Greetings Wizards! We're happy to announce that Waltz of the Wizard is now Steam Deck Verified!

The positive response to the Screen Mode on PC inspired us to take things a step further. We've worked hard to deliver a polished and seamless screen and controller experience, specially optimized for Steam Deck and look forward for Deck users to dive in and enjoy the magic.

Following this is also a Patch update with multiple bug fix & improvements for VR and Screen Modes.

We hope everyone can enjoy a great holiday and we look forward to sharing more news next year!

We'll leave you with a new Screen Mode gameplay trailer.

- The Aldin Team

• Igor's robotic creation can now be posed!
• You can now add hats, glasses and other wearables to Igor's robot
• Music Tower in Courtyard now automatically turns on when you enter
• Increased texture resolution of some explosive effects in the Fortress
• Added camera shakes and footstep when Giant in Screen Mode

• Fixed crash on Steam Deck
• Added more alternative answers for riddles
• Fixed realtime lights not being visible on some surface in Fortress
• You can no longer fall down in Elevated when in Smooth Movement in VR
• Grimoire pages are now non-destructible
• Fixed being able to get stuck crouching when holding specific objects (such as Crossbow) in Screen-Mode
• Fixed some NM powers being castable twice in succession in Screen Mode (thanks Magni!)
• Fixed some buttons in Infinity Fortress not being interactable in Screen Mode
• Fixed various issues in final scene after finishing the Fortress
• Fixed some slopes in the Fortress being hard to walk in Screen Mode
• Fixed Puppetered objects sometimes shifting sideways when released
• Fixed voice commands like "Give me A fireball" not working
• Fixed NM powers not functioning as expected when big/small in Screen Mode
• Fixed issue with NM gather gesture detection when small in VR

Seasons greetings wizards! We've seen Waltz grow like never before this year and have been amazed by the reception from our old and new users. Thank you, we are humbled!

It is that magical time of year again and we are thrilled to announce yet another free update to Waltz of the Wizard this year available right now! Riddles, Ramblings and Robots includes a horde of new features and maybe a few bits in the spirit of the season…

Skully is more alive than ever now, adding more than 700 new voice lines and a host of new reactions including a totally new riddle game, questions & answers, humms, whistles with a dash of some shower thoughts - and the update includes an all new Screen Mode! Solving the riddles may (or may not) include some special rewards… And a secret revealed for those who finish!

The voice ring (also known as Aldin's Reality Ring) is also no longer required for chatting with Skully, he's now ready to chat with you from the moment you step into your tower! Just make sure you retrieve the ring to enrich your voice with magical powers.

Now what is that mysterious robot? Well, we also have something that some might find surprising… Waltz is now fully playable on a screen without VR - where you can embody this robotic puppet! It has long been our wish that more people had a chance to experience Waltz of the Wizard and, after so many of you expressed the desire to do so, it's finally possible.

You will now see a new launch option for Waltz in Steam.

Even though Waltz is and will remain VR-first design, we are very excited bring Waltz to an even wider audience and hope you will enjoy the freedom to choose how to play! The screen mode is available to all of our Steam and Meta users that have a PC. (We're looking into Steam Deck and PS5 support but nothing to confirm at the moment!). We'd like to note that all feedback on this mode is most welcome.

We've made big strides to enable the non-VR mode of Waltz to include many interesting options to make the experience more interactive and fun. This includes a brand new Emote radial menu where you can select which action you'd like to perform by default. Natural magic is also now accessible via radial-menu for quick power selection in the non-VR mode.

Oh and one last thing, we're happy to tease that another update is coming early next year that will introduce an entirely new feel and companionship in the Fortress! More on that soon.

• 🧙🏻‍♂️ Test your Waltz knowledge by asking Skully "Give me a riddle"
  
• 🥱 When all seems idle, Skully still might utter some peculiar showerthoughts.
  
• 🥴 Be careful not to hit Skully too hard, his eyes can go askew!
  
• 🫣 Play hide and seek with Skully just by asking him "Can we play hide and seek?"
  
• 🔮 Skully shares some new insights into his past via the old memory orbs, both before and after you teleport to those memories, depending on what you do.
  
• 🎃 Greet Skully with "Happy Halloween" for a seasonal surprise!
  
• 🐀 Skully can get quite upset if you do anything harmful to the rat.
  
• 😳 Don't stare too long at Skully.
  
• 🤾 The moment when you are about to throw Skully will not make him happy. Same goes for the moment you are about to throw something at him.
  
• 🪶 For a giggle, tickle, tickle Skully with his featherpen.
  
• 💔 Be a little more careful while working the tower, some things are more precious to Skully than others if they break.
  
• 🎺 The trumpet sound can ring in Skully's ears.
  
• 👂The earpiece makes Skully react differently to loud sounds.
  
• 💀 Skully might share some more details if you bring him around the Tower.

Full list of new features can be found here: Riddles, Ramblings and Robots Blog Post[medium.com]

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.

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[medium.com]

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.
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.
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.
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.
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 [medium.com]and release notes can be found on our Discord[discord.com].

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.

• Powers to Change the World
  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.
  
• SteamVR/PC Specific 
  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!
• Fortress
   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.
• Infinite Mode 
  The Fortress has a new mode that lets you generate an infinite number of new random levels.
• Enemies
   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!
• Voice Suggestions 
  Use "What can I say" for voice suggestions to learn all the huge variety of voice commands.
  
• Tower Spells 
  All tower spells can be activated everywhere with voice.
  
• Sticker Board
   A new sticker-board keeps track of the many things you can experience.
  
• Wards 
  Progress through four new magical wards to unlock all parts of the experience.
  
• Teleport anywhere, anytime
   Instantly teleport to all parts of the Waltz world using the voice command like "Take me to the Trainstop"
  
• Courtyard
   Expanded and redesigned with new activities and secrets.
  
• … and lots and lots of bug fixes and improvements.

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.[medium.com]
- The Aldin Team

• Added menu item for Aldin Newsletter

• 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

Voice interaction is now available as an update for Waltz of the Wizard, the first VR app to use Meta’s new Voice SDK. This unique update makes it possible to speak to the beloved skull assistant character and use your voice and gestures to shape the world, as if by magic. Voice features are available on both Quest and PC VR headsets (SteamVR) and work internationally (English-only support for spoken language).

The update adds over 200 new character voice lines and magic commands, introducing a broad range of innovative capabilities that haven’t been possible before in consumer software. Going beyond pure voice features, Aldin’s multimodal interaction systems unlock entirely new VR/AR capabilities that let you use voice, hands and gestures all together to perform actions.

Voice and extended multimodal interaction is an important part of Aldin’s vision for natural VR/AR interfaces and believable reality experiences, which the company has been exploring since 2013. Believable reality experiences in this sense refer to content that aims to feel like real-life experiences in alternate realities— where we act like we do in reality and the world reacts believably to our presence. Voice and multimodal interaction is an important part of making that possible, opening powerful new ways to make VR feel more real and magical to use.

We will be sharing more in-depth information about the voice interaction update soon on the Aldin blog, offering greater insights into its many aspects and the parts involved in next-generation VR/AR content.