Two seniors, Tyler Blust and Anthony Mikicic, started a virtual reality gaming company, Guessworks VR, with hopes of joining the future of gaming.
Ohio University students are taking virtual reality and gaming to a whole new level.
Guesswork VR, a virtual reality gaming company, was brought to life by about a dozen OU students. The heads of the project, Tyler Blust and Anthony Mikicic, said the concept for the game stemmed from ideas sparked in a Disney class they took together through OU.
“VR is most likely the future,” Mikicic, a senior studying audio-music production, said.
Virtual reality games place users in a 3-D, virtual reality world with a goggle headset, showing a first-person view of the game’s 360 degree landscape with a turn of the head. The headset Guesswork VR uses in its lab costs about $600, Blust said.
When players put virtual reality headsets on to play the game, they experience what it’s like to be a detective investigating a death on an 1869 Trans-Pacific railroad, Blust, a senior studying games and animation, said. Anytime there’s a death in the game that’s sinful, or not natural, the player shows up, solves the case and takes the soul of the person who has sinned, Blust added.
“I don’t think we intended on a company starting out,” Mikicic said. “We just wanted to make something cool, and then, why not?”
As the two recruited more people to work with them, the new recruits started talking about more long term plans, Blust said.
{{tncms-asset app="editorial" id="1066622a-f525-11e5-96a3-67aec01d278f"}}
“We saw the potential because of the excitement from people wanting to work on it,” Blust said. “That’s hard to do — finding people who are enthusiastic.”
About six months after Blust started writing the script, the two began sitting in Scripps Hall on Sunday afternoons collaborating with their team members. In a room full of Mac desktops on the second floor of Scripps Hall, a few students work on animation for the game while Blust and Mikicic hold voice actor auditions in a room painted green, usually used for green screen purposes. They've had two audition days so far.
“The first go-through, we don’t tell them anything because if someone brings something that’s better than we thought of previously, we don’t want to taint that,” Blust said.
A few students majoring in theater have emailed Blust about auditioning, but they haven’t showed up yet. In total, the duo has auditioned about eight voice actors in the past two weekends while holding auditions.
“We’re getting more than we thought,” Blust said. “I’ve had friends that have tried to do films and hold auditions for it and they just haven’t had the same kind of turnout.”
Until the academic year ends, Blust and Mikicic’s team will utilize the facilities in Scripps Hall to bring their game to life. When they graduate in May, they’ll look into other options to fund their project.
“We’re going to look into things like Kickstarters …. investors, taking alternate jobs,” Blust said.
Blust added that even if the game doesn't work out, the experience working with virtual reality will help those involved get jobs in the field.
Marc Nie, a senior studying games and animation, has been in classes with Blust and Mikicic all four years, and joined the team in the beginning to work on the animation element of the game.
Last year, they took a capstone course in which Nie worked on a virtual reality game team. He added that he's been able to bring those skills into his role.
“I’m excited to see the VR boom we’re about to hit,” Nie said. “It’s edging right now. It’s really close to going off.”
@fair3julia
jf311013@ohio.edu
