Caliban Below news & patch notes

Hey Folks If you've purchased the DLC for Caliban Below, first of all, thanks! It's the first thing we've offered up for sale in the world of "The Abbot's Book," and we hope you like it! (Please let us know.) Second, if you're puzzling over how to access the book, just go to "Caliban Below" in your Steam library, then select "Play" as if you were going to launch the story in VR. You'll get an option there to launch the VR experience, ...or to launch the book. Please let us know if you have any trouble! Thanks! Mike

Happy Halloween, catacomb spelunkers! We've gone live with our 1.2 release, which includes: - Subtitles (Chinese and English to start) Subtitles should be on by default for Chinese language regions. Please let us know if you have any difficulties. - Use the new Options Screen to - Turn subtitles on or off manually & select language - Set graphics quality level (We know there are still performance issues with draw speed on the Mac. Thanks for bearing with us on that - we hope to implement a fix soon.) - We've also re-oriented a couple of interact-able items to better show what the turnable wheels do. - DLC! We're re-releasing the original short story "The Abbot's Book," as a beautifully illustrated digital book. For those of you who are interested to learn how Caliban came to be locked in his realm below, or those just interested to count the references to Edgar Allen Poe and HP Lovecraft ;) Spoiler alert: There is no happy ending. Please note, this is a pdf which you can launch from Steam - - it's not more VR (yet), unless you count your own imagination as a sort of virtual reality... some do. Anyway, it's an illustrated pdf, which we like so much that we're charging a few bucks for it. Thanks for your continued interest in Caliban Below, and the world of The Abbot's Book. I'm awfully happy to say we've been getting some great attention from film festivals, blogs, and various interested interlocutors. It's exciting! As I've mentioned elsewhere, the whole point of this project has been to raise awareness for VR as a narrative medium. It feels like maybe - just maybe - that idea is starting to catch on. Hopefully we'll have much more to come soon. MEANWHILE, our 1.3 release has been a bit delayed as a critical member of our team broke their leg :( ...Well, that too shall pass. With any luck, we'll have a really splendid 1.3 for you around the end of the year. Until then, Happy Halloween - and may Ovando's specter scare the daylights out of all your VR guests.

Hi All We're adding a little DLC to Caliban Below: The original short story of "The Abbot's Book." It's a richly illustrated digital book (pdf format) that tells the tale of Caliban's father, Tithonus, and his effort to shield his family from the darkness that has troubled his forebears for generations. Years before the events of "Caliban Below," an abbot discovers a mysterious realm underground, and returns with a strange book. The abbot soon dies under grim circumstances, and the book falls into the hands of the DiVelasquez family... So begins the tale that will explain how Caliban came to be in his cold prison. Told from a very different point of view. Coming on Halloween!

Dear Mac VR users - at long last, we've gotten our mitts on a mac that is VR capable - currently Apple's best gpu. And we've finally been able to jump into Caliban Below on Mac. And - - we can see there's a problem... Sorry for the delay in getting to this - we'd been inclined to get something out there for y'all to play with, and hadn't realized the performance was just not that great. Anyway, the PC & Mac builds are now at parity, and we can start digging into what exactly is hitting the performance so hard on Mac. It *should* run better than it does. (perhaps I'm doing something wrong on this end...) My best guess at this point is that there are a couple shaders I'm using for geometry instancing that aren't playing nice. This note is just to mention - we want to tune the mac experience considerably. It should be nice and smooth. More news as it comes.

Hi All We've just released a beta for 1.2, which includes - Chinese & English subtitles (hopefully more languages to come soon). Chinese subtitles should automatically be on if you're in a Chinese-speaking country. But if you want to invoke subtitles manually you can use the - Options screen - Use this to set subtitles on/off and to pick language. You can also set the graphics quality level here. Note this screen is currently only available in the starting scene by the castello. We'll add it to every location shortly. You can access it with the small button above the thumb pad on Vive, or by pressing "A" on the oculus controller. - A few refinements to layout, which should help tell the story a little more visually. - We've also added a warning screen if you don't have a VR headset. Wish we had gotten to that sooner! Well, there it is. ;) Let us know what you think! And thanks as always. We hope you like the work. And please send word if you have any difficulties - beta, after all. Thanks Mike

Hi Folks 1.1 is live! Lots of improvements here: - Click turning: Vive users swipe left/right on the thumb pad. Oculus users click left/right with the joystick - Better blink UI: It's much harder to wind up inside a wall... ouch! Also much easier for new users unfamiliar with blinking - Far better performance on a broad range of GPU's. And if you like, you can select higher or lower quality settings by launching from a folder with control/option double-click. We'll aim to add a quality setting in the in-app UI in the near future. Mac users, you should have a far better experience out of the box, with more options if you need 'em. - Lots of little fixes in layout and character performance. We're preparing some DLC now, for a new release in the very near term. Keep an eye out if you want more of the back-story. We're also preparing a major update to the sound FX in a future release. More news on that soon. Please drop word with any concerns/complaints/suggestions. We're thrilled that the project is well received, and look forward to continuing the story. We sincerely love sharing the work with you and hearing your thoughts.

Hi Folks We've just posted a beta of 1.1, with a number of improvements. Right-click on Caliban Below in your steam library and select the 'betas' tab; then the pop-up to opt in. - CLICK-TURNING. Vive: swipe left or right on the thumb pad. Oculus: click left/right on the joystick. - Lots of tuning for a broader range of GPUs. The default state should run better on older hardware now, but we also have: - Better support for user-selected quality level. Control-click to launch the app directly from Windows, or Option-click on Mac for direct launch from the finder. That will give you a dialogue box to select alternate quality levels. - We have a new heuristic for managing the landing spot on a blink, which should be much friendlier for new users of VR - Isabella now behaves slightly differently under certain circumstances. - It should be much harder to wind up blinking inside a wall. Ouch. - Lots of little fixes on layout. Future plans: - We have a BIG update coming on sound effects in a future release from my friend Paula, who also does the SFX for Game of Thrones. She's the bomb. Keep your headphones handy. - Likewise we still want to get smooth locomotion working as an option for you with VR sea legs. - DLC: The novella of The Abbot's Book; stacks of designs for the full project; character studies - I'd like to open up a bit more of the catacombs one of these days - particularly in the Temple Deep. - Achievements are coming. A couple should be quite funny ;) - Easter eggs: - A torch to carry around (yes, with volumetric fire, unlike the original demo. It's purty.) - A god mode to teleport all over the place inside the catacombs. (Careful what you wish for ;) ...My personal goal is to make Caliban good enough to become one of your go-to demos for your friends who are new to VR. Feel free to drop word with suggestions, gripes, bugs, etc. It's all sincerely appreciated. As I so often say, we hope to be able to make the MUCH larger, full project of "The Abbot's Book" one of these days. We are the very definition of grass-roots with this project, so your reviews and feedback are mighty appreciated. We're humbled that folks seem to like it (short tho it is!), and I want more than anything to share the whole vision in time. May the dream be without end. ;) More to come. -Mike

Hi Folks We're getting close to shipping an update on Caliban. We're adding click-turning (most requested feature), lots of performance enhancements, better support for different classes of machines, a more sophisticated heuristic for blinking which should prevent new users from getting stuck, and a handful of other goodies. We're looking for a handful of beta testers who might want to take a gander at the build, and let us know of any problems we haven't foreseen. If you're interested, please drop word! Thanks very much.

We've put a lot of work in on this little project and we're awfully pleased to put it our there for you to see. We hope you enjoy stepping into the story as much as we've loved making it. We'll keep a close eye on the forums, and with any luck our 1.0 will be smooth sailing. VR encompasses a pretty broad swath of hardware of course, so let us know if you have difficulties and we'll see what we can do. This latest release includes updated mechanics on switches, as well as a new heuristic for how and when Ovando comes to chat with you. If he scares the daylights out of you, it's my fault ;) Don't worry - he can't hurt you. And lest I haven't mentioned, our hope is that this project can grow and grow over time to tell the full story of "The Abbot's Book." Give us a high sign if you like the work - obviously we're giving this episode away, so your feedback is the only payment we receive! Heck, if you hate it, you can say so too... Anyway, we've had the script done for Episode 1 for quite a while now - - it's far bigger than this episode - - and while the tone of Ep1 is quite different than this story, if you like this, you'll surely enjoy the rest of the world. Hope to continue this conversation down the road. But for now... in an important way, you shall decide what happens next, dear visitor.

Hi All A few tweaks and refinements in this release: - We're making some adjustments to light levels. We know Caliban Below is pretty darn dark, and we like it that way... but we don't want it toooo dark. There's a fine balance to strike here which has to take into account manufacturing differences between generations of display panels. (Furthermore, since the Oculus color space is noticably different than Vive, we'll have to accommodate the Oculus crowd in an upcoming release. Keep an eye out.) - This release also reconfigures some areas of the catacombs, and - changes the secondary introduction scene a fair amount. - We've also changed up the way Ovando becomes available to interact with, and to a small extent what he looks like. Wiley demigod he is. We've got a couple more things to do before we're at a solid 1.0, but we think we're close. Hope you like the results, but please let us know either way. ;) PS: no update this time for Mac VR - but we'll post for Mac soon.

Hi All - we're pleased to announce our new project, Caliban Below. Based on characters from "The Abbot's Book," Caliban Below is the second installment in a much larger story which we're hoping to produce in full over the next few years. The VR world is growing and we're awfully excited to get some new ideas about immersive storytelling out into the world. While this is a short piece, it's jammed with details about the larger world - - we'll be very curious how much of the story you can infer, as you consider this new piece, alongside our prior chapter, "The Abbot's Book." Please let us know what you think. We hope you're as excited about VR as we are, and we hope to share much more of this story with you soon! PS - if there are any Poe and Lovecraft fans out there... well, we made this for you ;)