DevBlog Begins!

Greetings Agent.

Agents such as yourself and others across the world have been filling in our player survey and we’ve had a great response! It’s super useful for us to figure out what direction UD2 should be going in.

We’re keeping the survey open for another week, but one thing is already very clear – players’ primary platforms are HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. So with that in mind UD2 will be targeting SteamVR with explicit support for those two devices.

Although UD1 was also SteamVR, really it was only targeting Vive. Player with Rift were technically able to play, but got a non-optimal experience. Mostly because the requirements for a 4m x 3m tracked space is much harder to set up for Rift, so we need to see about reducing that. The other major obstacle Rift players have is the crawling – scrambling through vents is great, but the design of the Touch controllers means we were worried about players putting too much pressure on the front ‘loop’ of the controllers and possibly breaking them. No matter how much fun someone’s having, we don’t want to be the cause of broken hardware!

Supporting SteamVR also has a couple of other possibilities – Valve have generously provided us with some of the new Knuckles controllers, and Acer also provided us with a WindowsMR headset. So no promises, but we’ll be experimenting with both of those too.

We’ve also been working on the paper design – trying to figure out which bits of UD1 we really like and what we can learn from our last game, Smash Hit Plunder. Yes, we’re definitely keeping the ‘redirected walking’ method of locomotion – we think it’s a super immersive way to move around in VR. Along with that we really want to keep the game a ‘physical assault course’ and bring out the joy of moving around in VR.

Having said that, we’re also keeping an eye on accessibility (see our previous post about SWCTN’s amazing grant) and we don’t want to make a game that alienates lots of players because of physical, mental or hardware requirements. That means identifying places in the game that players might not be capable (or willing) to do, and providing meaningful alternatives so the game remains playable and fun for a broader audience.

We’ll be keeping the survey open for another week before we go through it in depth (with graphs!) so please spread the word and get as many people to fill it in as possible. Also a big hello to everyone that’s joined our Discord channel – it’s filling up nicely and as development picks up pace we’ll be using it more and more to share progress and get feedback.

Remain vigilant, Agent.