>> [Announcer] Live from Los Angeles, it's The Cube, covering E3 2018. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. >> Hey, welcome back here, we're ready, Jeff Frick here with the Cube. 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 a design director for Ready at Dawn, and you just introduced a new game, right? Great to see ya. >> 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 or are you going to public beta you 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 though going into VR. We released a game called Lone Echo last year, and Echo Arena was a multi-player mode that we also launched simultaneously with Lone Echo, so yeah, this game is new and fresh, but it's, 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-- >> [Jeff] 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. >> [Jeff] Right >> Yeah, it's actually, it's a pretty big challenge for us as both designers, developers, and just on 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, 'cause 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, 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. >> [Jeff] Right. >> We don't really want to restrict that. Part of the beauty of VR is that ultimate freedom. If you wanna of kind of go, 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 too. We try to code every little bit of our world with something that's interesting to find, discover, so. >> Right, right. >> Yeah, it's freedom of movement, freedom of wherever you wanna be, whatever you wanna 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 infinite store, infinite compute, infinite networking, you just said you've got designs, and you've got ideas that even today you can't necessarily put into place. So as you look forward for the opportunities when all these things are basically gonna 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 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 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. We have streaming that we have to kind of get better at. These worlds are very large, and so to store the things that you're gonna see and do, takes a lot of actual hard drive space, and the speed at which we can load and unload things, is a critical factor in terms of unlocking the freedom of your experience. >> Right, so when you get more horsepower, a new processor comes out, and you get more memory, whatever, I mean do you already have stuff keyed up where you want to use that? Is it more a 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 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 gonna have to maybe stop doing that or cut back on it, or scope back. We do look at creating settings and things where our 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 design kind of exercise and sort of 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 know right now fully what we're gonna start getting into and what kind of hardware that might require, but every day's just a different challenge, and that's part of the excitement of working in VR. >> Right, right and I was gonna say and also obviously the trade-offs. I mean you could go bananas on the texture, but at some point is it the law of diminishing returns in terms of the storytelling, in terms of the experience 'cause you can't optimize across all the potential variables. >> Yeah, no, you have to pick and choose, and you're right, like basically we look at 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, we'll have to make less compromises as the 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, maybe we can make that compromise now, but maybe in the future we won't. >> Yeah, the headset's a whole 'nother bucket of technology. >> It is yeah. >> That you guys have to account. >> But they're awesome I mean, yeah we're doing, 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 gonna see even crazier advances. So I'm really excited about that. >> Not just slap on 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, Dana, well 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's gonna 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 impressions are, and taking the feedback. >> All right, well, Dana, thanks for taking a few minutes and stopping by. >> Great, thank you very much. >> All right, he's Dana, and I'm Jeff. You're watching The Cube from E3 at the LA Convention Center. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)