Welcome to Tectastic, where we navigate the intersection of technology and business, uncovering innovations that redefine our world. JV Halyard, welcome to its techtastic. It is lovely to have you here. It is my pleasure. Thank you very much for having me on. Appreciate it. So JV, you're the author of the Warminster series of books, and a lot of these are being made into video games. Yeah. So the war, Mr. Sagas, a four book series.
And for those fans of the Fantasy Adventure John Rhodes, it's what is known as a subgenre's epic fantasy and dark fantasy. So if you think about what Lord of the Rings is epic fantasy and Game of Thrones being dark fantasy, where the good guys don't always win, that's the run which I write. And, I'd like to see an intellectual property to a video game company that's making them both an augmented reality and a virtual reality game that gets released in 2025.
Wow. So the virtual reality, augmented reality piece is really interesting as it's a emerging technology that is getting a lot of attention, of course. And I, I happen to be a a sci fi fantasy fan. I read quite a bit and, dark fantasy would be very, very much up my alley as well as the VR game. I I originally went to school a long time ago. The degree is in how humans and technology will interface going into the future. And I don't mean, like UX. This was before the web.
And so we were talking about what comes next robotics and, you know, computers and all that and what Hammer. And wearables were always part of that world.
And so VR augmented reality as a gateway to that, are a really interesting concept and putting it into a game that's, that, you know, whether it's an existing world is touching on a whole bunch of my favorite topics in this space because I think the opportunity to blur the lines between the world that we live in and the the fantasy worlds that we escape to in gaming or in novels is never been more approachable and that we've got a lot of opportunity to do
that, but it's getting stuck in these silos where I'm either watching the show. I'm reading the book. I'm listening to an audio version of the book or I'm playing the game, but they don't really relate to each other. And that opportunity for that to happen and to blur that a little bit, is really fascinating. Yeah. I think that you you hit the nail on the head. I mean, it it is a nascent industry. And therefore, the technologies, you know, they haven't been married up for long yet.
And, you know, when you get a good story, whether something you see in a movie or you read in a book or you play in a video game, it's often translatable into varying media. So, again, my case going from book to video game of book to graphic novel or in this case book to, you know, AR VR, you have a chance to translate your story and your art into that format, But you're right. It's something is always lost in the beginning here too.
Part of it is, as my art takes a different form, I can take three pages to describe a scene But in a comic book, you've got one panel or 6 panels, right, with no words, you know, and as an epic fantasy author whose books average a 150,000 words, I now have 6 to put in that panel. Right? So, like, there's different things that you'd have to sacrifice as part of that.
And I also think that the adolescents that the AR VR community is seeing, they're they're kind of staggering through, right, it it has to grow and mature a little bit. And as a result, we've seen some starting stops. You know, I think the most famous AR platform that's that's really worked out well. And what we've seen now, ubiquitous sleep in the last 6 or 7 years is Pokemon Go. People play that on their phone.
I mean, technically, I guess a wearable and many respects you're you're carrying your phone with me, it's not the VR goggles, but because of the clunkiness of the goggles, you don't see that yet. But you look even at the movies like Ready player 1 or the books like Ready player 1, you see people in the future wearing goggles all the time. And and I think the Google movement of some of the stuff we expect to see from, you know, Apple, there's going to be an analysis.
We just have to understand we're gonna be working through it. And so the connectivity and the flow and the internet things may not be there for that just yet, but we're all gonna get through it and prosumers of that. People that are they're gonna go out there and buy the greatest thing because they wanna be on the cutting edge are gonna be those that lead us there. We're gonna know from them, from their customer experience is what they like and what they don't like.
And so in my game, exciting for me is the next step in consumerism. Like, I we've we've been approached by folks that want to sponsor the game. So when you slay the drag and and your character recovers the dragon's forward.
Not only are you leveling up in the game, but when you open that treasure chest, you have stuff that you can redeem in real life you'll have an e coupon that will take you and give it to your buy 1, get 1 in a subway or a 50% off of a Starbucks or whoever the sponsor may end up being. And so not only are you leveling up in the game, but you're also getting real life stuff that you can use and trade and potentially sell. And I think all that stuff is fun, but it's just the beginning stages of it.
So we never know. And I think we've seen that over the years from tech mobile to Madden to where we are today. You know, some of the stuff, you know, we're with an integrated music and sound that, you know, the the art and how they've been able to capture famous people actors and actresses in movies, you know, or, you know, TV shows are now, you're seeing them up here in video games, for the first time.
We're getting a lot of that, and that's a much more mature space than what, you know, we're delving into. And I it's an exciting time for me to help storyboard it and look at it from outside in, looking through a fishbowl watching these guys fight through taking my story and putting in something that would be fun in the video game where anybody make it any different direction. Yeah. Like, as an author, I'm forcing you to follow my story arc. So you have to read what I write.
You know, in a video game, you could kill the hero and become the villain as opposed to helping the hero destroy the villain. So a lot of different ways he can go with that. The the closest analogy to it in the the book world would be like to choose your own adventures because the people are gonna go down the wrong path, but it's infinite in its variety and potential to to go off the script. Yeah. And and the choose your own adventure books have been around since I was a kid.
You know, when you play dungeons and dragons, they would even have a short form of those and you know, and you would eventually figure out the way that the author wanted you to go, but it was like a a single person role playing game. And you can do a lot of that you know, when you have single point of view shooters and stuff like that or with players, you know, in video games these days. And I think that's, like I said before, it's a it's a nascent tech and we're all kind of learning as we go.
And I think people understand that, so there's a lot more forgiving when it comes to that. And they just wanna try something new, something they haven't seen something they can play with, But you're right. In in books, it's really hard to do that. I can't have a choose your own adventure all the time, and this is like my adventure, and I'm forcing you to live with them. It's fascinating because I've got a friend who's a fairly famous author, and several of his books were made into movies.
And I was talking to him about that experience because when you're writing a book, you're crafting a very careful narrative. And when it gets translated into a movie, it's being handed off to other people that now are going to play up the they care about and diminish the parts that they don't. And so the story ends up changing the narrative changes a bit. And, in particular, one of his books was pretty drastically redone in the movie that came out.
And I asked him, I'm like, what's that like as an author to see your work go out into the world and become something different And I loved his response. It's like having a child, and you put all your hopes and dreams into them and what you expect them to be. But once they get out into the world, they become their own thing. It doesn't mean you're less proud of them. You're still very proud of what they've become.
And I like that, and I have to imagine that when you're creating a world in a book, or series of books, you were creating that world as part of creating the story, but it's the world that you created that becomes important for the game. And you're right on all of that. Right? You know, I think that, 1st of all, I'm not less proud of the video game we're creating even though it may differ from my book.
And I'm less proud of the graphic novel series is coming out because it just delivers the same message or almost the same message in the same way in a different way Hammer, in a in a different medium, I'm proud of the fact that the property itself is worthy of those opportunities to kind of grow if I'm now getting in front of a gamer that I would never have picked up a book or never listened to an audio book and they're playing the game, they might go out and buy it now, or vice versa.
Where, hey, you know, I'm buying this book. You know, I was at a con last summer in Raleigh, and people would come up and when I would turn my card over and tell them there was a QR code on there where they could get in and earn early play to jump into, you know, an AR VR game, they bought the books because they are Hammer. And they might not even read the books. But they think that if they read the books, there'll be clues to solve the game.
And it's true, you know, you'll you'll find that the story arcs and the character arcs and they'll figure out where to go, and that'll give them clues. It'll give them advantage in the game to read that stuff. And so there are ways to interconnect them, but you're right. I mean, I know that in my heart of hearts, the video game just by me helping with the story boarding is never gonna be the same.
They just it cannot be, you know, because you're offered an avatar that you create that's gonna take a different path than all of characters. And you might run into them. You might avoid them. You might wanna do your own thing. And so, therefore, you're living in on your own. You know, it's some living, breathing thing. It's just a new form of the art that I created and it's humbling in that respect. And like you said, it might not be exactly what I want, but that's okay.
It's kind of outgrown me at that point. So the dungeons in Dragon to me is really, really fascinating because it's always been right next to me, but never part of me. I've never played, and it's mostly because it's a time commitment that I just never like I got and doing a thousand things, and that's never been one of them.
The Gathering was always, you know, you could pull it into a a day because you could have a quick match that only lasted, you know, a few minutes, especially if you were getting really efficient with it. But I I love the DM role that happens in touch with the dragons because that's the storyteller of the person that's crafting the journey for everybody else, and that's a fascinating thing.
And to know that there's actually people that are taking that and then actually becoming authors from it is fascinating. I I did not know that was the thing that occurred. Yeah. It's been around for a while. And if you think about it, some of the folks that broke ground in have done exactly that.
So if you look back at Margaret Weisz or Tracy Hickman in the Dragon Land series or the Raven Loft stuff, that they played they were basically characters that they had played And they just memorialized those characters as part of the game, and they started writing literature about them or RNA Salvatore with the dark alternatively, you know, and that was his character. And he just played his character.
And then if people have story around it, it might not have been exactly, you know, point for point act to what his gameplay was, but he made a really exciting, and he's got 40 plus books just on this one character alone. So it's been around for a while, and that was what it was back when there wasn't video games. But now you have a chance to memorialize the battles and the same thing you did in your video game RPG. And, you know, people are doing that just the next generation of it.
There's a sub segment of the readership that enjoys fantasy adventure or sci fi stuff that also enjoys that too. And, and so It's fast growing and it's being catered to by many authors and are also players in your case, like you described being a DM. I mean, that's where I got my jobs. It was a lot of verbal storytelling for 20 years.
And then it's how do I take that verbal storytelling and turn it into something that's written, you know, best selling series because and that's exactly what I did was I took the best battle tested plots, battle tested characters, battle tested villains, because I played with them, and I, you know, baked them all into one final product, which was a series, because I knew that my players liked that. And as a DM, I enjoyed taking folks through that, those campaigns and stuff.
And so that's really where I think, I sharpen my steel doing that, and I think a lot of authors can do the same. I'm going back to the video game piece and using a new technology and some of the things that I've gone disappointing and and ones in the past, where there was a great opportunity for things to be done better. And some of the things that I've already seen with, like, the meta quest and things done well that were actually maybe even surprising that they were done well.
So, like, the Xbox Connect was a great device that could track your body and your movement, stuff like that. And if you play first person shooters in something like connect, if I duck, my character should duck, you know, if if I do certain actions, the character should do that. That was the opportunity, but that's not what they did. They used the connect in a terrible way. Like, you could build your own custom gun for sample.
And in that environment, a bunch of parts are laid out, and you kinda reach out. But you don't reach where you're looking. You reach out to where it wanted you to reach. It didn't, like, map to your visual. Hughes missed the opportunity on a bunch of fronts with the with the medic quest, some of the things that I've seen done really, really well are the incorporation of your space into the environment because you can do that whole laying out a play area and then staying within it.
But it also ran into a similar problem where you had to rotate the space around to continue walking down a hallway, for example, because your room ended and set up being able to, like, now that this is a harder technical thing to solve for, but, like, instead of it, you know, understanding the space and trying to remap the game level to match up with it. Yeah. Those are tech challenges. They're still gonna have to get over. Right? It's not, it's not smooth yet. There's not smooth sailing.
Exactly. Think that the the thing for me has always been, like, how do you blur the lines between the game and the reality in a way that doesn't feel like it pulls you out of it And so you you do have limitations within the technology. So how do you craft the story and how do you craft the game that comes from that to work within the limitations of it?
Because if if you've got a controller in your hand, for example, like you do with the meta quest, you've always got those 2 controllers, then I'm always gonna have that tactical feedback from it. I'm always gonna have that. How do I fit that into that world? How do I fit that in the story?
And if you screw that up, the game's ruined, if you get it right, the game's amazing and and you're in it, one of the reasons why, like, in the Star Wars universe ones, there's a bunch of them that are, like, lightsaber based, which makes sense because I've got a thing in my hand already. Yeah. Yeah. And you could think about that in terms of, you know, the one I would, I would use is like you two walk and there's nothing that you're walking on, you have to swing your arms. Right.
You know, that's under natural. Right? It's just not natural. It doesn't and it takes away from the rest of the game, especially if it's a shooter kind of game, or, like, it might say where I get because you're holding something that there's a sense that can pick up, but the minute you start walking with your arms and you're showing, you know, it's just gotta be something better than that, and we're not there yet. We'll get there.
You know, we might not be around to see it, but someone is gonna enjoy it down there. You know, but we're we're creeping that way. It's that part that pulls you out of it. That that so ruins the experience for me. I I was down in Vegas recently for the YouTube show at the spear. And the reason I bring that up is because they a form of augmented reality. When you go in and you're in that environment and all of a sudden, the sphere disappears and you see the rip beyond it.
And then the strip starts dissolving until it's just the desert that was there before. It is very, very hard for your brain to pick up that that's not glass you're looking through and seeing this happen because it's so high res. It's totally surrounds you. And that interaction, that type of thing, your brain goes. Yeah. That could happen. Like, I I could see this occurring.
But when they change it into being things that are out of scale and out of proportion, if it doesn't feel right, it it doesn't make you feel like you're into it. It just feels like you're dropped into it. That's Christian it pulls you out of it. And so using the technology in a way that we can naturally adapt to is really, really important. And when it comes to something like a fantasy game being dropped into it is very interesting because it is a different world. And so I don't know.
I I I spent a lot of time thinking about, like, how would I enter this world? How do I how do I get pulled into it so that it makes sense? And so that I feel natural. I don't feel like I've just been dropped into it. And I know that's not the point of, like, you creating your books and, and, working on the game, but it is something I, I do spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about. Yeah. We're getting we're not anywhere near the holodeck on Right.
Star Trek, enterprise just yet, but we're getting there close enough to play some of it. And I think that also you're seeing it now outside of game you're seeing it in therapeutics with people that are the Alzheimer's patients and stuff that they're using in helping human services. I think we're seeing it in sports where athletes are using it so there's no contact and practice, but they're, the quarterbacks able to see defenses as they're running live and stuff like that.
There's plenty of other aspects of this that will expedite the growth of this thing and the maturity of this thing. But, yeah, we're we're not there yet. It's not it's it's an imperfect science. It is, and it's a constantly evolving to your point. Which is the the fun part of being involved in it. JV, I wanna give you a chance to, like, direct people towards your books, the games that are coming out. If they wanted to find out if they wanted to read your books, where would they find them?
Yeah. I'm I'm really easy to find them. Jbhilliard.com. You'll find my books there. You'll find news on the video games and, like, the, graphic novels there as well, and, or you could find the one or saga, pretty much ubiquitous. If you're an Amazon shopper or you wanna go to dragonmoonpress.com, my publisher, or you'd like audio books, you could find it on audible or any 20 platforms that provide audiobook services. And if you wanna reach out to me, I'm really easy. Joe@jvhillier.com.
Imagine that, or you can also find me on my social channels at JV Hilliard Books. Well, JV, absolute pleasure, man. Thank you very much for having me. And that's a wrap for this episode of Tectastic. I wanna thank you personally for joining us, and we'll see you next time. Until then, keep exploring, and stay curious. Thank you for listening. If you are new here and enjoyed the content, please subscribe. It really helps us out.
And if you are a regular listener, thanks so much for your continued support. Overwhelmed by tech debt. Discover Vala AI. The solution to tech challenges with the simplicity of a click. No engineering background? No problem. Vala AI enables anyone to effortlessly tackle tech issues, freeing up your time from tech headaches. Make tech debt vanish with Vala AI, where your tech solutions are just a click away.