On January 31st, the Waltz of the Wizard (LEGACY DEMO) will be delisted on Steam. The experience will remain available to anyone who had added the app to their Steam library. The content in this original demo for Waltz will continue to be offered in the full version of Waltz of the Wizard, which has multiple times more content - voice interaction, gestures, many more spells, simulated magic system, upgraded graphics, deeper character interactions, combat, story and more.

The legacy demo was the first version of Waltz of the Wizard, released in 2016 as a prototype to showcase the power of room-scale VR and, remarkably, it remained the highest rated VR app on Steam from 2017-2020. At the time, experiences for roomscale and natural hand interactions were rare and considered an odd spectacle that would ‘never work’ as a commercial venture (hahaha). For us, Waltz was another step towards our vision of VR’s potential to simulate a believable reality — where everything is interactive and characters act alive.

Since the original release, VR has grown immensely and we are proud of the role that Waltz of the Wizard has played in its inception. With the support of all of you we have continued to push our vision forward for believable reality experiences in the full version of Waltz of the Wizard. We are so grateful and amazed by the reception since its release—our fans and the VR community have been vital throughout the years in motivating us to take chances and keep innovating in VR content design. (We are still in times when any innovation is incredibly risky—let alone when doing it on multiple fronts simultaneously! But we're far from done…).

We have been working hard expanding the full edition of Waltz of the Wizard which includes all features and content from the Waltz legacy demo and much more. There’s hours of gameplay we’ve delivered in frequent free updates, introducing pioneering features driven by the latest in VR technologies such as Index finger-tracking, voice interaction, full-body gestures, character interaction, gesture recognition and much more.

We're deeply thankful and humbled by the community response to the original release of Waltz of the Wizard and hope many memories will remain — and that the full version will continue to inspire broad audiences to see the potential of the medium. With your continued support, we are thrilled to keep pushing the boundaries of what is possible and attempt to forge experiences unlike any that past mediums have been capable of.

- The Aldin Team

Greetings! Change the World, is now live and available to all Waltz of the Wizard:Natural Magic 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.
- The Aldin Team

Greetings wizards!
We're making Waltz of the Wizard (Legacy Demo) free of ads as of today. We made the original Waltz of the Wizard demo at a time when experiences for room-scale and natural hand interactions were still rare, and when we made the full version of Waltz of the Wizard (which has grown immensely and more coming!) we wanted to raise attention that it existed. Now that we have, the original Legacy version will remain up for free in its original form so that people have a good demo for friends and family to showcase VR’s potential to simulate the experience of being in a reality. Please remember that this is a legacy version of Waltz of the Wizard and was originally created in 2016, as a prototype to showcase the power of room-scale VR.

We highly recommend all Waltz fans to check out our full product, Waltz of the Wizard: Natural Magic, which is in active development, includes hours of content, receives frequent free updates, showcases the latest in VR technologies such as hand-tracking, voice interaction, full-body gestures and recently won the "Best Updated Game" category in UploadVR’s Best Of 2021 Awards.

Today is the day. Waltz of the Wizard:Natural Magic has now been updated with our first major expansion - Natural Magic. Now live on Steam!





This is the largest production in our long history. We founded Aldin in 2013 to create believable reality experiences — worlds that are truly designed around the concept of you physically being present in them, as if they are reality. We are proud to have come so far, and we can still hardly believe that we have the privilege to help pioneer this amazing new medium.



This is in no small part thanks to the wonderful VR community of early adopters and users of Trial of the Rift Drifter, Asunder and lastly Waltz of the Wizard, who have supported us throughout the years. This is why we are giving Natural Magic to all our existing users free of charge, while the base price of Waltz of the Wizard will now increase from $9.99 to $19.99 to reflect the scope and breadth of content we are adding.



In Natural Magic, we pushed the limits of what is possible with current VR hardware (and ourselves as developers). Of the many new-to-VR features we are shipping today, here are few to mention; New magic physics engine which uses natural user motions and mic input to simulate magic and make it feel real, using an advanced particle based approach. This allows us to deliver never-before seen dynamics in interactions between the user’s presence, magic particles and the virtual world, to deliver an extremely diverse simulation of fun situations and events to enjoy over and over again.



This is just the first step in exploring the entirely new territory of simulated magic and we are very excited to keep developing it with more advanced gestures, interactions and overall functionality. We’re also introducing new advanced physical characters that can react believably in boundless number of ways to various situations and combat scenarios. Lastly we’ve created a new procedural based world-building system with believable reflective environmental lighting and immense flexibility going forward. All of these features and many more will be expanded on in upcoming updates.



We truly hope you find Natural Magic continues to deliver on making fantasy feel like reality—and we look forward to hearing from you. There are a ton of things in Natural Magic, including the natural magic system itself, and we’re sure you’ll both find a lot that could be better as well dream up countless ideas on how it can expand going forward. This is just the beginning and the future is bright—thank you all for the journey to date.

- The Aldin Team

Hey everyone! We are beyond exited to announce Waltz of the Wizard: Natural Magic expansion is coming in invite-only beta this Holiday season.

Natural Magic is the first full expansion for Waltz of the Wizard:Extended Edition, adding new locations and new form of magic for users to control. Visit the new castle courtyard and find the mysterious ritual circle to travel to new worlds - starting with the labyrinth. Adventurous wizards will explore its depths to recover forbidden knowledge and artifacts of the Observers, a race of interdimensional beings that have learned to harness magical energies to power strange gadgets and modify the fabric of space and time.

• Expanded activities & replayability — As a wizard you will master your skills in wizardry and explore new worlds to recover forbidden knowledge, encounter curious creatures, collect artifacts and face surprising challenges.
  
• New magic system — Magic flows through the world like a natural force and is connected to other natural forces like gravity and wind. Your natural gestures control those energies, making magic feel and work more as if it’s real. Only the most skillful wizards will fully unleash their mystical powers.
  
• Castle courtyard — The courtyard expands the castle where you’ll learn to harness magical energies, meet curious creatures and find the mysterious ritual circle to transport to new areas.
  
• Procedural world — Natural Magic introduces Aldin’s first procedurally generated world; a labyrinth that lives between dimensions, home to mysterious artifacts and prison to the most mischievous beings in the universe.
  
• Achievements & challenges — Challenges and new achievements let you compare your skills to other wizards in the community.

Invite-only Beta - Holiday 2020.
Join our Discord community for a chance to participate. https://discord.com/invite/cxHB5zF

Launch - Q1 2021.
Available on Oculus Quest/Quest 2 and SteamVR.

Waltz of the Wizard website - http://aldin.io/waltzofthewizard

- The Aldin team

Good day fellow Wizards!
We are excited to release the Scavenger Hunt update to Waltz of the Wizard: Extended Edition on PC that includes brand new content, performance improvements and revamped effects. The core of it includes a scavenger hunt where you trace clues and use physical movements to unlock more secrets, an in-world gramophone with music, over 40 new items and more!

We have been thrilled with the reception to the Extended Edition of Waltz of the Wizard. Over the past year, in addition to regularly updating Waltz and porting it to all major platforms, we’ve been working on new technologies and content prototypes for high degrees of natural interaction in VR. Some of those experiments have helped us understand what isn’t yet possible, while others have proven what is. First and foremost it’s given us an ability to take our VR content to the next level.



Because of your response and support of the Extended Edition, we’re excited to share that we have big plans this year for Waltz of the Wizard. We are currently working on expansions that will bring Waltz of the Wizard into deeper realms with more advanced levels of magic and believable reality simulation. The expansions will alter the nature of the experience to the better, but Aldin fans will of course find the same atmosphere and dark humor they’ve come to love, as well as the advanced principles of believable reality design we’ve developed over the years. A big goal for us in Waltz of the Wizard going forward is simulation of magical forces and creating a believable virtual reality where magic is real.

We’ll have more to share in the very near future and we encourage all to join our new Discord community.

https://discord.gg/cxHB5zF

We believe VR offers exceptional ways to bring computing to a more accessible stage with standalone VR, yet we also believe that PC offers the greatest potential for pioneering designs and engaging content for advanced enthusiasts of the medium. Simulation fidelity matters a lot for believable virtual realities and is particularly relevant to us, since Aldin has always been dedicated to innovation and pushing VR towards believable experience of being in an alternate reality. We’ve just barely started seeing what PC VR is capable of and are super excited to take part in continued innovation for greater presence & immersion.

Overall, we’ve spent heaps of effort taking what we’ve learnt developing for Oculus Quest and brought those improvements to PC. Waltz should now run on a broader range of low-end hardware, and on high-end gaming PC’s at higher fidelity than ever before.

Improved visual effects, particles and real-time lighting
Waltz has received big upgrades to particle effects and real-time lighting, giving the world more believable details and more satisfying effects for magic. In addition to real-time lights for things like explosions, you’ll find new layers of reactive particle effects.



Those who follow us will know that we focus heavily on presence and immersion and an important part of that is high refresh rates and believable reaction times. VR is still pretty far from the timescale of reality, but we’re getting closer! Most Valve Index users can now run Waltz of the Wizard natively at 144hz for a stronger perceptual illusion of reality. This is, of course, in addition to the native support of natural hand interactions with Index controllers.



The new graphical options in the settings menu are simplified for low, medium and high — and the lowest setting should enable 144hz for a big portion of low-end hardware. In our internal testing we have run Waltz natively at 144hz on the highest graphical setting on a GTX970 GPU and i7-4790 CPU (~67% resolution in SteamVR). We’d love feedback on this so let us know what you think and what hardware you use to run Waltz at 144hz.

With the optimizations we’ve made Waltz of the Wizard should now be able to run on an even broader range of hardware at higher fidelity. For example, although this remains untested, even recent MacBooks should be able to run Waltz of the Wizard using dual-boot with Windows. We would love to hear if you try it on any type of laptop. While the early days of consumer VR weren’t very laptop friendly, we think the optimizations developers have made in recent years along with simplified setup with things like Oculus Quest and Link are making it a more viable option for a certain group of users.

Waltz of the Wizard: Extended Edition is now available for Oculus Quest! We can’t wait to see Waltz bring delight and introduce countless new people to the wonders of VR!

We are excited to announce that Waltz of the Wizard is coming to Oculus Quest on December 5th, 2019!


Since its original release we’ve been honored to see Waltz of the Wizard introduce hundreds of thousands of people to virtual reality. The original remains the highest rated VR app on Steam and the Extended Edition has let us expand content and bring it to more platforms. Thank you all for the wonderful reviews and support!

- The Aldin team

Today we are excited to announce Waltz of the Wizard: Extended Edition! The Extended Edition expands on what made the original a great experience for showcasing the power of virtual reality to friends and family, adding new spells, activities, interactive items and secrets! There are also a number of additional improvements that help keep the experience great for new VR users and fun for more experienced ones. Head on over to the Extended Edition Store Page and scroll down for an overview of key new features.



As we work towards our next product (keep an eye out for upcoming announcements!), we want to keep maintaining Waltz of the Wizard as a fun showcase of the potential of virtual reality - but we can’t commit more resources than we already have on a free version of Waltz. The Extended Edition is a way for us to continue providing proper support and updates to Waltz of the Wizard, while helping fuel development of new products. The original version of Waltz of the Wizard will remain free in the foreseeable future, but content updates will focus on the Extended Edition.

We made Waltz at a time when experiences for roomscale and natural hand interactions were still rare, following our vision of VR’s potential to simulate reality. It features a fully interactive and diverse environment designed for natural interaction, along with intuitively controlled magic that extends reality to produce sensations we could never have in real life. We are so grateful and amazed by the reception since its release and hope for Waltz to continue spreading VR joy across the globe. Our fans and the VR community have been vital throughout the years in motivating us to take chances and keep innovating in VR content design, at times when innovation is risky.

To the many that have asked for ways to support us — thank you! Waltz of the Wizard: Extended Edition is now one way you can! Our vision for VR is content designed to present a believable illusion of a real-life experience, where presence and immersion are at the heart of design choices. The way towards those experiences is through broad and continued innovation in game design, character- and world interaction systems, production techniques and software development tools. Even now, years after we began this VR journey, we feel the industry has just barely begun tapping into the true potential of VR.

We remain committed to pushing the boundaries of what virtual reality can be and creating experiences that wouldn’t be possible in any other medium. Community support has always been absolutely vital in helping us accomplish that!

- The Aldin team

It's Waltz of the Wizard's second anniversary today! 😮 We can't believe it's been two years, feels like yesterday. Thank you for playing and for all the wonderful reviews! 🎉 🎂

- The Aldin team