Dean Hall is making a SteamVR game in addition to Ion

Dean Hall, the creator of DayZ, has a second game in development in addition to the newly unveiled science fiction title Ion, Eurogamer reports. The news comes on the heels of a challenging interview last night at the PC Gaming Show where Dean Hall adamantly defended his decision to sell DayZ, a game still in early access, to Bohemia Interactive and found his own studio.

It turns out that Hall's new development team based in New Zealand, called RocketWerkz, isn't actually working on Ion at all. They're actually making a game for SteamVR, Valve's in-development room-scale virtual reality system.

"[Valve's] Chet Faliszek was like a huge mentor to me," Hall told Gamasutra. "He contacted me very early on in DayZ's development and he's been all through everything — he's been a huge mentor."

Hall shared no details on the SteamVR project, other than to say it was a much simpler game compared to Ion, a game being developed in partnership with a tech company called Improbable.

From Improbable's website:

Improbable is developing an operating environment that makes building simulated worlds possible. Worlds which can be run in real time, simulating the behaviours and interactions of millions of entities. Spaces with their own rules and properties that a multitude of people can simultaneously change, explore and visualise in as many different ways as developers can imagine.

Simulated worlds provide unique insight to those asking questions of complex systems. As well as enabling completely new experiences in gaming, simulated worlds can solve significant problems in areas as diverse as defence, energy, city efficiency, health, and finance.

The technology seems like a good match for Hall's loose description for Ion, a sprawling third-person multiplayer game about space exploration. You can see the teaser trailer for that game below.