Artist Jarlan Perez recently worked with Google to test out a VR-first creation process. Perez built a fully interactive game in two weeks that started in intuitive VR creation tool Blocks, with another week spent polishing and squashing bugs.
You can now download the short puzzler, called Blocks Isle, and play it in an HTC Vive.
I’ve been following closely this type of process because VR tools use intuitive or natural behavior to unlock creativity. As the tools improve, this approach could dramatically lower the barrier to entry for making compelling interactive software. That’s essentially what Google is exploring through tests like the one with Perez. Earlier this year the game Paulo’s Wing was built using Google’s other VR art app, Tilt Brush. Blocks was released more recently and makes it easy to create simple solid objects that can be stacked up over time like Lego to make eye-catching scenes.
Blocks Isle is comprised of thousands of individual objects Perez created, then he moved them into Autodesk’s 3ds Max to work on texturing and working out how they’ll be lighted so they appear to pop when added to the finished project. In a blog post outlining the project, Perez discussed the creative process, saying, “I still had to take the geometry from Blocks and bring it into a 3D program for unwrapping and lightmap baking.”
Perez:
I think the project would have taken longer to put together without…
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