Waltz of the Wizard News

Hello! This past month has been wild! Waltz of the Wizard went viral on social media and what’s followed is that poor Skully has never been thrown out the window so often in a single month.

This has all helped Waltz reach new audiences and pushed it to best selling VR on Quest, Steam and PlayStation! Our thanks to everyone who’s been playing and to the streamers — we’ve been thoroughly enjoying all the amazing creativity in your videos.

Skully is already VR’s most interactive character with hundreds of voicelines and enormous amount of unique reactions to what you say, facial expressions and gaze, communicative gestures and people’s behavior along with awareness of the environment. So, we’ve been thinking, why don’t we make VR’s most interactive character…. "even more" interactive?

Skully’s Unruly Reactions update brings +400 new voicelines and a whole bunch of new Skully interactions! From entirely new reactions to extensions of what was there before, the update makes Skully feel more alive and responsive to a greater set of things that you do and say.

You’ll find things like alternate reactions so there’s variety in voicelines, greater commentary on in-world events, greater number of things like impact reactions, extended functionality in how specifically you do things like dunk him in the cauldron and, for the many who have been specifically asking for it, yes, you can kiss him now.

[previewyoutube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZbs4zTznEA[/previewyoutube]

Skully’s Unruly Reactions is a FREE update to Waltz of the Wizard owners, now live on Steam!

Full list of new stuff can be found here: Skully's Unruly Reactions Blog Post

[h3]Fixes[/h3]

• Fixed issue on PC where input (such as buttons or hand positions) was broken, rendering the game unplayable for some
  
• Fixed issue with new the achievements not unlocking if you had already finished all the required steps in the achievement
  
• Fixed an issue where Skully sometimes popped in at the wrong time in the Courtyard
  
• Attempt to fix an issue with Occlusion Culling in Fortress not working properly, leading to some elements of the Fortress being invisible
  

Hi folks! We've got some exciting new features included in this release, here are some of the highlights:

[h3]Use voice interactions with blazingly fast responsiveness[/h3]
We’ve made great strides to take voice interaction to the next level, and after a total redesign of our voice systems, everything behind voice runs locally on device (no network required!). This new version includes better reliability, better accuracy and much more consistent and faster latency. Voice enables you to modify your own abilities and create anything, anywhere, with just a few words.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
With voice we’re aiming to make true natural interaction possible and we feel that with the improvements in this update we’re closer to that goal than ever before.

[h3]Team up with a friend[/h3]
At anytime you can team up with a friend on a second screen with a controller or mouse/keyboard. You can have some cozy magical times together mixing spells or solving riddles, and when you’re feeling adventurous, enter the Observer Fortress and battle behemoth stone creatures and discover some dark secrets.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
We’re really excited to open up the possibility for you to enjoy Waltz of the Wizard with your friends and family. The co-op mode also includes fun new ways for veteran VR users to introduce new VR users to the magic of VR, making it easier for the 2nd user to guide the VR user through the experience by interacting with everything, highlighting items or picking up and throwing items to the VR user.

[h3]Play around in a revamped tower[/h3]
The tower has been totally revamped with improved shaders, models and texture resolutions on everything, making it much more polished than ever before. Skully also has new additions with interesting tips and new greetings every time you visit the tower.


[h3]Explore an enhanced observer fortress[/h3]
New magical hand-prints in start and end rooms for easy return to portal circle, new music loops and ambiences for a deeper dungeon crawling atmosphere, and various props and items like health vials now drop from enemies, crates and barrels.


[h3]Behold your new hands![/h3]
Your virtual hands should feel like a natural blend with your own and the final look has been adjusted to a blend from transparent to a solid form in order to better indicate thaty they are a natural part of you. While this may like a small change, it’s one we believe mentally makes a difference in VR compared to disembodied hands — avoiding the feeling better of being sawed off at the wrist.


[h3]Dive into more options in the in-game menu[/h3]
The in-game menu has been enhanced with new icons, adding the achievement sticker board and making the map fully accessible, along with more additions like microphone calibration. Make sure to glance through it since the menu has a wide range of options to customize the experience to your liking.


[h3]Full details[/h3]
There are numerous additions to improvements to a majority of content in this release of Waltz of the Wizard, see our full release blog post for more details and release notes can be found on our Discord.

[h3]Big thanks to all of our fans ♡[/h3]
We are grateful for the support from our community, appreciate everyone spreading the word and we’re excited to tell you what’s next for Aldin in the coming months.
- The Aldin team

Greetings! Change the World, is now live and available to all our existing users free of charge!



Change the World puts voice interaction at the center of the experience. At the heart of the update are new kinds of voice powers that give you abilities to change the virtual world to your liking, with a spoken word and wave of your hand. Hundreds of voice commands now let you control your magic particles, summon objects or even characters just by speaking their name; change sizes, your strength, your size, object physics properties like bounciness, weight or even pitch of audio to make characters sound squeaky. Voice magic is a groundbreaking feature that makes anyone able to make the experience their own, completely intuitively.

[h2]Release highlights
[/h2]

• [h3]Powers to Change the World[/h3]Voice can be used everywhere, with hundreds of voice commands that let you summon objects, change physical properties like making anything huge or tiny, super bouncy, animate them and play with magic physics in any way you want.
  
  
  
• [h3]SteamVR/PC Specific [/h3]Improved texture resolutions, post processing bloom effects and unleash the power of your PC with the ability to summon over a hundred things, enemies and weapons!
  
  
• [h3]Fortress[/h3] Added much more variety to levels with new environments, ability to use all kinds of magic in the Fortress using voice such as Air Drawing to create your own weapons or making yourself a giant, to name a few.
  
  
• [h3]Infinite Mode [/h3]The Fortress has a new mode that lets you generate an infinite number of new random levels.
  
  
• [h3]Enemies[/h3] Tweaked enemy vision and hearing to take better into account what the user is doing. If you are sneaky enough you might just catch them unaware!
  
  
• [h3]Voice Suggestions [/h3]Use "What can I say" for voice suggestions to learn all the huge variety of voice commands.
  
  
  
• [h3]Tower Spells [/h3]All tower spells can be activated everywhere with voice.
  
  
  
• [h3]Sticker Board[/h3] A new sticker-board keeps track of the many things you can experience.
  
  
  
• [h3]Wards [/h3]Progress through four new magical wards to unlock all parts of the experience.
  
  
  
• [h3]Teleport anywhere, anytime[/h3] Instantly teleport to all parts of the Waltz world using the voice command like "Take me to the Trainstop"
  
  
  
• [h3]Courtyard[/h3] Expanded and redesigned with new activities and secrets.
  
  
  
• … and lots and lots of bug fixes and improvements.
  

[h2]Big thanks to all of our users ❤️
[/h2]We hope you find Change the World continues to deliver our goal of making fantasy feel like reality. For more details on Change the World read our announcement blog post.
- The Aldin Team

[h2]Waltz of the Wizard v2.2.2 - Bug fix patch[/h2]

[h3]Improvements[/h3]
• Added menu item for Aldin Newsletter

[h3]Fixes[/h3]
• Improved freeze/crash frequency when loading between scenes (PC)
• Fixed Aldin’s Reality ring showing success for specific invalid commands
• Fixed game sometimes crashing when trying to use Voice Interaction if internet connection was off
• Fixed Fortress cave lighting being too bright
• Fixed realtime light for some particle effects sometimes not showing
• Fixed projectile charge effect sometimes not showing for projectile based enemies (Blaster, Larvops)
• Fixed user sometimes spawning inside the table in the Tower
• Fixed Ring of Force being invisible when returning from The Cell
• Fixed Ring of Force targeting sometimes being buggy
• Fixed Grenades not orienting to fit users hand when grabbed
• Fixed enemies sometimes being incapacitated when returning back to them
• Fixed Skully not reacting when being turned into a butterfly/frog