The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

Tech Support: Error Unknown is a rapid paced puzzle game in the vein of Papers Please. Presented entirely through a computer interface, the player is contacted by customers through a chat dialogue interface where they try to establish what the customer’s problem is and offer solutions relevant to the situation. The genre blends quick execution with detective work to interrogate customers and understand situations properly.

Over the course of a game, a player will interact with 200 to 350 different customers, many of which will have similar problems such as their phone not turning on, a broken screen or simply trying to change the wallpaper. Interactions generally involve between 10 to 20 lines of dialogue on the customer’s side.

Because of the fast paced nature of the game, I avoided using a text parser in favor of a macro system offering a series of questions and solutions. New options gradually unlock over the course of the game, but every unlocked option is available to the player at all times during a conversation, meaning the customer must be able to account for every comment and react accordingly.

Having such a wide range of dialogue options pushed me to create a system that would merge various tricks to make conversations flow naturally and as uniquely as possible. I also purposefully limited the choices available to the player, to ensure that most responses would be applicable to more than problem, even if they’re not always the correct answer. Towards the end of the game, the player access to over 25 replies, to which customers must be able to react in a natural and unique fashion.

Dialogue is always presented as the customer reacting to something the player is saying or doing, so the the first step was to write basic dialogue for each of those situations. In some cases, lines are reused for similar situations, like when the player is offering a solution which is inconsequential to the problem. However, even wrong paths often lead to unique dialogue options, like the customer asking why the player wants to track their phone through GPS when all they want is to change the wallpaper.

Once all the situations were established, I added multiple lines of dialogue for each case, to avoid having the same replies from happening when the same problem occurs. A customer calling concerning their phone being corrupted might answer “When I tried to start my phone, it gave me a garbled mess.” or “My phone won’t start, and it says something about corruption”. Some customers might dodge giving a specific answer altogether and simply respond “My phone doesn’t work correctly”. This variety also keeps the player on their toes and rather than simply memorizing the solutions to a series of replies.

Problems may also be re-contextualized to provide a wider range of replies. If a phone got wet, the customer might explain that they’re clumsy and dropped it in the pool, or that it was raining really hard. In some cases, the customer may not fully understand what the solution presented means, leading down a different solution free for the player.

All of the dialogue lines are listed in a Open Office spreadsheet, which I then convert to a JSON file loaded by the game. Statements can have several dozens of replies to choose from as a baseline, ranging from a single sentence to a small monologue, and changed on the fly as the customer becomes more irritated or the player asks the same questions again.

Once a line is selected, the system determines what variance to add to it. Sentences are broken into chunks which are interchangeable, allowing for different expressions to be used. In the case of “I already told you, I cracked the screen on my phone”, the customer could instead start the sentence with different expressions: “Like I told you”, “I just mentioned it! Once again,” or “Are you even listening? I already said that”.

Customers also have individual traits which influences their speech patterns. Emojis might be added to the responses to add some flair, or the customer might use shorthand for quick dialogue, where forget becomes 4get, you’re becomes ur, and so on. Some may even add typoes to their dialogue, with the frequency varying between different customers.

All of these variations not only serve to make sentences feel distinct, but also add a lot of personality to the customers themselves. The procedurally generated insults allow for memorable quotes like “you contemptuous piece of trash” or “worthless donkey”. They can even use more common swear words if the option is toggled on.

Tech Support also employs a series of unique characters with their own dedicated dialogue to spice up the conversations. These are split between story characters and specifically crafted customers, who blend in among the procedural characters until a dialogue is established.

These characters will always appear on the same days and have the same problems, which allows for more carefully crafted dialogue and requiring less variation. It also allows me to craft a story around these characters which makes them pop more and adds credibility to the dialogue system.

Having about 10-15% of conversations be unique characters makes the entire dialogue system feel more fresh,

A substantial amount of time was spent crafting the dialogue and breaking them down to make them go a longer way. Because the dialogue system and investigation was a pillar of the game’s design, making conversations flow naturally is a priority.

Locking the player’s reactions to dialogue macros helped limit the scope of the game but also allows for faster and more intense game play. The pacing also makes it easier for responses which do sound very similar to be mostly ignored as the player becomes doesn’t have time to break down how the reply is made, only focusing on the meaning itself.

The rate of a new conversation for every play minute was always going to be a challenge to make every response unique, but by virtue of a few tricks, a few thousand lines of dialogue were pushed to become a lot more.

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

b r 1 is an attempt to translate a game from one game engine/environment into another. In this case, it is a translation of my own game v r 1 from Unity into Bitsy.

Translations of one form or another are a generative approach to game design and development for me, something I’ve written about before. Translating between engines specifically feels like an opportunity to think about the underlying building blocks of videogames by employing the semi-scientific experimental idea of maintaining the design constant while treating the engine/environment as the controlled variable. b r 1 helps me to ask and explore what the differences between Bitsy and Unity and to look at what Bitsy is like as an engine.

To briefly recap the source material, v r 1 was a game I made as an approach to reproducing/thinking-about the work of Gregor Schneider in a virtual/digital space. Schneider’s masterpiece The Haus u r is a house that he obsessively makes, demakes, and remakes. Within the house there is a room he calls u r 1 which he has reproduced multiple times in different contexts, including in Totes haus u r at the Venice Biennale. It is this room that I tried to recreate in v r 1 and then to manipulate in different ways to explore hopefully related ideas about reproduction, craft, and space. In v r 1 the player encounters a version of Schneider’s u r 1 over and over again in different formats facilitated by the Unity game engine, whether it simply has the light turned off or whether it has been broken into its constituent pieces and left on the ground.

For the remainder of this essay, I want to write about what I found out when I remade v r 1 in Bitsy, focusing on what was revealed about Bitsy as a game engine as well as more general design and development ideas. My objective isn’t to go over these things exhaustively, but just to note what I find interesting. Much fuller documentation and obsessive thinking can be found in the project’s commit historyand process documentation wiki.

Vision versus concept

Bitsy is a 2D game engine, Unity is a 3D game engine. One of the most immediate decisions to make revolved around the basic question of how to represent the room in the Bitsy form. The initial decision was a bird’s-eye view, since this is the most formal way of translating, but it felt flat and uninteresting to look at (c37bd36). I went with a kind of false 2.5D approach, with inaccurate perspectival effects, in order to try to capture the feeling of v r 1 (84047e7). Even though it was less straightforward, it felt important to be able to evoke the Unity version of the game visually to maintain some connection between the very distinct engines. Further, having perspective was the only way to make the window and radiator in v r 1/u r 1 visible in the Bitsy context: seen from the top, they are simply part of the wall. This kind of translation project creates specific tensions of this kind, a need to reconcile a new technology or design framework with pre-existing requirements. These tensions are valuable because they force us to ask both about the technology/framework at hand (the materials of production) and the source design/concept we are attempting to translate.

“What is that?”

Bitsy uses a tile-based representation of the world. A single ‘room’ (or scene) is 16×16 tiles and each tiles is 8×8 pixels. This limitation, especially at the tile level, is hugely restrictive on what can be represented, or at least how that can be done. Given that the avatar in Bitsy is one tile in size, a scale is effectively set for the rest of the world, not dissimilar to Unity’s unit grid in relation to the avatar height in that system. The obvious outcome of this is the challenge of re-representing 3D objects and forms from v r 1 in Bitsy’s low-resolution, and the risk that they will become unintelligible through that translation (Thursday, 10 May 2018, 13:57). This situation is partially resolved through careful use of the restricted pixels, partially through creating some multi-tile objects where scale permits (such as the bed), and partially through the additional Bitsy affordance of dialog boxes. The dialog boxes allow for descriptive (or other) texts to be attached to specific objects in a scene, meaning that texts can further clarify the low-resolution image and creating a cooperation of text/image that can approximate the high resolution detail of Unity (See commit 8066d3b and Saturday, 19 May 2018, 14:44 and Sunday, 20 May 2018, 18:07).

I am not a camera

A drastic change from v r 1 to b r 1 is the use of a third person ‘camera’. Where v r 1used a first-person character controller, allowing the player to be ‘immersed’ in the world and adopt a (relatively) naturalistic view based on perspective, proximity, etc., Bitsy lends itself to a third-person view in which the entire scene is visible at all times and the avatar moves around it with tile-based movements. This leads to different understandings of ‘visibility’ in b r 1. In v r 1, for instance, if you stand outside the window and look into the room you can see the bed, tube, and trunk, but not the radiator because it is recessed beneath the window (757f18a). We end up with a “total information” view of the scene in which you can see into a room before you even enter it, a strange perceptual trick that is actually fairly common in many games, but raises the question “who am I?” This is complicated even further in a scenario such as the “door down” room, in which the character cannot enter the room, nor look through the window, yet can see everything inside it (8066d3b). The fact that the ‘camera’ is situated high above the world being experience further complicates matters and ultimately necessitated odd decisions around how to represent walls and objects’ spatial relationship to those walls (dd47dd8).

Me and Gregor Schneider

At its heart, v r 1 was about grappling with how to work with Unity in ways that might stay somewhat true to Gregor Schneider’s practice. Schneider’s work is very much focused on obsessive crafting and duplication of space, and so v r 1 changed this idea to reconfiguration of space (as duplication is all too easy in digital spaces). As such, b r 1 has to be situated in relation to Schneider’s work too. At many points in its development, I was pleased to find quirks of Bitsy that seemed “more authentic”, such as the fact sprites are unique in Bitsy, meaning I had to create, for instance, a new radiator every time I needed one for a new room, a very Schneider-esque activity (984beb9). I became sufficiently interested in this idea that I even began to worry whether my underlying process was “honest” enough if I duplicated not the original radiator but a different copy (0e084ae). Ultimately, working in the new game environment felt like a continuation of the v r 1 project to reimagine his process in this new digital context. “His work is about spatiality and the seen and unseen and spatial composition. … He struggles with imperfect materials to make things identical, perfect, I’m struggling with a perfect materials to make things legible, humanised, real.” (Thursday, 10 May 2018, 13:57).

A frozen world

Another major contrast between the Unity and Bitsy versions of this work is the presence of physics in Unity but not in Bitsy (beyond basic collisions that prevent movement through solid objects). This is relevant to the above meditation on Schneider’s work especially because of its highly physical nature. In v r 1 I relied on the physics engine to create appropriate configurations of objects when the room was rotated in various ways, with the bed etc. falling realistically and settling. In Bitsy this kind of physics had to be simulated in drawings and dialogs in order to create facsimiles of the v r 1 tableaux (ad168b3). Another approach to this idea of physics was, in fact, to have the player act as the simulation, as with the scene in which the player falls through the floor, enacting their falling by moving the avatar downward on the screen (9c69163). In the end, I wonder whether the extremely static nature of the Bitsy world is actually more true to Schneider’s creations which, after all, you are only meant to view and never touch, and which tend to represent timeless, endless scenarios that repeat their minimalist scenes indefinitely.

Going with the grain

To end on a point of Schönian joyfulness about the conversation with materials, working with Bitsy did have these moments of feeling like I was in synch with the software. This was especially true when creating versions of the v r 1 spaces could be reimagined in terms of the “Bitsy reality”. The ‘organised’ scene is an example of that (b56a96c). In Unity the elements of the 3D models are arranges by height in a line, in Bitsy the corresponding scene is arranged in a grid, tile by tile in a way that’s visually pleasing and makes sense as a translation of that idea. Similarly the scene in which the room is collapsed into pieces on the ground as if it has fallen down in Bitsy is represented with the tiles that make up the room being jumbled but still taking up the same space on the screen (ad168b3). This idea of “going with the grain” (4b7e96f) was a recurring feeling with the work, from choosing to represent the title in a dialog box, to using the dialog system to describe what is seen through windows (19d7a75), to selecting the order of rooms by hand since Bitsy is not predisposed to random generation (9c69163). Perhaps most emblematic of this process was toward the end of the project where I needed to replace a set of three scenes from v r 1 that simply made no sense in Bitsy (generally these relied very specifically on having a real third dimension, such as one room leaning on the other. Needing three new rooms to feel fulfilled, I ended up turning to Bitsy-specific affordance to manipulate the space: a new colourful palette, animated tiles, and an ‘items’ based room in which you can pick up the objects (Saturday, 19 May 2018, 16:58).

The end

In the end, b r 1 served both as an intriguing reengagement with v r 1 and Schneider’s work, and a way of thinking closely about the representational and experiential properties of both Unity and Bitsy as creative tools. I have every intention of carrying this particular project forward with presumably b r 2 and b r 3and all the struggle and learning that will entail.

An event four years in the making has finally arrived and we are unbelievably happy to bring Boss 101 to Xbox One. When we started Boss 101 our goal was to make a game about two friends going on an epic adventure. One of the first additions was the Make-A-Boss generator where you create your own enemies to fight. From there it wasn’t long till we had tons of weapons, player upgrades, a campaign and millions of boss combinations for you to battle.

We didn’t stop there and worked hard to bring it together with a story both compelling and interesting. The Command Center (your main base) was turned into a home for not just you but your friends, Berl, Rob, and the Professor. We added visitors from other planets and a galactic Wiki so you can learn about your allies and enemies. Heck, we even added in pet friends, arcade games and kite flying to round out your day.

A lot of time went into making what we called ‘connective tissue’ for the game and story. That’s all the little touches that might not seem obvious or necessary at first but in the end, expand your experience as a player. An example would be the galactic Wiki. At first, we put it in to explain game lore but it quickly grew into something a more. We added in animated icons, bonus material and designed it to feel like part of the Command Center instead of a text dump screen. Take that thinking and multiply it a few hundred times and you get Boss 101. Where we are now is not the place we imagined when we started, it’s bigger and better. The world feels like a place. The characters feel like people we know.

The two main questions we asked over and over were “Is this fun?” and “Does it feel like it belongs in our universe?” All the rooms, ships, guns and equipment had to feel like they were built by the people you see in the game. Though the player might not see or hear every little secret there are reasons for everything. Reasons for Boss 101 and his mission, for you and your mission. All of it is sprinkled through the main campaign and across the Command Center. You don’t need to know it all to enjoy the game but if you dig around you can find everything.

Boss 101 represents a universe we want to come back to and tell more stories in. We hope you check it out and feel the same. Our team is three people, living our dreams and bringing you the best games we can.

For news about Boss 101 and its universe please visit the official Boss 101 site, follow us on Twitter or Facebook and stay tuned to Xbox Wire!

The amazing success of the Switch has led to some equally amazing crowdfunding campaigns for must-have accessories, the most notable of which are the Switch Charge case and the OJO Projector. Both of these products massively over-performed in their initial funding drives, and both have endured a rather sluggish route to market. SwitchCharge is only now making its way into the hands of backers (and, if reports are to be believed, in a painfully slow fashion) while the OJO – which raised $270,966 (687% of its goal amount) last year – has also arrived on the scene slightly later than originally planned.

Pitched as the world’s first portable projector for the Nintendo Switch, it’s easy to see why so many people backed the OJO. Compact and versatile, this is – on paper – the ideal accessory for Nintendo’s hybrid console. Not only does it project gameplay footage onto any flat surface up to a size of around 120 inches corner to corner, it also acts as a dock, is totally portable, can charge other devices via USB and act like a normal projector, thanks to its HDMI input. All of this functionality is packaged within a device that measures just 172 x 80 x 70mm – small enough to fit inside most average-sized satchels or rucksacks.

The OJO uses a Texas Instruments Digital Light Processing system which delivers a crisp, colourful image at 854 x 480 resolution, with a brightness of 200 Lumens. While the resolution might sound disappointing and the brightness a tad low when compared to other projectors on the market, in reality things are a lot more positive. Sure, visuals look slightly pixelated in places and text can occasionally be harder to read, it’s not the deal breaker many had anticipated – especially when you consider how large the overall size of the projected image is. We played a wide range of Switch games and while there’s definitely a trade-off when it comes to visual fidelity, it’s one we can just about live with – especially when you take into account the contrast ratio of >1000:1, good colour balance and a ‘punchy’ picture. Even in a moderately light room, it’s possible to see the image perfectly clearly.

Audio is supplied either by the built-in speaker or via the 3.5mm output, which means you can connect the OJO to your stereo or portable speaker system. To be honest, there’s no real need to, as the speaker is incredibly loud with good bass reproduction. In a modest-sized room it will positively drown out any other noise, which is a good thing, because the OJO has not one but two fans inside to keep things cool, and these get very noisy indeed. One 7,600 RPM turbo fan (working in conjunction with a copper radiator) ensures that the projector itself doesn’t get too toasty, while the other 11,000 RPM fan keeps the Switch itself at a reasonable temperature. Even with this dual fan setup, you can expect both the projector and your console to be pretty warm after an hour of use; for this reason, the team behind OJO don’t recommend using the device in a hot environment.

The OJO comes with its own PSU which tops up the internal LG-made 20,400mAh battery. Once fully charged this can be used to run the projector anywhere you wish, and offers around four hours of use. Alternatively, you can toggle the OJO to charging mode and it will fully replenish your Switch console’s battery three times over. There are also two USB sockets on the back of the OJO which allow you to charge compatible devices, such as smartphones or tablets. Next to these is a HDMI-in port, which allows you to turn the OJO into a multi-purpose projector capable of displaying any image via a HDMI connection.

The OJO takes a few seconds to properly boot up from a cold start, and once it’s running you can adjust the focus and volume using the buttons on the top of the unit. There’s a little kick-stand underneath which allows you to angle the projector to get the best picture, and in a really neat touch, the unit actually senses the angle at which it is pitched and adjusts the image accordingly to ensure it’s nice and flat against whichever surface you’re using. Because of this, you can actually position the OJO at quite a sharp angle (ideal when you’re in a small room and close to the wall) and the image is automatically manipulated to ensure a decent picture.

When you’re running the OJO off its battery, the brightness level drops after a few minutes to conserve stamina – to get maximum brightness, you need to be running it from the mains. As far as we can see, there doesn’t seem to be any way of overriding this setting, but as long as you’re in a sufficiently darkened environment, you shouldn’t really have many complaints. 

One thing that might raise a few eyebrows is the price. At $400 / £300 the OJO is very expensive for what it is; stand-alone projectors are available for significantly less cash, and while they lack the portability and elegance of the OJO setup, they’re often comparable in terms of picture quality and offer superior clarity thanks to their higher resolutions. It’s important to remember that 1080p isn’t automatically better than the OJO’s 480p because the Texas Instruments DLP system is fantastic, but when you look at the massive gulf in cost, it becomes harder to justify the OJO over its many rivals in the projector space – even when you take into account the unit’s many other features, such as dock functionality and an internal battery.

Another thing that may give you pause for thought is the fact that the company behind this product has been incredibly candid when it comes to talking about its next project, the OJO 2. Even though the original is only just hitting the market, YesOJO is already hyping up the sequel, which makes you wonder if it’s all that wise dropping such a large sum of cash on something which could potentially be old news in a few months. You may also be wary of buying a third-party projector with docking capabilities, given the recent issues Nyko has had with its own docks following the Switch 5.0 firmware update. YesOJO has assured us that the device is constructed to the, “highest standards,” but we were also told that, “The OJO team will promise that we will take full responsibility if anything [goes] wrong with the system,” – make of that statement what you will, but it sounds to us like the company isn’t totally certain that the OJO won’t brick your Switch.

We also have some slight doubts regarding the reliability of the unit, too. During our review the light flickered repeatedly at one point, and on another occasion there was no audio output. Undocking and redocking the Switch was enough to solve both of these issues – and they only happened once, we should add – but it would appear that YesOJO has a few gremlins to eradicate when it comes to the device’s performance. These may well be addressed in future units.

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Ultimately, we’ve really enjoyed our time with the OJO; it really does take the Switch experience to the next level, and being able to take the projector anywhere – outside, on camping trips, to a friend’s house – is a real boon, and turns the Nintendo’s ‘any time, any place’ ethos to the next level. However, the 480p resolution is behind the curve even when compared to cheap-and-cheerful projectors, and the fact that the OJO 2 is very much on the horizon means you’ll have to seriously consider your purchasing decision before dropping such a large sum on this.

Well, here’s an exciting little turn of events. A brand new page for Pokémon on Nintendo Switch has popped up on the official US Nintendo Store page. There’s very little detail to glean from it, but it does include the following tease for things to come:

Enter your email below to register your interest in our pending title Pokémon on Nintendo Switch and be the first to hear from us about how to pre-order and about other exciting new Nintendo products, services, promotions and events that might be of interest.

You can visit the page right here to register your email address, so you’ll know exactly when the Big N and The Pokemon Company finally make the big reveal for the Switch release we’ve always wanted.

So what do you make of this little tease? Do you think we’ll be hearing about this latest entry sooner, or later? Let us know in the comments below…

Spring Cleaning. That wonderful time of year where people go through their closets to make space, and in doing so discover forgotten gems lost to the bottom of plastic storage totes. But why should the joy of rediscovering a kitschy t-shirt, or a well-hidden holiday gift, be limited to cleaning our homes? With so many wonderful games out there it’s easy to have a backlog of titles that you always intended to go play, but for whatever reason never got around to and the Steam Spring Cleaning Event is the time to change that. By diving into your Steam Library and playing games that you haven’t looked at in a while (or at all), you can unlock and level up the new Spring Cleaning badge. But this event isn’t just for those with a hefty backlog of titles to work through as we said earlier, Spring Cleaning is a time of delightful surprises and so in that spirit the following games will be available to play FREE for the duration of the event (May 24th -May 28th)

Don’t Starve Together
Dead by Daylight
Cities: Skylines
Tyranny
Borderlands 2
Castle Crashers
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
Left 4 Dead 2
Dirt 4

It’s a great time for games, so enjoy the weekend exploring Steam and finding a new classic to add to your all-time favorite list.

“I’d like to think our return rate is so low because we’re very clear about the experience the player should expect.”

– Developer on Quarantine Circular Mike Bithell on why the game has a two percent refund rate. 

Steam can be a tricky platform for developers looking to market short, narrative-driven games. After all, if players aren’t satisfied with their purchase they can request a refund, so long as they’ve played less than two hours of it. 

Bithell Games’ newest title, Quarantine Circular, has a fairly short runtime of about one to two hours with only a two percent refund rate. 96 percent of its 718 reviews are positive, and Bithell credits honesty as the reason for 98 percent players not refunding the game after finishing it.

“I think we’ve been very upfront about the short duration of the game, and we’ve done similar with Quarantine Circular,” he explains. “We try to be very clear this is a text adventure and what that entails, but the majority of returns are people who were expecting a very different game than the one described on the store page or in the trailer.”

Another factor which may have played into the low refund rate of Quarantine Circular is the non-existent marketing of the game, which seemed to appear out of the blue. “We are terrified of people getting the wrong idea from a screenshot of the game,” Bithell admits.

“What better way to control expectation than to not allow time for it to build? Here’s our game. This is what it is. We put a lot of work into it.”

Make sure to check out the entire piece over at Kotaku, which goes into more detail about how Bithell could get away with dropping a game with little public hype before release. 

In this GDC 2018 talk, designers Raph Koster, Dave Mark, Richard Lemarchand, Laralyn McWilliams, Noah Falstein and Robin Hunicke go over what problems they wish artificial intelligence could solve for them when developing games.

The panelists discuss concepts like character AI, procedural content, animation, speech, and “director”-style pacing and content delivery.

While the talk doesn’t necessarily focus on the practical of “what can we do,” it focuses instead on exploring “what COULD we do.” It’s an informative session that provides AI programmers with ideas for what could be implemented in game design.

Programmers interested in AI programming may appreciate that they can now watch the talk for free over on the official GDC YouTube channel!

In addition to this presentation, the GDC Vault and its new YouTube channel offers numerous other free videos, audio recordings, and slides from many of the recent Game Developers Conference events, and the service offers even more members-only content for GDC Vault subscribers.

Those who purchased All Access passes to recent events like GDC, GDC Europe, and GDC Next already have full access to GDC Vault, and interested parties can apply for the individual subscription via a GDC Vault subscription page. Group subscriptions are also available: game-related schools and development studios who sign up for GDC Vault Studio Subscriptions can receive access for their entire office or company by contacting staff via the GDC Vault group subscription page. Finally, current subscribers with access issues can contact GDC Vault technical support.

Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Americas

Grab your keyblade, wake up Goofy, and prepare to smack a Heartless with a rollercoaster: Kingdom Hearts III is almost here.

Kingdom Hearts III will be the first franchise entry to appear on an Xbox platform, and it’s clear that this is a game for both new and old fans alike. With evolved gameplay punctuated by exhilarating attacks modeled after Disney attractions and characters, Kingdom Hearts III is shaping up to be an action-packed ride for everyone.

Action was exactly what we found during a recent hands-on demo touching on two of Kingdom Hearts III’s many worlds: the craggy mountains of Olympus from the 1997 “Hercules” film and a trip to Andy’s Toybox from Pixar’s “Toy Story”.

Built to show off the game’s verticality, Olympus charged us with taking down a massive Rock Titan. Dashing up the sheer mountain face while dodging huge boulders hefted by the mighty Titan, we were immediately struck by the game’s newfound sense of scale. Once they reached the summit, Sora and his trusty sidekicks Donald Duck and Goofy were face to, well, foot with the monstrous Titan.

After climbing up to the beast’s twin heads, we had access to one of the brand new “Attraction” ultimates inspired by real-world Disney theme park rides. In this case, it was “Big Magic Mountain,” a glittering, technicolor train yanked right out of the Main Street Electrical Parade. Sora and crew hopped aboard and blasted the Titan with colorful fireworks before exploding in a breathtaking, fight-ending light show.

The second half of the demo was just as magical. Warped into the not-so-small world of “Toy Story” – the first time a Pixar property has appeared in Kingdom Hearts – Sora and crew promptly meet up with Woody, Buzz, Rex, Hamm and other famous Toy Story faces. Watching Sora and Woody casually chat while wandering around Andy’s room is exactly the sort of thing that sets Kingdom Hearts fans’ hearts aflutter, a seemingly incongruous character mashup that somehow makes perfect sense.

Off we went to rescue Woody’s pals from Galaxy Toys, a brand new “Toy Story” location introduced in Kingdom Hearts III, but not before a few more Heartless battles demonstrated the game’s flexible combat system. Hammering on the attack button yielded combos that powered potent keyblade transformations. Players will wield several different keyblades over the course of the game and can switch between them at the press of a button. After dispatching a few grunts, we transformed the keyblade into the Tangled-inspired Mirage Staff, clearing out the rest with fierce, flowery blasts of light.

A Link attack brought forth the muscular star of “Wreck-it-Ralph”, who laid down a handful of explosive bricks before tackling enemies like a linebacker. Later we turned the world into water as Ariel from “The Little Mermaid”, diving beneath enemies and flipping them into the air. Another attraction, the Mad Teacups, turned the stomach-churning ride into a destructive, nauseating whirlwind. We even channeled “Pacific Rim” by controlling three giant toy mechs at various spots in the toy store.

Combine all of that with more keyblade modes (at one point we wielded a “Toy Story”-inspired hammer that would make Thor jealous), a wealth of magical attacks, and handy defensive dashes and you get a cinematic, laugh-out-loud system so grandiose, even Maleficent would love it, though she may frown at Kingdom Hearts III’s unbelievable looks.

Speedy and smooth with picture-perfect character models and bright, cheery colors, it’s a visual stunner. From the stiches on Woody’s pants to Goofy’s iconic gait, Kingdom Hearts III evokes the mouse house’s inimitable style and attention to detail. It feels like you’re playing through a bizarre Disney film.

Precisely when you’ll get to do that remains to be seen, as Square-Enix has yet to reveal a specific release date. But like the best rides, this big, bold, and beautiful romp through Disney’s unforgettable worlds looks like it will be well worth the wait when it arrives on Xbox One.