AC thVRsday
In his weekly column, Android Central Senior Content Producer Nick Sutrich delves into all things VR, from new hardware to new games, upcoming technologies, and so much more.
The term “immersive” isn’t an adjective you’d normally use to describe watching videos or playing games on a smartphone. Craning your neck down at a 6-inch rectangle simply doesn’t fit any definition of the term. But one game developer is hell-bent on turning that little black rectangle into a portal that defies expectations.
Waltz of the Wizard might not be a name you’re familiar with unless you own a Meta Quest 3 (or an older headset). It’s a classic VR title that’s been around for a long time but has seen regular updates over the years, often injecting impressive levels of innovation into a seemingly simple formula.
The game has enjoyed a huge revival over the last year thanks to social media, and developer Aldin Dynamics is launching the first mobile version on iOS at the end of this month. Yes, I know, it’s more than a bummer that it’s not available on Android yet, but it’s still an impressive way to take a VR game and make it available for a significantly larger audience of gamers to try.
Bash some Skullies
After toying around with the game for quite a while, I knew I had to chat with the developers to find out how they ported a VR game so successfully to a mobile platform. After all, Waltz of the Wizard deeply relies on both physical and voice immersion to drive the experience, but it turns out the pace of the game allows this to translate to mobile quite seamlessly.
Hrafn Thorisson, the co-founder and CEO of Aldin Dynamics, told me the company has always been about “making realities that make you feel like this isn’t a game.” For Aldin, this means adding a “high degree of interactivity to characters, thousands of reactions for them,” and, maybe most notably, “speaking to them verbally by using your voice.”
That last part is something not often seen in the world of smartphone gaming, unless we’re talking about having a chat between friends on Discord while simultaneously playing a game. Waltz of the Wizard almost completely revolves around a disembodied human skull named Skully, whom you talk to constantly.
Whether it’s asking about the properties of an object in the world and what you can do with it, or even asking Skully to conjure up some magic to create items, this sarcastic, borderline rude skull is the key to Waltz of the Wizard’s unique personality as a game.
Unlike some other VR games that have started experimenting with LLM robots to create unique dialogue, Waltz of the Wizard uses a more “classic AI model,” as Thorisson puts it. Skully is built to react to things in a specific, hand-hewn way that has required developers thousands of hours to build, complete with a fully-voiced personality.
Thorisson says Skully is “the most interactive character you’ll have on mobile now,” with “thousands of thousands of reactions” for you to find. Whether that means bashing him against the wall a few times or feeding him some weird potion you just concocted is entirely up to you.
Translating the interactivity component of the VR classic to a mobile touchscreen interface was a better fit than a traditional console. “In some ways, we’re able to do things with a mobile device that we can’t do with a console, where the standard is to have buttons and joysticks.” Plus, being able to utilize the natural “drag and drop” nature of a touchscreen meant the interaction paradigm fit better on a phone than a console.
Phones also have the added advantage of a front-facing camera and built-in microphones, which allow Skully to not only hear you, but also see you making facial expressions. Make an angry face or wink at him, and he’ll probably notice.
Furthermore, Aldin Dynamics is utilizing the rear camera on the phone in a way I’ve ever seen before: using your physical hand to interact with the virtual world. Some of my favorite casual Meta Quest games use hand tracking for simplicity, but Aldin is using it here for something unique in the smartphone world.
Thorisson stresses that this mode is “not exactly like a fully fledged mode yet” and Aldin Dynamics is using feedback to further polish the experience, but he hopes this gives “people a taste of what VR is like.”
There’s nothing quite like using your own hand to interact with a game, which is something VR is typically uniquely built to handle. This becomes quite clear as you play around with the mobile game’s mixed reality mode, as it doesn’t always track your hand perfectly and often doesn’t nail interactions like the VR version.
However, Aldin’s quest to deliver a VR game on a mobile platform is surprisingly successful, based on the hours I’ve put into Waltz of the Wizard on mobile so far, and the experience is impressively full and immersive, despite the relatively small screen. Keep an eye out for Waltz of the Wizard on iOS devices later this month, and hopefully, we’ll see the magic land on other Android devices in the near future.
Whether you love social environments, puzzle game, multiplayer shooters, or just checking out the next evolution of technology, the Meta Quest 3s has it all at a lower price than you imagined.
