Winter Sale! - by John Luxford With the team hard at work optimizing our two remaining scenes, Brazilian Rainforest and Ancient Volcano, which will be released alongside our Oculus Rift launch slated for February 16th, 2017, we have one more announcement to share before 2016 is up. Lost Cities is included in the Gear VR store’s big Winter Sale, so starting today until January 3rd you can get Lost Cities for 60% off the regular price! Stay warm,

The Campfire Union

Play Lost Cities in Oculus Rooms - by John Luxford Today, Oculus Rooms and Parties are out on the Gear VR. We think the coolest thing about Oculus Rooms is a new coordinated app launcher that lets you jump into a game together with a friend. What’s even cooler for us is that Lost Cities is one of only 9 apps chosen to be included in the Oculus Rooms app launcher!

Look, that's Lost Cities up there in the Oculus Connect 3 keynote!

With the Gear VR having a relatively small user base, players wanting to play any multiplayer games have found it can be a challenge to connect with others who are online at the same time. We think Oculus Rooms is going to be a great way to ensure you and a friend can jump right into Lost Cities together, so neither player has to wait while a game invite sits pending. We’ve built a custom loading scene for players coming from Oculus Rooms where you can choose your avatar and where you want to go together, complete with voice chat throughout the whole experience.

The new Lost Cities coordinated launcher: keep chatting while you decide where to go! We’re super proud to be included in this launch with Oculus, and look forward to playing lots of Lost Cities with you all over the holidays and the new year!

Happy Halloween! - by Rachael Hosein Here's the latest version of our spookiest character so far - Mica your Brazilian rainforest opponent!









Discover Neptune's Realm - by Rachael Hosein You can now play Lost Cities underwater in the middle of the ruins of Atlantis! It took us a little bit longer than anticipated to get this update out to all of you, so thank you for being so patient! This seems like an appropriate time to revisit all that went into putting together this environment. Let's take a walk down memory lane...



Remember when Neptune's Realm was just a thought fuelled by internet searches?



That time we day dreamed something that looks nothing like the final environment...



Our lists and lists of things we want and need.



The piles of reference material. An underwater world made of blocks and spheres.



When Graham nailed the concept art.



Liem's Neptune creation.



Profiling (oh dear).





Optimizing.

And finally, being able to breath while underwater.

Neptune's Realm is the third environment we've release with two more to come over the next few months! We're lost in the Brazilian Rainforest at the moment, so check in soon for a sneak peek.





VR is more fun with friends! - by Rachael Hosein We love virtual reality but sometimes it can get lonely inside the matrix. Today things get a lot less lonely and at lot more social with our latest update to Lost Cities. Now you can play with friends. For those of you who have have bought the game, thank you. Lost Cities is a type of game that is way more fun playing online and we are excited to share this update.

On the development front, we are looking forward to sharing some of our insights into how we brought this feature to the Gear VR. The number of use cases when bringing a social feature like this can be overwhelming and we learned so much in the process. We are putting together a talk about this topic too. For those of you who are waiting on the next environment, we are working hard on Neptune's Realm, an underwater world that you can play in.





We've finally come up for air - by Rachael Hosein Sorry it's been so long, but we've been swimming with the fishes ;) We're on the tail end of finishing up our next environment for Lost Cities. Soon you'll be able to play at the bottom of the ocean amid the ruins of Atlantis. Here's a sneak peek!



Lost Cities VR on Tom's Hardware, release plans - by John Luxford It's been a bit quiet on here, but lots has been going on behind-the-scenes. Our launch plans are starting to ramp up, and we can also share that Lost Cities is going multiplayer in a big way. You can read more about that on Tom's Hardware. Les just got back from Vision Summit last week, and is already in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress, and soon he'll be in NYC joining a panel called "The VR Cutting Edge from Canada: A Look at VR, AR, and Immersive Entertainment from our Northern Neighbors" at Media Summit. Meanwhile, John's been away on a backpacking adventure through Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala where he visited the Mayan cities of Xunantunich, Cahal Pech, and Tikal. His poor vacation timing aside, he did manage to score some cool Lost Cities photo ops in Tikal (see below), and he promises to share some 360's he took using the Cardboard Camera app at each of the 3 sites when he's back next week. It's been a Campfire Union world tour! We'll keep posting more Lost Cities info here as soon as we can, so check back soon!



Lost Cities VR has been submitted to the Gear VR app store! - by John Luxford Yesterday just after 5pm, we officially submitted Lost Cities to the Gear VR app store! Here's one of the screenshots we submitted with the game (more below):

Lost Cities is our very first game, so this is a huge moment for us as a VR company. Right off the bat, we'd like give a massive thank you to the whole team for your amazing work. Landon, Ryan, Graham, Sam, Liem, Olaf, Steve, and Nolan, you guys came along with us to make something beautiful and fun in a very short time frame. Campfire couldn't have done it without all of you believing in our vision for this game, and that means a lot to us. We'd also like to take a moment to reflect on the experience of making Lost Cities. How we ended up making Lost Cities Last spring, we were talking about what kind of game we'd like to make as our first game. We're all fans of tabletop gaming, and due to the lack of positional tracking on the Gear VR that style of game seemed like a natural fit for the platform. So we started looking at tabletop games for ideas. What we found was that most tabletop games for one reason or another present substantial challenges in being adapted to VR; too many pieces to select and move, legibility issues on current VR screens, requiring 3-5 players, the list goes on. We ended up short listing just a handful of games that we thought had potential, with Lost Cities at the top, and right then a bit of serendipity happened. Before going to GDC last year, we were talking with Jay Powell of The Powell Group who was helping us make connections as first-timers to the conference, and in conversation it turned out that he knew Reiner Knizia, the creator of Lost Cities, and put us in touch. Reiner Knizia and his team were very receptive of our concept, and great to work with. We ended up pulling the trigger on making Lost Cities into a VR game just before leaving for GDC, which gave us double cause to celebrate in San Fransisco (we also turned 1 year old at that time).

Lost Cities as a VR experience We got asked this more than a few times since we started making the game: Why a board game in VR? Lost Cities has a great theme that gave us lots to work with and imagine in a VR context. And it's a fun game that Lux has been playing for more than 12 years now, so we knew the replayability was there. The game lends itself naturally to building immersive worlds around each of the 5 expeditions (Desert Sands, Neptune's Realm, Himalayan Mountains, Ancient Volcano, and Brazilian Rainforest), and also allows for crafting Indiana Jones-style narrative elements too. All of that informed our decisions around the time period, visual style, the music, and even the ways we created affordances to fit some of the UI elements more naturally into the scenes. For example, the settings panel, the door, and especially the map in the explorer's study, which we used as the lobby of the game.

What's next We shipped Lost Cities with just one of the scenes (Desert Sands), choosing to focus on a polished core game over quantity of content. We put a ton of work into the tutorial and lobby scene too, and are very happy with the results. We don't have an exact release date yet (we're working with Oculus on an ideal release that doesn't just get buried under the holiday sales), so we'll keep you posted on that. Next up, we're working on the remaining scenes over the next few months, as well as multiplayer capabilities, so stay tuned for those too.

Lost Cities taught us a lot about games, user interfaces in VR, peoples' expectations of the world around them, as well as keeping a team (11 in total!) focused on the same vision to craft something special. I'm sure we'll have more posts reflecting on that stuff in the future too. Thanks for reading and celebrating with us. We're really proud of the results of everyone's hard work, and we can't wait to reveal it to the whole (virtual) world soon! – Rachael, Lesley & John

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