With its stunning graphics, first-person perspective and complex puzzles, XING: The Land Beyond promises to be an epic adventure game for the Oculus Rift on release.
Set in the afterlife on a series of floating islands, XING offers players the chance to explore beautiful paradise beaches, waterfalls and caves; all the while solving puzzles and gathering poems that help release other spirits trapped in the afterlife. Ever since it’s demo for the DK1 headset in 2014, we’ve been looking forward to playing the full game, and with an estimated release date of spring 2016 there’s still a while left to wait.
To help pass the time, and to find out more about this intriguing game, we caught up with the development team at White Lotus to discover how they work together, tackle virtual reality challenges and create such amazing real-time visuals.
Q: First of all, how is development progressing at this current time?
White Lotus (WL): Development is going well! We are excited to be showing off some of our latest work at the end of August at PAX Prime.
Q: It’s astonishing how a team of three can create such a detailed and inventive game. How do you work together as a team?
WL: We met in college and initially all worked together from a single apartment. Our work chemistry seemed great – as we were always working off of each other’s energy, and at the time we didn’t know if it would be possible for us to become a digital company after graduating. Luckily for us, we transitioned pretty well. When we graduated, we decided to continue to work together from our respective homes using Google Hangouts. Now 5-6 days a week we each join the video chat around 11 am, and work till about 11pm. We work hard, but the work is fun and challenging – and we get to crack jokes all day 
Q: XING is an absolutely breath-taking game to look at. How were the visuals and level designs conceived?
WL: Google images. We just google things that look cool, both fictional and not, and then just model/design accordingly. Architecture, objects, plants, natural places…you name it. If there is a picture of it on google, we can probably make it.
We each enjoy a variety of genres of entertainment; because of that, XING has received fantasy elements from movies like The Lord of the Rings and The Mummy, Sci-Fi elements from movies like Stargate and Avatar, and whimsical elements from movies like The Road to El Dorado and Ghibli movies. James does hard surface modeling/concept, Koriel does concept/soft-surface modeling/environment design, and John brings it all together with the foliage/lighting/rendering. Each level revolves around a specific character, so we take that into account and try to tell their story through the visuals and environment, as much as the actual writing.
Q: What challenges and puzzles can players expect to find in the game?
WL: Players can expect to discover puzzles based on the environments surrounding them, or rather “environment-based puzzles”. They are given power to control different types of weather, and this affects the puzzles in the surrounding areas. There are logic puzzles, platform puzzles, conditional puzzles, deduction, insight, riddles and more.
Q: What can players expect from the VR version of the game?
WL: We have worked hard to ensure that the VR version of the game will be almost identical to the standard version, meaning that we have designed all the levels with VR in mind so that it can be enjoyed in both a traditional and VR platforms.
Q: What challenges have you encountered while developing for virtual reality headsets like the Oculus Rift?
WL: We’ve said it before, but developing for VR is incredibly challenging and rewarding. Nothing beats putting together a well composed scene in VR and getting to throw a headset and seeing it in a whole new way. Of course, before that, we get to see the same scene with incorrectly scaled meshes, effects only showing up in one eye, glitchy shaders and all at 15 fps. Despite naturally avoiding many of the design pitfalls of VR development (movement speed, lack of a HUD, playing at your own pace) it’s been a huge undertaking to support all the technical requirements current generation VR presents, and there is always a new challenge to surmount right around the corner. At PAX Prime this year we are presenting our game at full DK2 resolution at a steady 75 fps, and soon we’ll be working on supporting the high resolution, high refresh rate HMDs of the near future.
Q: Are you planning to incorporate motion controls for the final game?
WL: We’d love to incorporate motion controllers. While we have embraced a very simple control scheme throughout development supporting keyboard and mouse and controllers, many of the actions you perform in XING are analogous to common real world movements, like pressing a button or throwing an object. Recently Epic has put out an update to Unreal Engine 4 that enhances the workflow for positionally tracked controllers that should make it easy for us to try some out and see how they change they way XING is played. Of course, we’ll be watching the VR industry closely and support whatever makes sense at the time of our release.
Q: Will there be a new demo for players to try before the games release?
WL: The question of creating a new demo is almost always a question of time, and our efforts are presently focused on the eventual final release of the game. We do understand the importance of a tech demo, especially with all the changing hardware of the VR world, so we’d like a theoretical new demo to mimic the real game experience as closely as possible. If we do make a new demo before or release, it will be on the Oculus Share page alongside our old DK1 demo.
Q: Finally, is there any news on a release date?
WL: We recently released a new trailer that announced a spring 2016 release, hopefully somewhat coinciding with the start of commercial VR. We are taking a “when it’s done” approach, so that date is more of a deadline for us to keep our scope in check than a hard release date. There is still a lot to be done!
XING: The Land Beyond Website | XING Steam Greenlight Page | DK1 Demo