Earlier this year Epic announced a $5 million grant fund for content creators to create content with Unreal Engine 4. The fund encompasses all types of experiences, including virtual reality, and has injected funding into multiple projects such as the upcoming VR space thriller ADR1FT. Today, two new virtual reality projects received funding from the grant, including a brand new project from New Retro Arcade creators, Digital Cybercherries.
Titled ‘Hypercharge,’ the company isn’t quite ready to discuss the game in detail but did offer some hint as to what it will be like. The gameplay takes place at toy-scale, putting you in control of your own, highly customizable, action figure. “Literally every part from head to toe will be customizable,” Joe Henson, Digital Cybercherries’ Community Manager, told UploadVR. “To finish this off we have added a very unique feature within the gameplay itself which heavily revolves around you and other action heroes you battle.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gB9jCEXVQDk
Previously Digital Cyber Cherries released New Retro Arcade, a VR experience that takes you to your dream arcade complete with working games from MAME, SNES, Gameboy and other platforms. Unlike Oculus’ Arcade which recently released on Gear VR, New Retro Arcade allows users to load in their own ROM files (provided you own the game already) and customize the room however they wish.
In addition to Hypercharge Deep Echo, another tech-demo darling being built into a full experience, also got a funding boost from the Epic developers grant. Deep Echo puts players 4000 feet below the surface of the ocean on an alien world. Piloting a DSM-V Mark 4 submarine (Psych 101 people are chuckling a bit right now) the game tasks you with a recon mission to find the black box of a crashed sub at the bottom of the ocean. A demo of the experience can be downloaded on Oculus Share.
As virtual reality continues to move towards consumers, we will likely be hearing a lot more from other indie developers who have been continuing to work on their fan favorite projects.
Update: According to Digital Cybercherries, despite being listed under “VR” on Epic’s funding announcement, the studio is not building the title exclusively for VR.
