2015 – The Almost Year of VR
As the year draws to a close and we start to think of not much more than stuffing our faces and opening presents, it’s time to look back over the past year and the events that occurred, or didn’t and forwards to 2016.
We ended 2014 on a high, having recently just launched Radial-G : Racing Revolved on Steam Early Access and we were keen to capitalise on that feeling and get cracking with development once back in the studio for 2015. Starting work on Update#1 took us up to February when we did our first event of the year, “SWVR Conference” down in Bristol, UK. It was a great start to the year and we will certainly be back down Brizzle-way in 2016 for the [SW] “VR World Congress” in April.
After a day of demoing and meeting old and new fans alike, we were keen to do more events throughout 2015 to help carry on spreading the word about the game and so we signed up for “EGX Rezzed“, to be held in Tobacco Docks, London, UK in March. We teamed up with our local dev pals Knifey Spoonie and Sock Thuggery to take a 4-berth booth and after a bit of negotiating who was going to be where, off we went with Update#2 ready and loaded on the PCs to show.
Wow what an event! For three days we demoed, talked and promoted the game to eager players of games, all desperate for a go on the fastest, most exciting VR game at the show. We were told that we had the 3rd longest queues, after Bloodborne & Guild Wars 2, with attendees willing to wait up to 1.5 hours to try out the game! Such an overwhelming reaction and welcome ^_^ We were planning on running one PC with VR and one with non-VR modes but in order to try and help reduce queuing times, we switched both to VR only. Again, after such a welcome from the players there in 2015, we will be back bigger than ever at EGX Rezzed 2016
After we had recovered from that, work quickly refocussed back on Updates#3 and #4 to the game and we added the final full set of features and gameplay modes we wanted for release,. just in time for another event!
We were selected to appear on the Indie Showcase at the “Brighton Develop Conference” with 9 other hopefuls, eager to be picked as organisers and press choice. Whilst we didn’t win, we certainly were happy to be doing an event in our home town once more, revisiting the locale that kicked off our journey with Sony PlayStation and PlayStation VR development in 2014.
We’ve done a few other small scale events since then, such as the “Rocketjump Brighton” and a couple of “Geek Central” days, both held at the Komedia venue, a few more “I.Am.Arcade / Fight Clubs” hosted at our local favourite haunt Sticky Mike’s Frog Bar, organised by Kotaku UK and another “VR in a Bar” where we took part in a VR roundtable discussion with EDGE magazine.
We had one more location to visit and that was Newcastle, home of CCP Games working on EVE: Valkyrie and Callum from Oculus but we were there to see the game installed in GAME ON 2.0 as the showcase VR game under the “Future of Gaming” banner.
However when we realised that the Oculus Rift wasn’t going to commercially release until Q1’16, we decided it best to save our limited funds and hold off doing any more events until nearer the time we release on Day One alongside the hardware.
So from now until then, we polish, we tweak, we prepare for v1.0 of everything to go FULL VR early next year…
V1.0 – Windows PC only, non-VR & Oculus Rift DK1 support – 