Wonderland and Robot Invader have partnered on a novel way to get players excited about playing a virtual reality game.
The companies converted the first few levels of the Meta Quest VR title Dead Secret Circle so that it can be played on the web. The companies are giving away those first three levels for free on wonderlandengine.com as a way to entice players to the VR title. The conversion is a good tech achievement.
Cologne, Germany-based Wonderland converted the game so it can be played instantly and without the need for installation, clearing out barriers to entry for playing a VR game. The game exploits WebXR graphics and performance, and it opens up new avenues for discoverability for Quest Store developers.
The usage of browsers from VR headsets has been steadily increasing, and web-based VR presents an intriguing marketing opportunity for native VR developers. Recognizing this potential, Cupertino, California-base Robot Invader and Wonderland joined forces to pioneer this new marketing concept, leveraging the popularity of Robot Invader’s Dead Secret Circle. The game was initially released as a native game for Nintendo Switch in 2022 and Meta Quest in early 2023.
“After playing Dead Secret Circle for the first time, I was blown away by the detail and immersive storytelling it offered,” said Jonathan Hale, CEO of Wonderland, in a statement. “However, I realized that the store page alone couldn’t fully convey the depth of the Dead Secret franchise. By making the first levels available for free on the web, we can reach a wider audience.”
Within a few months, a dedicated team completely rebuilt the game in Wonderland Engine, eliminating all dependencies on Unity. With the engine, devs can make a lot of small code changes can be reflected immediately in the browser. That reduces the iteration times on coding.
“We are a development platform comparable to Unity, basically, but we are focused 100% on the web, and the performance characteristics of the web,” Hale said in an interview with GamesBeat. “For the web, because it’s a little bit different than native as it supports many different platforms, you need to optimize the engine a little bit differently. Traditionally native engines, like Unreal Engine and Unity, haven’t really worked well on the web because they had like really big packages that took a long time to download.”
Hale added, “Also, the frameworks weren’t even comparable to what they had when they exported them directly to mobile. And so what we did is we build the native from scratch, just like C++, compiled to WebAssembly, with these modern web technologies to run extremely well in the browser on VR headsets, but also support AR on mobile and just desktop in general. So you can play the games on your mobile device, on your computer, on your VR headset. Or even like upcoming VR headsets, like the Apple Vision Pro because the browser they use already supports the standards that are required to run games.”
Hale said the code had to be written from scratch, but the companies saved a lot of time because Robot Invaders provided Wonderland with all the assets. They did this with a small team in a few months. They got the code to run more efficiently than Javascritpt. Hale showed me a demo of the web version of the game running.
Weili Dai, executive chairwoman of Robot Invader, said, “I am extremely proud of Wonderland’s and Robot Invader’s partnership on this technological breakthrough, which showcases how Wonderland’s state-of-the-art web technology is leading a disruptive shift in spatial computing.”
The work took just a few months to do the conversion.
Gregory Love, COO of Robot Invader, added, “The Wonderland team has faithfully recreated Dead Secret Circle, and in some areas, they have even improved upon what we were able to accomplish with Unity. It’s truly impressive to witness a game we spent years building running flawlessly in the browser, both on desktop and in VR. We are excited to see how this trend drives new game development and creates effective marketing opportunities for VR developers.”
Wonderland Engine, available now, empowers developers to create high-quality spatial applications on the web.
“We partnered with Jonathan and team on taking a slice of Dead Secret Circle running in Wonderland and made it available on the web,” Love said.
The Wonderland Engine provides top-tier development tools and optimized rendering for VR, AR, and 3D experiences.
“By making web technology accessible to more developers, we are empowering the democratization of spatial computing and the metaverse, making them available to a wider audience,” Dai said.
This collaboration was made possible by Dai, an entrepreneur and investor in both Robot Invader and Wonderland. Along with MeetKai, these three companies form part of Dai’s ecosystem of technology companies focused on games, AI, and the metaverse.
Wonderland’s engine enables developers to effortlessly create performant web-based VR, AR, and 3D graphics applications, optimized for web performance. Wonderland Engine takes full advantage of the latest Web APIs, including WebGL2, WebXR, WebAudio, and future integration with WebGPU.
Notably, code or scene changes made in Wonderland Engine are instantly reflected in the browser, maximizing development efficiency and speed. Wonderland is actively optimizing the engine for leading standalone VR browsers such as Meta Quest Browser, Pico Browser, and Wolvic.
With over a decade of experience in Silicon Valley, Robot Invader is a prominent video game developer. The company’s portfolio includes acclaimed titles such as Wind-up Knight, Rise of the Blobs and Dead Secret. This year, the company released Beacon’s Bluff, a puzzle game designed to showcase the capabilities of their latest project, Story Machine. Story Machine is a no-code, AI-infused, cross-platform 2D game engine tailored for narrative games.
When Dai met Hale via one of her other CEOs, James Kaplan of MeetKai. She was impressed that Hale had bootstrapped the company and she considered him to be a brilliant entrepreneur. So, they helped Wonderland move to the next stage.
“Jonathan is extremely talented,” Dai said.
Dai said she was impressed with the work that Wonderland did, which was a first. Wonderland has about 16 people.
“I believe it’s a disruptive company,” she said.
Hale said the goal of Wonderland is to work with other game studios that want to bring their experiences to the web, either as web demos or full games at some point.
Wonderland and Robot Invader have partnered on a novel way to get players excited about playing a virtual reality game.
The companies converted the first few levels of the Meta Quest VR title Dead Secret Circle so that it can be played on the web. The companies are giving away those first three levels for free on wonderlandengine.com as a way to entice players to the VR title. The conversion is a good tech achievement.
Cologne, Germany-based Wonderland converted the game so it can be played instantly and without the need for installation, clearing out barriers to entry for playing a VR game. The game exploits WebXR graphics and performance, and it opens up new avenues for discoverability for Quest Store developers.
The usage of browsers from VR headsets has been steadily increasing, and web-based VR presents an intriguing marketing opportunity for native VR developers. Recognizing this potential, Cupertino, California-base Robot Invader and Wonderland joined forces to pioneer this new marketing concept, leveraging the popularity of Robot Invader’s Dead Secret Circle. The game was initially released as a native game for Nintendo Switch in 2022 and Meta Quest in early 2023.
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“After playing Dead Secret Circle for the first time, I was blown away by the detail and immersive storytelling it offered,” said Jonathan Hale, CEO of Wonderland, in a statement. “However, I realized that the store page alone couldn’t fully convey the depth of the Dead Secret franchise. By making the first levels available for free on the web, we can reach a wider audience.”
Within a few months, a dedicated team completely rebuilt the game in Wonderland Engine, eliminating all dependencies on Unity. With the engine, devs can make a lot of small code changes can be reflected immediately in the browser. That reduces the iteration times on coding.
“We are a development platform comparable to Unity, basically, but we are focused 100% on the web, and the performance characteristics of the web,” Hale said in an interview with GamesBeat. “For the web, because it’s a little bit different than native as it supports many different platforms, you need to optimize the engine a little bit differently. Traditionally native engines, like Unreal Engine and Unity, haven’t really worked well on the web because they had like really big packages that took a long time to download.”
Hale added, “Also, the frameworks weren’t even comparable to what they had when they exported them directly to mobile. And so what we did is we build the native from scratch, just like C++, compiled to WebAssembly, with these modern web technologies to run extremely well in the browser on VR headsets, but also support AR on mobile and just desktop in general. So you can play the games on your mobile device, on your computer, on your VR headset. Or even like upcoming VR headsets, like the Apple Vision Pro because the browser they use already supports the standards that are required to run games.”
Hale said the code had to be written from scratch, but the companies saved a lot of time because Robot Invaders provided Wonderland with all the assets. They did this with a small team in a few months. They got the code to run more efficiently than Javascritpt. Hale showed me a demo of the web version of the game running.
Weili Dai, executive chairwoman of Robot Invader, said, “I am extremely proud of Wonderland’s and Robot Invader’s partnership on this technological breakthrough, which showcases how Wonderland’s state-of-the-art web technology is leading a disruptive shift in spatial computing.”
The work took just a few months to do the conversion.
Gregory Love, COO of Robot Invader, added, “The Wonderland team has faithfully recreated Dead Secret Circle, and in some areas, they have even improved upon what we were able to accomplish with Unity. It’s truly impressive to witness a game we spent years building running flawlessly in the browser, both on desktop and in VR. We are excited to see how this trend drives new game development and creates effective marketing opportunities for VR developers.”
Wonderland Engine, available now, empowers developers to create high-quality spatial applications on the web.
“We partnered with Jonathan and team on taking a slice of Dead Secret Circle running in Wonderland and made it available on the web,” Love said.
The Wonderland Engine provides top-tier development tools and optimized rendering for VR, AR, and 3D experiences.
“By making web technology accessible to more developers, we are empowering the democratization of spatial computing and the metaverse, making them available to a wider audience,” Dai said.
This collaboration was made possible by Dai, an entrepreneur and investor in both Robot Invader and Wonderland. Along with MeetKai, these three companies form part of Dai’s ecosystem of technology companies focused on games, AI, and the metaverse.
Wonderland’s engine enables developers to effortlessly create performant web-based VR, AR, and 3D graphics applications, optimized for web performance. Wonderland Engine takes full advantage of the latest Web APIs, including WebGL2, WebXR, WebAudio, and future integration with WebGPU.
Notably, code or scene changes made in Wonderland Engine are instantly reflected in the browser, maximizing development efficiency and speed. Wonderland is actively optimizing the engine for leading standalone VR browsers such as Meta Quest Browser, Pico Browser, and Wolvic.
With over a decade of experience in Silicon Valley, Robot Invader is a prominent video game developer. The company’s portfolio includes acclaimed titles such as Wind-up Knight, Rise of the Blobs and Dead Secret. This year, the company released Beacon’s Bluff, a puzzle game designed to showcase the capabilities of their latest project, Story Machine. Story Machine is a no-code, AI-infused, cross-platform 2D game engine tailored for narrative games.
When Dai met Hale via one of her other CEOs, James Kaplan of MeetKai. She was impressed that Hale had bootstrapped the company and she considered him to be a brilliant entrepreneur. So, they helped Wonderland move to the next stage.
“Jonathan is extremely talented,” Dai said.
Dai said she was impressed with the work that Wonderland did, which was a first. Wonderland has about 16 people.
“I believe it’s a disruptive company,” she said.
Hale said the goal of Wonderland is to work with other game studios that want to bring their experiences to the web, either as web demos or full games at some point.
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Author: Dean Takahashi
Source: Venturebeat
Reviewed By: Editorial Team
