I can't claim to have any special insights, but if I had to guess I'd say that since
this "Project Untold" thing was basically Anna's idea, she was seduced by the idea of getting a project she's passionate about made, to the point that it's overridden her reasonable expectations of what's possible. Wu has also shown that she has no particular qualms about lying, so there's possibly some strategic lies going on behind the scenes to keep her on board. Alternatively, they really could have some promising leads on actually getting money. Seems unlikely, but anything is possible I guess.
That said, the original description of what "Project Untold" was going to be, some sort of visual novel creation kit akin to a souped-up twine, bears no resemblance to what Wu is now saying Giant Spacekat is going to be doing. The original thing is something I would have said might be within their abilities,even without external investment (though apparently they can't afford to pay Megill a salary, which suggests they have no actual capital at all.) This new thing is delusional in scope, even with $23 million. It's flat impossible for any company that's looking to make a profit in the near term.
This original concept of Project Untold being basically some kind of visual novel dev kit sounds doomed to fail even if they stuck to it - companies aren't just going to line up for something like that, you need a
demonstrator game to show this shit off.
And given how Wu can't even make a playable demo of the PC R60 port, we all know where that would have gone.
This recent interview lays it out the plainest I've seen:
So what we’re doing at our studio is we are in the middle of raising $23 million to build games that are going to let you interact with stories and in extremely organic ways.
We have three primary sensors that we’re working on. One is looking at where your eyes are pointed, another is looking at your body language, another is analyzing the emotional tone of your voice and determining the intent behind it. The technology we are working on will let you put on VR goggles and live in this world and talk to people and have them react in emotional ways to what you are saying. So if you’re looking a character in the eye while talking to them about something serious, they’re going to respond to you with more fire than if you’re looking around the room. If you speak to someone aggressively, that is going to affect how they react to you. We are working on these extremely complicated tools to get to really awesome story-based games.
She's been yammering about VR and how she's been getting devkits for a while on twitter, though, so this isn't a recent change of direction. Spending your husband's money on new toys is a lot easier than producing cutting edge natural language processing though.
...forgive me if I'm wrong, but I swear to God all Wu is talking about is making a real life version of either .HACK or Sword Art Online.
Seriously, is there any part of what she's describing that's realistically possible?
Edit:
I'm just thinking about the processing power you'd need for to be able to:
-Accurately interpret human speech, then accurately interpret voice inflection and possible range of emotional states.
-Accurately gauge body language and microgestures in order to understand the feelings being conveyed.
-Track eye movement and interpret its interactions with virtual objects.
-Somehow have the space and power for a deep, rich game world top of all of this.
I have no idea what kind of system could handle that, but I guarantee Apple doesn't make it.
Well, individually, at least basic versions of all these things do exist:
- The Nintendo 64's "Voice Recognition Unit" accessory was sensitive enough that it was calibrated to be most effective when a child spoke into it, more than a teenager or adult. Only one game ever was released in the US (out of two total) that used this thing
:
- As mentioned, there's the Kinect, but while I don't recall
exactly all the details, a long while back I remember there being something at the local museum's kids area where you stood in front of a screen and it "scanned" you in, then you could play a game by jumping around and stuff in projected VR. The only game I even recall there being was a basic soccer goal keeper level (not the only one, but this was years ago so I don't even remember the thing's name) but it was fairly accurate in tracking body motion.
- Oh, I
know this kind of thing exists, IIRC that was part of a driving simulator that the Mythbusters used when testing stuff about distracted driving.
- Isn't this basically Bethesda's bread and butter?
That's sort of what I thought. I mean, we have some rudimentary ability to track movement and body position, like with the kinect. We can do some eye tracking stuff, like with VR. We can do a little voice command stuff, like on phones. But advancing it to the point that you're interpreting it all as a whole, and with enough precision to interpret emotional state and voice inflection, then having the AI adjust accordingly? Wu's dubious programming ability aside, I'm not sure any hardware out there could handle that, to say nothing of what it would take to program something like that.
This is kinda nice. I knew when she started talking about some mysterious big "thing", it was going to be batshit and she delivered beautifully.
Yeah, combining all this shit when Wu's the only one potentially
doing the combining is never going to happen. Wu can't code for shit, all they can do is do procastionation-level work on a few model tweaks and that's literally it - they
paid other people at GSK to learn the Unreal engine to make the game only for them to take all the credit.
What's amusing is how Wu has connived at his own destruction of late. Wu has thrown in his lot with the koolaid drinkers, even though their ranks are becoming more poisonous and fractured by the day and SJWs have finally started pissing off the general public due to their entitlement bullshit, so Wu's continuing to double down is really going to bite him on the ass royally, as his allies are becoming public enemies more and more as time goes on.
Well, Wu's been pissy ever since they stopped getting featured on national television segments a long while ago - everything Wu ever does is just for attention and to be lauded for shit they never actually did or deserve to be lauded for.
On this, Wu is partially aware. I've noticed Wu has completely abandoned trying to kiss Quinn and Sarkeesian's asses, and the fact Wu bailed rather quickly on whiteknighting Nyberg before any other SJW definitely means Wu is just bright enough to realize what could hurt his bottom line, and while deranged idiots like Arthur Chu still retweet this jackass, Wu rarely if ever returns the favor.
Didn't stop Wu from being super salty about not going to that Google thing or the idiotic UN meeting that got called out for being entirely stupid.
In fact, Wu's circle of true believers has contracted considerably in recent day, and the fact he refuses to change his tune, babbling on about projects that will never happen and being even more brazen about trying to silence dissent is a good sign Johnny is getting nervous about the money drying up, but he's going to continue lying to himself until he can't ignore how much it hurts anymore.
Yeah, whatever happened to
Cupcake Crisis? I thought that was the next thing Wu was working on.
