 Live from Los Angeles, it's theCUBE. Covering E3 2018, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're at the Los Angeles Convention Center at E3, it's amazing, it's like 68,000 people. They're in every single hall, they're out in the streets, they're in the hotels, they're at LA Live, they're all over the place, for really the biggest gaming conference, I think in the world, and we're excited to have our next guest, he's Dana Jan, he's the design director for Ready at Dawn, and you just introduced a new game, right? Great to see you. Thank you very much for having me, yes, that's true, we just announced Echo Combat last year in October, and today we're showing off on the floor. Private Beta still, are you going to public Beta, he said, soon? Yeah, we just had a closed Beta, actually, we're moving into open Beta, and that's gonna be June 21st. Right, pretty amazing though, you guys have not been around that long, and this is already your third game. Well, the studio's been around for a while, so we've been making games for a long time. This is actually kind of a new foray for us, that are going into VR, we released a game called Lone Echo last year, and Echo Arena was a multiplayer mode that we also launched simultaneously with Lone Echo. So yeah, this game is new and fresh, but we've been developing VR now for a little over two years. Right, so from a design perspective in the VR space, what is some of the special considerations you have to be thinking about, either challenges and opportunities? Yeah, I mean, some of the challenges are obviously performance is a big deal for us, the game has to run at 90 frames per second on Oculus per eye, so that's rendering essentially like two different games. 90 frames per eye. Yeah, it's really fast, you have to render 90 frames per second, otherwise it gets really uncomfortable for the user. So we optimize a lot of our experiences and it's even like some of the ideas that we have, we have to figure out how to make them viable at that frame rate. And we have a lot of high fidelity body movement going on in Lone Echo, Echo Arena and now Echo Combat. We do a lot of IK work to kind of represent a full body avatar that honors essentially head, hands, and because our game takes place in zero G, we have this floating body that has to convincingly flow behind you wherever you go. So yeah, it's actually, you know, it's a pretty big challenge for us as both designers, developers and just a technical standpoint to get all that to kind of harmoniously work together. Right. So other thing just in terms of the game play inside VR, because the other thing is right, you don't necessarily control which direction they're looking. I mean, how do you kind of direct the player to where you want them to look and where you want them to participate? That's a great question. Actually, so part of the beauty of VR is we try to do some of that like you would for a conventional game, you know, trying to use lighting, trying to basically design environments with things, cues, details that would maybe help people along, but ultimately you're as free as you are just like right now you and I, we can look all over the place. Right. We don't really want to restrict that. You know, part of the beauty of VR is the ultimate freedom. If you want to kind of go, you know, look in that little corner underneath you for the whole game, you really can and we try to as much as possible make that something that's beneficial to you. We try to, you know, coat every little bit of our world with something that's interesting to try and discover. Right. Yeah, it's freedom of movement, freedom of, you know, wherever you want to be and whatever you want to do. Right. So we're doing this as part of the Western Digital Data Makes Possible program and really as we get closer and closer to, you know, kind of infinite store, infinite compute, infinite networking. You just said you've got designs and you've got ideas that today, even today you can't necessarily put into play. So as you look forward for the opportunities when all these things are basically going to be close to infinite at close to zero cost, what are some of the things that excite you? Where do you see kind of using that power to do a better job or a different job in your storytelling? Yeah, I mean, the horsepower that you need to run these kind of games is actually pretty staggering. We compute a lot of stuff on the GPUs, the CPUs. We have a lot of physics-oriented things in the game because VR is really big into like, you know, letting you kind of touch everything and manipulate stuff and it doesn't feel like you're really somewhere, you don't feel present unless you can actually interact with the environments. And for that, we have to basically create tons and tons and tons of objects. We have physics constraints and things that are costly for the computation cycles. And then there's like memory issues. You know, we have streaming that we have to kind of get better at. There's a, these worlds are very large. And so to store the things that you're going to see and do takes a lot of actual, you know, hard drive space and the speed at which we can load and unload things is a critical factor in terms of, you know, unlocking the freedom of your experience. Right. So when you get more horsepower, right? New processor comes out, you get more memory, whatever. I mean, do you already have stuff keyed up where you want to use that? Is it more realistic nature of the graphics? Is it speed? I mean, what are some of the priorities that you would immediately apply if you had some more horsepower tomorrow? Yeah, certainly. I mean, there are things that we absolutely know about like, you know, there's texture resolution. There's, like I said, there's physics objects. There are just things that we end up going, that's too costly to do. We're going to have to maybe, you know, stop doing that or cut back on it or scope back. We do look at creating settings and things for users who actually have more high-end machines to actually turn that stuff back on. But I think every time we kind of go into another, you know, design kind of exercise and start looking at what do we want to do in VR, I think we're surprised at what does it take to actually accomplish it. And so I'm not sure, I'm not sure I know right now fully what we're going to start getting into and what kind of hardware that might require, but you know, every day is just a different challenge and that's part of the excitement of working in VR. Right, well, I was going to say and also obviously the trade-offs, I mean, you could go bananas on the texture, but it's, you know, at some point is that a lot of diminishing returns in terms of the storytelling, in terms of the experience, because you can optimize across all the potential variables. Yeah, no, you have to pick and choose and that you're right. Like, basically we look at, you know, what are our goals? What are we trying to get out of this experience? What do we want the user to really get out of it? And then we have to compromise. We have to make some of those smart choices. But I do think at some point, you know, we'll have to make less compromises as technology gets better. And certainly things like resolution, if the headsets have higher resolution, then it makes sense to put more resolution into the textures because now you can actually see it. And so we kind of hit that synergy where both of those are unlocked. It'll never be infinite, obviously, but to where they're more in sync with each other, you know, maybe we can make that compromise now, but maybe in the future we won't. Yeah, the headset's a whole another bucket of technology that you guys have to count. But they're awesome, I mean. Yeah, we're doing, I think, I think it's really impressive to me how far we've come with the headset technology and I think in the next few years we're just going to see even crazier advances. So I'm really excited about it. Not just slapping the phone in the cardboard box like a couple years ago. Here's your VR box. I know, right? That's not that long ago if you think about it, really. All right, Dan, we'll give a shout out. What's the date for the public beta so people know where to go and how to get involved? Yeah, our open beta is going to be starting June 21st. They can sign up on Oculus.com. And yeah, we're looking forward to people getting in there and seeing what their pressures are and taking the feedback. All right, well, Dan, thanks for taking a few minutes and stopping by. Great, thank you very much. All right, he's Dan. Jeff, you're watching theCUBE from E3 at the LA Convention Center. Thanks for watching.