Danny Unger had been longing for an opportunity for his team at Cloudhead Games to parter with a titan VR company to create something magical. Cloudhead would always be building out the skeletons of games are pitch them to companies, but nobody ever bit on any of their ideas.
Even when the companies would agree, it would often fall apart after the parent company would slow down the funding. Unger believes some executives would simply turn to ghosts when the deals were near completion. He says “We want to make VR games. That is all we want to do. And we want to be there with some amazing stuff when the market tips.” Cloudhead Games couldn’t find a perfect fit, until Valve came along with their own unique controllers.
Valve knew that they were going to have to find something that could show off their incredibly useful controllers, and they had a couple ideas in the work. They thought of doing something called The Lab, in which users would throw objects and squeeze them. This would show that you can let go of the Valve controllers and be completely fine. In fact, they already had a script written out for this, but it never went through. Instead, they decided to add this amazing writing to the Aperture Hand Lab, and tweak it a little bit to fit Friendly Frank’s style.
If you hav e played the Aperture Hand Lab on the Steam Store for free, you know how hilarious the robots can be in the game. Throughout the entirety of the roughly 20 minute gameplay, you will find yourself chucking at some of the weirding things you’ve seen and heard inside of virtual reality. Don’t be alarmed, it is simply all a simulation.
Steven Blomkamp from Cloudheads said this is how the commentary came to be.
“I don’t know all the voice actors but the one I knew for sure was Henry Zebrowski. Have never had more fun animating something than his stuff. That combined with Erik and Jay’s writing… *chef’s kiss* … Basically writers try to nail down script as soon as possible so animation can start. Scope is assessed based on script needs vs manpower available. Someone does recording sessions, files are reviewed and given to our sound guy/producer/all round wunderkind Joel Green who processes them all and hands them to me to take into Maya and start animating to. As it was a lot of specific, triggerable dialogue, timing had to be accounted for in as many ways as possible with minimal variance. So between fully hand keyed performances, we used idles or programmatic solutions like eye darts and aim constraints to keep the cores alive during bits that couldn’t be estimated/covered for easily by the hand keyed parts. Once the anims are done, our programmers implement them and work with the designers to create the sequence of flow that has all the triggers that compensate for player actions and story needs.”
The main features of this lab game are the grabbing, shaking, waving, and throwing. Through all of these motions, you are going to truly feel how good the Valve Index controllers can be. These controllers were originally called “knuckle controllers” when they were first available to developers, but now they have simply been named the Valve Controllers. This came as a move to make sure the creator of the controllers never got forgotten, and another great marketing idea. The creation of the Aperture Hand Lab was exactly what the Valve Controllers needed.
