**A Year's Worth of Development: The Making of Furnace**

Furnace is a single-player game that was released in 2009, and its development was a labor of love for the team. With only a year to create the game, they stayed focused on making the best possible single-player experience. "We're really excited about this one," said Jeremy, who had just played a preview version of the game.

**A Niche Experience**

Furnace feels like a niche experience compared to other games in its genre. While some games are designed to be quick and intense, Furnace is more of a long game that requires players to sit down and play for an extended period. "I think it's going to be one of those games where you're gonna want to play for 12 to 14 hours," said Jeremy. This is in contrast to other VR games that are designed to be shorter experiences, often lasting only a few hours.

**A Comfortable Experience**

One of the standout features of Furnace is its comfort level. The game was designed with VR in mind from the very beginning, and every room was built with one camera position in mind. This means that players can sit back, relax, and enjoy the experience without feeling like they need to move around or adjust their position constantly. "It's really comfortable," said Jeremy. "I was able to play for hours without feeling any fatigue."

**A Compelling Combat System**

Furnace also features a compelling combat system that requires strategy and skill. Players must think carefully about when to attack, defend, and use special abilities like shields and diving attacks. The combat is deliberate and methodical, rather than fast-paced and action-packed. "It's not just mashing buttons," said Jeremy. "You have to actually think about it."

**A Narrative Experience**

Furnace is also designed to be a narrative-driven experience. While the game has some puzzles and challenges, its primary focus is on storytelling and exploration. Players will need to explore different environments, solve problems, and uncover the secrets of the game's world. The developers are aiming for a full 12-14 hour playtime, with a narrative arc that takes players on a journey through the game's story.

**Designing for VR**

One of the key decisions made by the developers was to design every room in the game with one camera position in mind. This means that players can sit back and enjoy the experience without feeling like they need to move around or adjust their position constantly. The cameras are placed in a way that creates a sense of immersion, drawing players into the world of Furnace.

**The Price of Comfort**

While the comfort level of Furnace is one of its standout features, it also comes at a cost. Some critics might argue that the lack of camera movement or tracking can be boring or tedious for some players. However, Jeremy believes that this trade-off is worth it for the overall experience. "I don't think if you were to move the camera around a lot and do a tracking kind of experience, it would be as comfortable," he said.

**The Developers' Vision**

Furnace was developed by a team with a clear vision for what they wanted to create. They wanted to make a game that would showcase the potential of VR technology, while also providing an engaging and immersive experience for players. With only a year to develop the game, they had to prioritize their design goals and focus on making the best possible single-player experience.

**The Rift and Furnace**

Furnace is just one part of a larger story that includes another upcoming VR game called The Rift. While details about The Rift are scarce, Jeremy hinted that it might be released alongside Furnace. With both games coming out in March 2009, players will have the chance to experience two innovative VR experiences and see how they shape the future of gaming.

**Chronos: A Zelda for VR**

Furnace also drew comparisons to a popular Nintendo franchise, Chronos. While Furnace shares some similarities with Chronos, it's clear that the developers were aiming for something unique. "It's like Zelda in VR," said Jeremy, but with its own twists and challenges.

**Backtracking: A Design Challenge**

One of the challenges faced by the developers was the need to balance exploration with pacing. They knew that backtracking could be a crutch to extend gameplay time, so they made sure to keep the game's narrative arc tight and on track. While some areas might require backtracking, Jeremy believes that this will not detract from the overall experience.

**Playtesting and Evolution**

As the developers prepare for release, they are still playtesting Furnace to ensure that it meets their standards. With ongoing tweaks and refinements, the game is sure to evolve and improve before its final release. "It's always going to be a process," said Jeremy, but he believes that the end result will be well worth the effort.

**A New Era for VR Gaming**

Furnace represents a new era in VR gaming, one where developers are pushing the boundaries of what is possible with virtual reality technology. With its innovative design and immersive gameplay, Furnace is sure to be a standout title in the world of VR gaming.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: eneverybody's norm from tested I'm here at oculus game days whether showing a bunch of games are coming out for the oculus rift now some developers are working with oculus studios to make games for the Rif I'm here with David who's with gunfire games and your guys game is ro nose correct bonus is like an action RPG for virtual reality yep it's it's kind of a mixture of Advent old-school adventure games and RPG games people have been using VR like on the gear VR for example may have played the earlier game a hero bound which I love I love that type of the walking around she's doing gamepad so the game really suited for looking around VR but playing with a gamepad right yeah absolutely yep and the idea is that you want to have a player at the character move across the screen but the camera is in a fixed position if you talk about the design decision behind that how it affects gameplay and comfort sure so I mean one thing we knew right away when we made Cronus it was one at a rather large game the games like 12 or 14 hours long so we wanted someone bill to sit down and play two three four hours and so we decided no camera mode because that's the most comfortable way you can do that and so once we have decided that then we wanted to come up with a camera system where it was a little more immersive than here of them so more pulled in but also still fixed camera and that's sort of how we ended up with the camera system across it kind of reminds me of the old flat screen like a Zelda game were when you move from dungeon room to dungeon room you would get that room and is that how you approach designing the levels words a sequence of different rooms and from different each with a unique perspective yeah and one thing like in hero banne we had an issue where like you've moved to the right and the guy would come on the left he had to like look over so we did a lot of stuff to always make sure your character was in view so I mean you played it and you notice that you never lost sight of your guy that's probably the big difference between this and say here about it also feels like you have to play a role of a cinematographer or a photographer because the placement of your camera has aesthetically looked beautiful as well as being functional you know if I'm walking from the left side screen in then you know you have to put items in the foreground to make it look interesting create places with shadow and light to direct the player but also hi enemies and puzzles yep absolutely which was pretty challenging because just getting the cameras right hard in the first place but also making sure a that the stuff you can see is cool and B we try to Telegraph where you're gonna go next by the vistas you're looking at and also the fact that the player can just turn around and look down and everything's got to be interesting it's meant to be played with the player mostly in one position whether it's sitting or standing looking at the environment how far how varied is the camera in terms of how close is the character how far pulls back um it varies from shot to shot I mean we try to keep it down at character height for the most part because we want you to feel like you're in the game but there are times for dramatic shots that will pull out or it'll be more you know wide range shot or whatever but yeah we try to keep it in a little closer just so you feel like you're there then also bein has to be functional for combat yeah okay so there's a great combat system you have to use a shield role you might be fighting mom and these at the same time lock onto them so you have to give the character enough space to get over yeah and that's also what dictate the camera in the rooms depending if there is comment there or there isn't so tell me about the environments because it looks like I played two of the environments it looks like a pretty expansive game how is it all connected and what type of environments can people jump in so we wanted to have a lot again for me I love to think I love about fantasy is the variety you can have right you can just do all kinds of crazy stuff so we wanted to have a lot and there's a lot of cool different environments in the game and we wanted to have sort of a fairytale feel to it so it's not like you know there's a there's a little bit of darkness of the game but there's a lot of beauty too like everywhere you go has a lot of beauty to it and it just sort of gives it that fairytale quality which we wanted to capture with the games just kind of identify the different fantasy environment areas that you guys like the woodland area a cave area then yeah I'm in a way make up a story mechanic to tie them all together yeah amazingly enough and this has literally never happened on the game I worked on but the areas we outline when we start are the areas with me usually you change or drop one or add a new one but yeah we did a rough outline in the beginning and that's exactly what we ended up putting in the game for the game is called Chronos and there is a temporal aspect to the game that can you explain that yeah every time your character dies they aged by one year which is interesting because all your stats and abilities change so when you're young it's really easy to get stronger or more agile but as you get old you can't so if you're 70 or 60 70 80 years in the game you actually can't even get stronger anymore but at that point your magic ability starts to increase is there an arc like icicle abilities go down you're really so we always jokes it's like you start as Strider and you in this Gandalf it kind of crosses but Wow and then the game is the story and the levels are designed to accentuate that so you can explore the plenty different environments with the different abilities and it's also tied to your skill level because magics harder to do magics based on like time blocks or timed of aids and stuff like that and the beginning game you're not very good at you don't do them very often and then later the game you do a lot but that those those attacks do a lot of magical damage so it kind of corresponds with as you get better at the game now you can build up your arcane and start to really master the game yeah the fixed camera obviously meant for comfort now what about player movement what have you done and what do you tweak so for the player speed and what how many actions you can do it wonder to make it comfortable and fun there wasn't really a comfortability issue with the player but one thing we did do is in one of the game to be a little more deliberate it's not a really fast-paced spammy action system you it's you know you want a block take it slow and that corresponds at the fact that when people play the game they want to look around and enjoy the environment we didn't want them just rushing through the game and there's also a lot of puzzles in the game so you have to be aware of your environment so we really want to just slow it down a little bit so people didn't just play blast they're everything to fast I got mostly the shield and the sword and mentioned there as magic Later he teased some of the other abilities oh yeah there's a bunch of different weapons there's different shields you get these things called dragon stone or I can't roll where they come you always have him development aim for things but they're like these little stones that go in your hand they gave you special powers and you get different ones and some might have different abilities depending on you know what kind of power is inside of them and then there's a ton of puzzle mccann like puzzle items you find that you can use to solve and that's more resin to evilly where you're solving different puzzles you know you might find a sheet of music or a weird locket or a key and all those different things you got to figure out how to use something abreast of the game furnace is a single-player game because experiment any with multiplayer and you co-op no play we only have a year to make it so we stayed very focused and wanna make the best single-player experience as possible Wow a year to make furnace and it's coming out very soon along with the rift yeah March 28 2009 you so much for sharing this with us and I can't wait to play the full game thank you yeah absolutely okay Jeremy we just played some Chronos would you think well I think it feels a niche a lot of the games here they kind of they're encapsulated experiences and you sit down and you play in this one environment or it's it's really fast-paced and you there maybe you don't want to play for that long because it's pretty intense this is more of a long game where you're gonna sit down you're gonna play this game I think they're estimating 12 to 14 hours yeah for you to finish the entire game and people were talking about playing it within you know five hour segments at a time this is a comfortable game where you sit down in an environment and and you can play it for quite a long time without any kind of fatigue right and with this first wave of VR games you see a lot of like adaptations from traditional genres and you could look at Chronos you can say okay this is Zelda for VR yeah but when you just say Zelda free VR there's so many ways you could execute that you're gonna have the camera fixed behind the person you can have you know changing camera points they decided tab is a one fixed camera point right for every room for every room I'm like alone in the dark really right right right and it was super comfortable like hero Brown proved that where if the gear VR game I could play that for almost like hours no problem because you were pulled back and you're just looking at the player here but in this game what was different was they put cameras and interesting parts of every room yeah it was built for the ground up for VR so they actually designed every room with one camera position in mind yeah and it's not so much that you want to engage or move into that space but it was very beautiful where you know with every room I was excited to see how the camera would be positioned in the next room right to see what that scene would be like yeah I will say it was I felt like it was a little more compelling when they have combat was closer to the camera hmm I think that just that's part of the trade-off if you're gonna have a lockdown camera and you're gonna have action happening away from it that's kind of the price you pay for having a very comfortable game you know because I don't think if you were to move the camera around a lot and maybe do a tracking kind of experience it would be a little more you might induce nausea within some players you'd certainly introduce a little more fatigue the combat was very deliberate that was something they told me like it wasn't just Matt button smash and doing crazy moves you have to think about it that's what's gonna make it a fun oh yeah yeah fighting like one guy is is difficult fighting two guys I mean I don't even know if I succeeded at that one time yeah there's a lot of combat you know strategy and putting up your shield and then when to slash and when to duck when to dive it's a it's the fighting mechanic is pretty well done in terms of you know requiring a certain amount of skill and for a lot of people who doubt whether these first wave of VR games gonna feel like short experiences or long ones this one feels like it can be a long one yeah I think that was their design goal and it stands unique I think among all of these games here as being the game that is the time commitment sure to experience the full narrative arc I will say that in the fairy force entry level I played there was a little bit of backtracking and I hope that they're not gonna use backtracking as a crutch to extend the game time right that's gonna actually be always moving forward and always discover new environments yeah I mean it's I'm sure I'm sure as the developers saw you have to backtrack you know I think he was probably feeling a little bit of like know you're not supposed to do that I want to jump in and tell you what to do so they're you know we're still sort of play testing here it'll be interesting to see where these games are even in two weeks because they're probably still tweaking awesome well I can't wait to come out yeah youeverybody's norm from tested I'm here at oculus game days whether showing a bunch of games are coming out for the oculus rift now some developers are working with oculus studios to make games for the Rif I'm here with David who's with gunfire games and your guys game is ro nose correct bonus is like an action RPG for virtual reality yep it's it's kind of a mixture of Advent old-school adventure games and RPG games people have been using VR like on the gear VR for example may have played the earlier game a hero bound which I love I love that type of the walking around she's doing gamepad so the game really suited for looking around VR but playing with a gamepad right yeah absolutely yep and the idea is that you want to have a player at the character move across the screen but the camera is in a fixed position if you talk about the design decision behind that how it affects gameplay and comfort sure so I mean one thing we knew right away when we made Cronus it was one at a rather large game the games like 12 or 14 hours long so we wanted someone bill to sit down and play two three four hours and so we decided no camera mode because that's the most comfortable way you can do that and so once we have decided that then we wanted to come up with a camera system where it was a little more immersive than here of them so more pulled in but also still fixed camera and that's sort of how we ended up with the camera system across it kind of reminds me of the old flat screen like a Zelda game were when you move from dungeon room to dungeon room you would get that room and is that how you approach designing the levels words a sequence of different rooms and from different each with a unique perspective yeah and one thing like in hero banne we had an issue where like you've moved to the right and the guy would come on the left he had to like look over so we did a lot of stuff to always make sure your character was in view so I mean you played it and you notice that you never lost sight of your guy that's probably the big difference between this and say here about it also feels like you have to play a role of a cinematographer or a photographer because the placement of your camera has aesthetically looked beautiful as well as being functional you know if I'm walking from the left side screen in then you know you have to put items in the foreground to make it look interesting create places with shadow and light to direct the player but also hi enemies and puzzles yep absolutely which was pretty challenging because just getting the cameras right hard in the first place but also making sure a that the stuff you can see is cool and B we try to Telegraph where you're gonna go next by the vistas you're looking at and also the fact that the player can just turn around and look down and everything's got to be interesting it's meant to be played with the player mostly in one position whether it's sitting or standing looking at the environment how far how varied is the camera in terms of how close is the character how far pulls back um it varies from shot to shot I mean we try to keep it down at character height for the most part because we want you to feel like you're in the game but there are times for dramatic shots that will pull out or it'll be more you know wide range shot or whatever but yeah we try to keep it in a little closer just so you feel like you're there then also bein has to be functional for combat yeah okay so there's a great combat system you have to use a shield role you might be fighting mom and these at the same time lock onto them so you have to give the character enough space to get over yeah and that's also what dictate the camera in the rooms depending if there is comment there or there isn't so tell me about the environments because it looks like I played two of the environments it looks like a pretty expansive game how is it all connected and what type of environments can people jump in so we wanted to have a lot again for me I love to think I love about fantasy is the variety you can have right you can just do all kinds of crazy stuff so we wanted to have a lot and there's a lot of cool different environments in the game and we wanted to have sort of a fairytale feel to it so it's not like you know there's a there's a little bit of darkness of the game but there's a lot of beauty too like everywhere you go has a lot of beauty to it and it just sort of gives it that fairytale quality which we wanted to capture with the games just kind of identify the different fantasy environment areas that you guys like the woodland area a cave area then yeah I'm in a way make up a story mechanic to tie them all together yeah amazingly enough and this has literally never happened on the game I worked on but the areas we outline when we start are the areas with me usually you change or drop one or add a new one but yeah we did a rough outline in the beginning and that's exactly what we ended up putting in the game for the game is called Chronos and there is a temporal aspect to the game that can you explain that yeah every time your character dies they aged by one year which is interesting because all your stats and abilities change so when you're young it's really easy to get stronger or more agile but as you get old you can't so if you're 70 or 60 70 80 years in the game you actually can't even get stronger anymore but at that point your magic ability starts to increase is there an arc like icicle abilities go down you're really so we always jokes it's like you start as Strider and you in this Gandalf it kind of crosses but Wow and then the game is the story and the levels are designed to accentuate that so you can explore the plenty different environments with the different abilities and it's also tied to your skill level because magics harder to do magics based on like time blocks or timed of aids and stuff like that and the beginning game you're not very good at you don't do them very often and then later the game you do a lot but that those those attacks do a lot of magical damage so it kind of corresponds with as you get better at the game now you can build up your arcane and start to really master the game yeah the fixed camera obviously meant for comfort now what about player movement what have you done and what do you tweak so for the player speed and what how many actions you can do it wonder to make it comfortable and fun there wasn't really a comfortability issue with the player but one thing we did do is in one of the game to be a little more deliberate it's not a really fast-paced spammy action system you it's you know you want a block take it slow and that corresponds at the fact that when people play the game they want to look around and enjoy the environment we didn't want them just rushing through the game and there's also a lot of puzzles in the game so you have to be aware of your environment so we really want to just slow it down a little bit so people didn't just play blast they're everything to fast I got mostly the shield and the sword and mentioned there as magic Later he teased some of the other abilities oh yeah there's a bunch of different weapons there's different shields you get these things called dragon stone or I can't roll where they come you always have him development aim for things but they're like these little stones that go in your hand they gave you special powers and you get different ones and some might have different abilities depending on you know what kind of power is inside of them and then there's a ton of puzzle mccann like puzzle items you find that you can use to solve and that's more resin to evilly where you're solving different puzzles you know you might find a sheet of music or a weird locket or a key and all those different things you got to figure out how to use something abreast of the game furnace is a single-player game because experiment any with multiplayer and you co-op no play we only have a year to make it so we stayed very focused and wanna make the best single-player experience as possible Wow a year to make furnace and it's coming out very soon along with the rift yeah March 28 2009 you so much for sharing this with us and I can't wait to play the full game thank you yeah absolutely okay Jeremy we just played some Chronos would you think well I think it feels a niche a lot of the games here they kind of they're encapsulated experiences and you sit down and you play in this one environment or it's it's really fast-paced and you there maybe you don't want to play for that long because it's pretty intense this is more of a long game where you're gonna sit down you're gonna play this game I think they're estimating 12 to 14 hours yeah for you to finish the entire game and people were talking about playing it within you know five hour segments at a time this is a comfortable game where you sit down in an environment and and you can play it for quite a long time without any kind of fatigue right and with this first wave of VR games you see a lot of like adaptations from traditional genres and you could look at Chronos you can say okay this is Zelda for VR yeah but when you just say Zelda free VR there's so many ways you could execute that you're gonna have the camera fixed behind the person you can have you know changing camera points they decided tab is a one fixed camera point right for every room for every room I'm like alone in the dark really right right right and it was super comfortable like hero Brown proved that where if the gear VR game I could play that for almost like hours no problem because you were pulled back and you're just looking at the player here but in this game what was different was they put cameras and interesting parts of every room yeah it was built for the ground up for VR so they actually designed every room with one camera position in mind yeah and it's not so much that you want to engage or move into that space but it was very beautiful where you know with every room I was excited to see how the camera would be positioned in the next room right to see what that scene would be like yeah I will say it was I felt like it was a little more compelling when they have combat was closer to the camera hmm I think that just that's part of the trade-off if you're gonna have a lockdown camera and you're gonna have action happening away from it that's kind of the price you pay for having a very comfortable game you know because I don't think if you were to move the camera around a lot and maybe do a tracking kind of experience it would be a little more you might induce nausea within some players you'd certainly introduce a little more fatigue the combat was very deliberate that was something they told me like it wasn't just Matt button smash and doing crazy moves you have to think about it that's what's gonna make it a fun oh yeah yeah fighting like one guy is is difficult fighting two guys I mean I don't even know if I succeeded at that one time yeah there's a lot of combat you know strategy and putting up your shield and then when to slash and when to duck when to dive it's a it's the fighting mechanic is pretty well done in terms of you know requiring a certain amount of skill and for a lot of people who doubt whether these first wave of VR games gonna feel like short experiences or long ones this one feels like it can be a long one yeah I think that was their design goal and it stands unique I think among all of these games here as being the game that is the time commitment sure to experience the full narrative arc I will say that in the fairy force entry level I played there was a little bit of backtracking and I hope that they're not gonna use backtracking as a crutch to extend the game time right that's gonna actually be always moving forward and always discover new environments yeah I mean it's I'm sure I'm sure as the developers saw you have to backtrack you know I think he was probably feeling a little bit of like know you're not supposed to do that I want to jump in and tell you what to do so they're you know we're still sort of play testing here it'll be interesting to see where these games are even in two weeks because they're probably still tweaking awesome well I can't wait to come out yeah you\n"