Nellyvision Ltd is a software development and digital agency based in Brighton. As well as developing and publishing our own and external client's games and applications we often work on solving difficult problems, producing proof of concepts, back end systems and tools.
We formed after the Second Life makers Linden Lab closed down in the UK in 2010. Two games industry veterans, Elaine Green and Gabriel Lee, set out with the intention of straddling the difficult area between ‘media’ and games. Since then we’ve worked with many very talented people and created some wonderful, complex and clever things for clients all over the world.
Recently we've moved mostly back into the games sector, converting a mixture of VR and flatscreen games for clients as well as consulting and coaching their teams on the move to the Console market and all that entails. We support a wide varienty of VR headsets and the three major Consoles, as well as smaller devices like the Playdate and occasioanlly mobile. For more details click on the images below to see what we provided in each case.
Some of the many amazing things we’ve previously made for amazing people include:
Augmented Reality for SIGGRAPH Chair Rebecca Strzelec, CUDA and maths madness with point clouds for Digicave, Iris Connect’s very successful multi camera video app and iOS news casting for the masses for NewsFlare, Automated driving simulation to teach AIs, real driving simulation to teach people, city traffic simulation and management to help with mobility and help the people and AI’s drive together nicely, pollution and energy saving simulation so they stay clean, disaster recovery and first response, telecoms infrastructure planning, digital twin, health care, big data, tiktok a like full stack, live video streaming, Open Banking and web finance and web security!
This is all in addition to our wealth of knowledge and experience in all areas of games development. We have worked on pretty much all platforms from the ZX Spectrum and Amiga through to the latest XBox, Switch, PS5 and PSVR2. We also have experience on a wide variety of VR headsets, and in all major game engines as well as native development.
Ancient Dungeons is a great Indie VR title, created by Eric Thullen.
In 2023 we helped Eric with the Sony publishing and backend process for the PS5 release. Following on from that he asked us to help out in late 2024 and we ported the Multiplayer over from Quest and updated the PS5 version with all the great stuff now in the Meta, Steam and Pico versions. This new shiny version should be live on the PS5 store in the next few weeks.
It makes a great multiplayer VR game and we had a lot of fun developing and testing!
Strange Moon Digital (then Lyra Lark) showed off an eary version of Rhythm of the Gods at Develop: Brighton, they were at Norwich University together and this was their final year project. We saw the game and were extremely impressed, we approached them then and there and asked if they wanted to work with us to bring the game to Switch and Playstation, and they said yes! We ported the game (which was UE4) to PS4, Switch and XBox and it's been very well received.
We recently ported it to PS5 (and UE5) and added some extra polish for a Christmas 2024 re-release.
Deathtrap Dungeon was originally developed by Branching Narrative. Back in 2020 we talked to them about creating a 3DS version (a fun technical challenge given the 5 hours of video) and when that fizzled out, a victim of Nintendo's ending of the 3DS, they asked us to make and publish a Switch version for them. This has never quite got to the point of release and the Switch market no longer warrants the remaining budget needed, it was always going to be a labour of love and as such it got pushed aside by projects that would pay the rent!
Last year we had the budget available and decided that a PS5 version would go down well. We ported the game to UE5 (the original is html5) and we launched it at the Fighting Fantasy Fest at the start of September 2024. The conversion has a lot more polish than the original (which is still available on Steam for PC) and we were very pleased with the results. The launch went very well, lots of great feedback from dedicated fans of the series and newcomers alike.
We are in preproduction on a new Fighting Fantasy game, based on the 1980's book City of Thieves. This will be shooting in the summer for an Autumn release, with the author Sir Ian Livingstone CBE taking the lead on camera. This promises to be an excellent production!
Infinite Inside is a game by Maze Theory; we created the hand tracking for the Pico, the PS5 specific platform code and systems for the PS5. We also carried out QA for the Pico hand tracking, and TRC QA specifically for the PS5; as well as standing in to handle release management on the Quest when the team didn't have the resources internally.
We were working closely with Maze Theory on Doctor Who: The Edge of Time at the start of 2024 and as that came to a close they asked us to employ our expertise with the PS5 to get Infinite Inside ready to go aswell. After that we were brought in again to create the hand tracking systems and integrate them on the Pico version of the game.
There are always tight budgets and short timescales on this kind of work and the Pico work was even more of a stretch than usual: just 10 days of madness to get the update ready for release alongside the Quest.
At the end of 2022 we were asked by Maze Theory to convert their new Quest title Peaky Blinders: A King's Ransom to the Pico4 headset, ready for the launch in April 2023.
Having completed the Pico version and helped out on the Quest version we were in a great position to port it further and Maze Theory asked us to port the game to Steam, the HTC Vive XR Elite and the PSVR2 (PS5).
Time pressure was extremely high on these versions, with the PS5 version being particularly hard to squeeze into the time we were given. However, everything went according to plan and we were proud of the results. For the PS5 and Steam versions we worked closely with the Maze Theory art team to push up the quality bar considerably.
After release, and into 2024, we worked on bringing the updates from the Quest version to the PS5 and Steam as well as making some extra improvements to the PS5 version.
In addition to the port for the Pico we created a Chinese release version with the cultural and legal changes needed for that region. We usually work with the end platforms directly when working on porting projects, so this was an interesting and enlightening process as the original title has quite a few political and social things which didn't pass the stringent audit on the Chinese side.
We also handled most of the QA for the PS5 version, and TRC checking, then worked closely with the Indian QA team once they came onboard toward the end of the project.
G: The highlight for me personally was seeing the Pico version in the Argos catalogue as one of the free titles given away with the Pico4. After nearly a year of crunch it's little things like that that cheer you up!
E: The bit I'm most proud of is getting the fingers to work correctly on the Index Controllers for the Steam version, and that it was noticed by the community!
We were first asked to create a Pico3 version of the Maze Theory game Dr Who: The Edge of Time in 2022. We had just shipped Dr Who: The Lonely Assasins on the three major consoles, and they needed someone who could take on quite a tough legacy conversion project. The original project had been lost and only some fairly fragmented backups were available. After some detective work the art and audio were eventually recovered intact but the VR technology was too outdated to run. Most of that had to be scrapped and rewritten, and all the game logic reworked to fit. All in all it was a tough cookie.
Due to ongoing complications with the availability of assets and outdated tech the project ran very close to the deadline, but it got there in time and miraculously passed Pico certification on the first run - all working and looking great!
The project came back to life a year later for PS5. More ancient backups had been found and we managed to recover the last original PS4 (PSVR1) version. This helped a lot, although all the same rewrites had to take place again things always go faster the second time around!
The PS5 version went on hold due to publisher negotiations, and we picked it back up once Peaky Blinders: The King's Ransom was complete, there were further delays but it finally came out on PSVR2 in April 2024.
We also handled most of the QA for this inhouse, and used our expertise with the Sony TRC's to get it through quickly.
It's still a good VR title, and enjoyable for fans and non-fans alike.
We were approached by Labrador Studios to help them convert their upcoming Steam game Live By the Sword: Tactics to XBox and Playstation in 2022. It's a turnbased Multiplayer game, and Labrador were keen on cross play with the Steam version.
The development went smoothly and the game came out on XBox supporting full cross play with Steam. It's a fun strategy game and was good to work on.
Following the XBox version we started on the PS5 conversion; that fell afoul of publishers and budget but might well be ressurected one day.
We also handled the QA for the XBox version and
Mia's Christmas 2 was developed in house, based on the first game with lots of embellishments. The game uses our legacy engine Orter. Up to four players can play with drop in multiplayer. The game is deceptive, its actually a feindishly difficult procedural puzzler, a great ending to our Mia's game series.
Magma was developed over the period of a year in the gaps between other projects, its an homage to the 16bit era. Completely procedurally generated levels and a good difficulty curve make it feel old school while continually changing and providing new challenges.
G: This was the game I would have made on the Amiga in the early 90's had it been several hundred times more powerful. It was immensely good fun to write and I'm still very happy with the results, brilliant fun!
Doctor Who: The Lonely Assassins was our first project for Maze Theory. The game is by Kaigan Games and they had written most of a Switch port from the original mobile 'found phone' game. We were asked to do conversions to PS4 and XBoxOne, and add some polish to make them feel good on console. These we did, tailoring the experience as much as we could in the time to make it a better experience on console.
Having finished the XBoxOne and PS4 releases we offered to take the Switch and re-work the whole game to work in tate mode, while finishing the development and addressing all the remaining issues.
We worked closely with the Maze Theory internal QA on this, and handled the Sony TRC and Microsoft Cert QA to ensure it would pass.
Ths game is a nice take on the genre and it was interesting working to make the UX work nicely on each platform.
Having finished a serious project (Actimeme, a video sharing app and full stack development) we needed a break and decided to make something simple and fun.
So Mia's Christmas was born, our slightly tounge in cheek take on a Christmas match game, as usual with our titles this ended up being a fairly hard puzzle game! We had some lovely feedback from people who've enjoyed the game and we're still both very proud of it.
The Switch version was released the following year, the ideas for that overflowed somewhat became Mia's Christmas 2!
Mia's Picnic came about largely due to the state of the industry (and world) as Covid closed everything down. We'd started various prototypes, and also toyed with a 3DS and Switch conversion of Deathtrap Dungeon, but the little match game that became Mia's Picnic was the most fun, the old school difficulty and manicness had us playing for hours; it might be a match game, but it's far from Casual!
The art was created by Elaine 'IRL', with beautuiful little scenes of curled textured paper and card and masses of love and attention to detail. Gabriel handled the code and gameplay, and the Music was written for us when we created the video game version of About Time for Circa Circa here in Brighton.
Wordherd was our effort to make something new that we enjoyed playing and our kids could enjoy too; they were a little young for the violent staples of most console videogame culture!
Started in 2019 it was a fairly rapid development, initially using Love2d as a super simple way to prototype, then taking our own engine which we'd been maintaining for 9 years at that point, and adding support for the consoles we wanted to hit.
The first was Switch, its a great little device and back then it was a very exciting scene. Then came PS4, and finally 3DS - something we'd both wanted to develop on for a long time, but never had the bandwidth.
The game still makes me proud, even with its Kenney inspired art and mad story, and we still get nice comments from people playing it occasionally - which is amazing considering how long its been out there.
G: Having both come from the world of console development, and worked as Nellyvision on some big titles like World Zumba Party for other people we decided it was time we bit the bullet and started working on our own games. It's a huge leap of faith and we should have done it years before. Instead, we'd been distracted by the mobile market, and the great little games we created there would have got the attention they deserved on console or a handheld!
As a side project I recently created a web version of the 3DS Sku, when I get some time I'll put it up on here for anyone to play.
Nellyvision Ltd is an independent software development company based in Brighton in the UK.
Covering all platforms we produce our own projects as well as working in both the public and private sector with local, national, and international companies to create business, educational and gaming applications.