Developing the VR game of my dreams (and getting roasted on Steam)
Coming of age during the golden age of PC gaming, my childhood was a never-ending stream of incredible experiences. My report card, however, was not.
For the sake of my future, I stopped playing games in my final year of high school - but not before I got a glimpse of the latest technical marvel that John Carmack and his team at id software were brewing up:
The real-time lighting and shadows, the detailed texture maps: I fantasized about the potential I saw in that game for the next decade as I focused on university and employment. Fast forward to 2012, and John Carmack comes back on my radar in a very interesting way:
What on earth was that duct-taped prototype he’s holding? A fully-3D virtual reality headset? Doom 3?? Suddenly PC gaming was interesting again. I built the best computer I could afford, and got my hands on a developers kit:
It lived up to the hype:
I devoured every tech demo that came out, played every release. The technology improved: tracking got quicker and more accurate, and the next generation of devices promised the ability to track hand position using controllers. I got my hands on an HTC Vive pre-order as quickly as possible:
The ability to walk around a tracked volume and interact with objects took the experience to a new level:
It was very obvious to me what this technology should be used for:
I scoured the internet, but nobody had created a VR experience where you could play as a giant monster and level a city to the ground.
Unacceptable. I’ll have to make it myself.
Our process will be straightforward:
At a high-level, it is easy to describe what I want. Take the chaos of the classic arcade game Rampage: World Tour:
And cross it with the office punch scene from Pacific Rim:
Our primary game mechanic will be the destruction of tall buildings in stages. Each hit will damage the building progressively, until a threshold is passed - at which point the rest of the building will fall apart.
For locomotion, I want to take full advantage of the room-scale capabilities of the HTC Vive (and I find controller-based smooth locomotion nauseating), so we will assume players are limited to the recommended 2m x 2m playspace and are able to walk around freely within that space. After players destroy everything in one location, we will have them teleported to the next location to repeat the process. In this way players will destroy their way through the city section-by-section.
Ragdoll physics are entertaining, so we will have humans which can be picked up and thrown.
A suitable setting for the game comes to mind: New York City. We can have the player start in the ocean, work their way past Brooklyn Bridge, down through Midtown and Manhattan, and end with the destruction of a “final boss”: the Statue of Liberty.
All of these ideas are worked through on paper:
We have our high-level design, we are ready to begin development.
There are two competing choices for VR game engine: Unity or Unreal.
For me, the choice is clear - Unreal has significantly better graphics capabilities out-of-the-box, but more importantly it features the Blueprints Visual Scripting system:
For assets like the monster hands, Statue of Liberty, boats, cars, trees, etc., we will use assets purchased from any of the various libraries. When needed we will modify the files in 3dsmax.
Development was long and tedious, with the most amount of effort expended on getting the destructible physics working properly. Checklist after checklist of bugs and features-to-add occupied all of my spare time:
After 866 hours of work, our game was finally complete.
We register for a developer account, get an AppID, pay a fee, and go through all the administrative hurdles for publishing a game on Steam (preparing the game package, filling out paperwork, etc.) The game is finally released!
The starting price was relatively high ($5), but I lowered it over time and made sure to include the game in every Steam sale. I also contributed the game to as many VR game bundles as possible. This would provide an interesting lesson: the less someone pays for your product, the more critical they will be.
Plenty of people enjoyed the game:
But the negative reviews are best:
Some popular YouTubers enjoyed themselves.
But the thing I am most proud of is the pirated release:
That’s how you know you’ve made it!
Super Ultra Monster Smash! is available for free on Steam!
Trailer:
Screenshots:
Steam Statistics:
At QuakeCon 2023 I finally got the chance to meet my idol:
His words of wisdom? “Better late than never.”