Weta Gameshop
We step inside Weta Workshop’s industry-disrupting interactive games division
We step inside Weta Workshop’s interactive games division
It may come as a surprise to learn that the Academy Award-winning practical effects studio behind The Lord Of The Rings has expanded into AR game development. Take a short walk through the sleepy suburban neighbourhood surrounding Workshop’s Miramar headquarters, however, and you’ll arrive at a nondescript building that opens up to an incredible sight: Weta’s very own new Interactive Games Division, or Weta Gameshop.
What began as a small group of passionate artists developing their game from within Workshop itself has grown into a 55-strong team, housed in an open-plan space filled with colourful concept art and collectables. Together, they have one purpose: to change the future of gaming as we know it.
We spoke to studio director Greg Broadmore as well as lead artists Stephen Lambert and Simon Baker to find out more.
BOSS-LEVEL BEGINNINGS
If the process of game development had levels, the Gameshop team had definitely started from the hardest. Not only did they decide to tackle games for the first time from within a famous film facility that had never produced a game before, they also decided to develop them for a platform that had yet to be released: AR device, Magic Leap.
“When we started, the current VR revolution with Oculus and the like had not yet taken place. There was nothing, no frame of reference for us to work from,” remembers Broadmore. Originally hired as a Weta Workshop designer, artist and writer, he was between work on King Kong and District 9 when he came up with the fictional universe of Dr. Grordbort. At first, this was simply the design for a series of retro-futuristic rayguns that the head of Workshop, Sir Richard Taylor, appreciated for their potential as collectables.
As the universe expanded, though, so did Broadmore’s vision. His dream became to create a game out of his creations, and together with Taylor, he began reaching out to various publishers to see where conversations would lead.
Recruiting a small group of like-minded Weta artists, Broadmore had even begun building an entire Team Fortress mod featuring his science fiction IP when he met Rony Abovitz, the CEO of the then-unknown Magic Leap. Abovitz presented such a compelling pitch that Taylor himself now sits on the Magic Leap board of directors.
“Rony said okay, I want you to take the Dr. Grordbort’s world, and make a video game out of it that could be used on my new augmented reality device. This game needs to involve photorealistic CG characters that will appear real to the player – they need to be walking around his or her living room and interacting with the furniture in it,” Broadmore reveals.
“My first reaction was, what the hell are you talking about? How can that even happen? It was the stuff of the science fiction films I grew up with. I thought it would be 50 years before we saw a game like that become a reality, but I couldn’t help but think that it sounded like an awesome job to start creating it. We began on the concept right away.”
UNTETHERED CREATIVITY
For almost six years, the Magic Leap project would be unlike anything Broadmore or his team had ever embarked upon before. “Everything, on every level, was something we had to invent. There was very little we could buy off the shelf for this,” adds lead artist Stephen Lambert, who like Broadmore was originally at Workshop.
“When we started, none of us had made games before. We hired killer people who had, but even they had never made a game with characters that could exist in the real world. We’re literally figuring out how games can work within this new medium, while also learning to collaborate as a team for the first time and build a studio from scratch – down to the boring bits like who buys the toilet paper. It all had to be done.”
Throughout the process, the team always aimed to ensure the physicality of an AR experience truly came across to the player. The design needed to feel grounded in reality, with real-world objects constantly both interacting with and informing gameplay.
The final version of their first title, called Dr. Grordbort’s Invaders, features Stephen Fry and is now officially available to download from Magic Leap’s website. As the game begins, the player sees a portal appear in the midst of their real world.
“I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE 50 YEARS BEFORE WE SAW A GAME LIKE THAT BECOME A REALITY” Greg Broadmore, studio director
The objective is to then shoot as many of the terrifyingly life-size CG robots that come through it.
Robots can stumble over real living room couches as they advance, and players can shove a robot and watch it react, or duck beneath their tables as CG sparks from robot rayguns bounce off real walls. The player is untethered, and can experience the game anywhere whether in or outdoors.
“The importance of audio was a huge shift for me,” adds lead artist, Simon Baker. “As a visual artist, you can sometimes forget how important audio is, and how it can affect the way an audience perceives a performance. We were constantly challenged by the fact that we had no control over the camera, so learned to use an explosion or gun spark sounds to let the player know where they need to go.”
“We also paid close attention to the high fidelity of the physics involved,” continues Broadmore.
“Whether the player was in a Japanese living room at night, or American garden in the morning, the game needed to perform in the same way, on a mobile platform.”
“During the early days of VR,” he says, “we had our first real stumbling block. Guidance came through that said you need to run at 90-120 frames per second to avoid motion sickness. We were stumped. We thought, if you need 90 minimum for VR, and we’re registering our CG against the real
world, we’re going to have to aim to hit 200 frames and make a great game at the same time. It seemed impossible, especially because we had an early version of the hardware, so less processing power than we do now.
“Luckily, once we started testing, we found that even 30 frames was acceptable. We weren’t going to ship at 30 frames, but it wouldn’t make users feel sick either. As it turns out, because AR always provides the player with the real world as an anchor to look at, it doesn’t make as many people motion sick compared to a VR experience. What we did have to be mindful of was the device’s field of view, which kept changing until the very last minute.”
FUTURE REALITIES
With Dr. Grordbort’s Invaders and a spaceship-based follow-up called Boosters now creating shockwaves in both the AR and gaming communities, the Gameshop team have plenty of ideas for what to work on next. Today, they’re experimenting with scale to bring tabletop experiences with multiplayer functionality to AR.
“It’s exciting because we’ve gone from making this singleplayer game, to something where there’s going to be other people in the room! You’re not the only one having this CG hallucination anymore,” Broadmore laughs.
By developing methods of tracking players’ faces, he reveals