Responses by: Jelle de Stigter, Senior Programmer at Vertigo Games.

Interview has been edited for readability and length.

Introduce your studio!

We are Vertigo Games, a VR studio and publisher located in Rotterdam and Amsterdam here in the Netherlands. You might know us from titles like Metro Awakening, Arizona Sunshine, and After the Fall.

How did you first hear about bHaptics?

Vertigo Games also has an arcade section where we create special experiences only playable in VR arcades. The first time I heard about bHaptics was years ago while working on a special Arizona Sunshine arcade project. Using the bHaptics suit, we were able to make this experience even more unique and realistic for the players. It's nice to see bHaptics grow over the years, where nowadays many players enjoy the same unique experience at their own house.

Three of your games are integrated with bHaptics! What made you do the first integration?

VR is all about immersion; we try to provide a feeling to the players as if they are really there. Using bHaptics, we were now able to do things which we couldn’t do before, allowing the player to actually feel the game. This creates an even higher level of immersion for our players. The bHaptics devices also fitted perfectly within our games with many haptics to choose from, and thanks to the very easy-to-use SDK we could set up haptics and iterate on it in a short amount of time.

What were your most interesting technical challenges with integration?

The SDK allowed us to play haptics wherever we want and whenever we want. This allows a lot of scalability and creativity to what haptics we can implement into our games. However, this also made it challenging sometimes to really bring over that feeling of impact to the player where timing is essential. For example, when a grenade goes off you really want to feel that vibration at the moment of the explosion. If this is not done correctly then it will only take away the immersion and even feel annoying to the player.

How do you think bHaptics integration changes the way gamers experience your games?

Our games tell a story, thanks to the bHaptics integration we could enhance this storytelling with feedback to the player’s body to allow us to do things which we were never able to do. This helps us to provide an even more unique experience and we think players will notice this immediately when they are going to play with bHaptics.

Do you think you’ll have more titles integrated in the future?

Yes, this is definitely something we want to keep supporting in our future games. Also, the collaboration with the bHaptics team went very smoothly as they were eager to help out and provide feedback. We would love to keep this collaboration going for the upcoming games.

Leave a message for your community!

bHaptics is always something many of you have high on their list. We hope you will enjoy the new bHaptics update for Arizona Sunshine 2, Arizona Sunshine Remake, and Metro Awakening!