headquarters to report what you find so that your bosses can give you further instructions on what you do.

The action part of the demo was a simple zombie’s waves shooter. I’m quite bored by this genre of gaming in VR since it is something that I have seen a bazillion time. I also had some problems shooting at the targets with the gun I was provided, but this is something the studio is working on. I also had some other issues in this phase, because the graphics seem not completely fluid, maybe because some optimizations are required to make the game run at the required 90FPS.

Anyway, Paola told me that in the final release (that should come next year), LIZ Before Plague VR should be a lot more polished: now they are making people try this preview of the game to gather feedback and fix all the issues and I appreciated a lot her open attitude towards the negative feedback I provided her. This is the attitude every game developer should have. This makes me optimistic towards the final release of the game. I’m curious to see how the game will be at that time. Paola previewed me that the game will still be like “divided” in two parts, but in a more coherent way: following the story, you will have to find your lost mates inside the factory and to do this, you will have to investigate and at the same time shoot at zombies to defend yourself; and then, when you will find your colleagues (dead or alive? You will discover that just by playing the game), the only thing you’ll have to naturally do is flying away from that place infested by zombies. There will not be many things to do but shooting and try to save your life. At this stage, you have not to investigate any more while zombies are chasing you: this has sense.

Let me write a little mention for the press kit: at the end of the demo, Paola gave me a little plastic card with written on the number of the “case file” and an additional number. Going to the website of the game, in the press section, I found something like a login of the Police database. I had to insert my personal agent data, the case number and the password provided me on the plastic card to access the press kit of the game. And once I logged in, I found all the press elements as if they were evidence inside the file in the police archives. I have been delighted by this idea: it has been like they wanted me to continue the experience even at home, by accessing the press kit as if I were agent Elizabeth even days after the demo. Kudos to them for this genius and very original idea.

If you want to know more about the game, visit Twin Wolves Studio website or directly the game website.

SoNi

I and Max have tried a funny game where in a dark room you have to avoid all the lasers and go from the beginning to the end of the room in the fastest time possible. It is not much related to VR, it was fun anyway.

The bond with VR is the SoNi representer that talked to us: he was Massimiliano Soresini, that was the first one opening in Italy an arcade completely dedicated to Virtual Reality called 3DWA.

WAKANDA VR

One of the biggest booths with VR inside the Games Week was the one of WAKANDA VR. There were various solutions related to VR, like for instance a goalkeeper game, a flight simulator, ICAROS, or a multiplayer escape room entirely in VR. This is, of course, another company highly focused on location-based virtual reality entertainment.

I was really interested in the VR escape room, but at first, one of its computers broke, and then the booth lost completely all the electrical power. “Mainagioia” as we say in Italy… in the time needed to repair all this mess, I had to go to do my clubbing test of Beat Reality (more on this very soon!) and so I missed everything. It has been a true pity: anyway, I wanted to highlight this company because it had lots of cool VR and non-VR attractions.

And that’s it with this late round-up of my GamesWeek! I, Max, Thomas and Leandro, consultants and friends at New Technology Walkers (if you need an AR/VR consultancy from us, let me know!) had lots of fun trying VR stuff and getting free gadgets all the day. It has been a great day, and I hope that this summary has helped you in knowing some interesting Italian VR companies. Cheers!