Xtended Realities Podcast | S2 E1 | Survios Co-founder Alex Silkin: Best Practices, Mistakes to Avoid, and Running A Studio

Xtended Realities

It's time to get technical this week with Survios Co-Founder and CTO Alex Silkin! Join us for a deep dive into VR gamedev in Unreal Engine as we cover decisions and challenges faced by Survios while making some of the market's biggest VR games like Raw Data, Creed: Rise to Glory, Sprint Vector, and an upcoming Aliens title.

• 0:00 - Welcome back/intros.
• 1:55 - How Alex approaches game design.
• 5:38 - VR games as fitness tools.
• 7:31 - Player fatigue and session playtime.
• 13:41 - Designing gameplay loops around fatigue.
• 14:50 - Survios "must-haves" when designing for VR.
• 20:33 - What Survios considers before production.
• 22:27 - Flat screen games vs VR.
• 29:45 - Lessons Survios has learned.
• 33:31 - Survios' standards with VR design.
• 40:51 - Survios' testing process.
• 45:29 - Collaboration between designers and engineers.
• 53:06 - Survios' "must-have" tools.
• 1:05:20 - Best practices for architecting systems in Unreal Engine.
• 1:27:32 - Shift from blueprints to next steps.
• 1:33:12 - Alex's thoughts on Nanite/Lumen.
• 1:38:32 - Mistakes made and lessons learned.
• 1:44:28 - Lightning Round