nDreams & The Assembly On-Stage at BAFTA

One of the major gameplay concepts we’ve grappled with over the course of The Assembly’s development has been the ways to deliver compelling interactive narratives in VR.

Last week, we spoke about this very topic to the audience at BAFTA in London in a talk titled Bringing a Virtual Mystery into Reality - Crafting a Story in VR.

We were happy to find out that we’d be presenting to a sold out theatre – not a bad start to the event, by any measure!

BAFTA Games were on hand to live-tweet the event and pick out the key points from our talk:

If there’s a singular, major point that we wanted to get across, it’s that in VR you're not merely spectating – instead, you engage with what you’re seeing, hearing and interacting with as if you’re actually present in the scene.

Luckily for you, there were attending press at the ready to break down our talk into its more granular constituent parts:

Design, Art and Audio: nDreams’ Three Pronged Attack to Making The Assembly a True VR Videogame
VR Focus cover off our thoughts on the challenges and opportunities facing various different disciplines of game development when telling stories in VR, along with some fresh morsels of info about The Assembly.

Eight vital VR lessons from nDreams
Develop have collected our tips for budding VR developers on how to deliver a fully-fledged, narrative-focused VR game, in which we explain why your framerate must be 90fps, your GUI needs to be chucked, and you need to render absolutely everything.

‘The Assembly’ Builds Atmosphere Before Teaching You How to Move in VR
Upload VR go into the ways in which we’ve tackled the practical challenges in implementing a first-person, narrative-driven experience in VR, such as artificial locomotion, UI design and creating a consistent, convincing world.

In addition to our talk, we also provided hands-on demos of The Assembly to a long but orderly queue of BAFTA attendees on four gaming rigs, which were kindly supplied by nVidia.

The whole night was a resounding success, with full credit to Patrick, Jackie, Martin and Matt for giving such engaging and informative speeches.

We’re now looking forward to our next big public event – EGX Rezzed! Rest assured you’ll hear more from us on that topic before the end of the month.

We’re here for you, virtually

In the meantime, if you have any questions about The Assembly, feel free to send us a message via The Assembly's Facebook page or tweet us with the hashtag #TheAssemblyVR.

If you’d like to know more, you can also find nDreams on Facebook, reach us via our dedicated subreddit and check out the game’s board on Pinterest for more screenshots.