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Enyx Studios makes niche in virtual reality
By GRAIG GRAZIOSI
YOUNGSTOWN
Don Hileman and the team at Enyx Studios are creating worlds on the third floor of the Youngstown Business Incubator.
Enyx Studios – a 2-year-old video game development studio operating out of the Youngstown Business Incubator – is taking its first step into both video games and virtual reality with its game “A Haunting: Witching Hour.”
Virtual reality is a computer-generated environment or image that can be interacted with in a realistic way. Users experience virtual reality through the use of headphones, controllers and goggles that house display screens.
Much like traditional video games, users interact with what is happening on the screen based on visual and audio cues. VR diverges from a more common video game experience by incorporating motion controls and blocking out most external visual and auditory stimuli to heighten the immersion a user feels.
Hileman, the CEO and founder of Enyx Studios, first experienced modern VR in 2014, and knew he wanted to get into the VR game-development scene as early as possible.
“I told my wife ‘This VR is going to be huge.’ Everywhere you looked online they were talking about it,” Hileman said. “I missed my chance when the iPhone came out; the developers who got in early there did really, really well, and I saw this as the App Store all over again.”
Three highly anticipated VR systems were released last year – the Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive and the Sony Playstation VR. Despite high expectations and hype in the tech media surrounding the systems, all three devices underperformed in sales.
According to forecasts from the International Data Corp., VR headsets were expected to sell at least 9.6 million units globally. Between the three major VR systems released in 2016 – the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Playstation VR – only 1.7 million units total were shipped worldwide, however.
The lackluster sales have been attributed to a combination of high product cost – the Oculus Rift runs $600, the Playstation VR is $300, but requires a Playstation 4 gaming console, and the HTC Vive is $800 and requires a modern gaming comptuer – and low “can’t miss” exclusive VR content.
VR’s slow start may play to Hileman’s advantage; rather than getting lost in the avalanche of new game releases during a period when the technology is still finding its footing, “A Haunting: Witching Hour” may find a larger audience when it launches in mid to late spring.
“A Haunting: Witching Hour” is a first-person horror game that follows a group of documentary filmmakers into an abandoned mine that is connected to a number of mysterious deaths.
Though the exact nature of the player’s goal won’t be known until closer to the game’s launch, it’s clear that players will find themselves navigating unsettling environments while doing their best to avoid whatever horrors lurk in the darkness of the mines.
VR lends itself to games in the horror genre, which often use the immersion and narrow field-of-view provided by a first-person perspective to intensify frightening interactions with on-screen enemies.
Unlike other games in the genre, Hileman said his game won’t be reliant on gore and brutality to elicit fear from players, but will instead focus on creating tense, realistically frightening conditions for players to experience.
To create these experiences, Hileman relies on a small team of programmers and artists to build the world of “A Haunting: Witching Hour” from the ground up. The game’s environments, sounds, acting and voice work are all done in-house.
His team is young – most are right out of college – and all are trying their hand at game development for the first time.
Hailey Ferrara, a 3-D artist, is a graduate from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and joined the Enyx Studios team right out of college. Peter Ballester is a programmer and a recent graduate from Youngstown State University. Shane Wellman is an audio engineer and the composer of the game’s music.
None of the team ever imagined they’d be developing video games in Youngstown, but they’re thankful for the opportunity.
“For artistic people, this job is like winning the lottery,” Wellman said.
Ferrara initially had her sights set on moving to the West Coast to work at one of the many game studios located in San Francisco or southern California, but decided to stay in the area when Hileman reached out to recruit her to Enyx.
Ballester considers himself lucky to have found a programming job in Youngstown, and considers it doubly lucky he gets to work in gaming, which had only been a hobby before being brought on at Enyx.
In the case of Hileman, running Enyx is the fulfillment of a dream he’d had since he was a child.
He recalls developing simple games on the Commodore 64 gaming system during his youth, and later in life teaching himself more complex coding disciplines.
Now, in position as the first major game developer in Youngstown, Hileman hopes “A Haunting: Witching Hour” will not only begin a trend of indie game development in Youngstown, but also inspire a new generation to get passionate about art and games and begin programming themselves.
“It’s exciting right now because there aren’t really any rules to VR development. We kind of get to make the rules and set the standard,” Hileman said. “I hope kids look back at this time, at the early age of VR, and the kind of work we do now inspires them to get involved and design their own games.”