Beach Ball Valley Early Access
We're going to be out of early access soon, but we've made big changes which we will release this month! Here's a bit of back story behind our development!
Beach Ball Valley started out a long long time ago. It started back when HTC was going to Release the vive in December 2015. We had 2 months to learn VR development and develop a game in VR. This game made a lot of people smile and laugh at VR demos in 2015, so we figured we'd build it out for a release with the Vive.
Release schedules changed to April, and we shifted to work on a different game entirely - a castle defense crossbow game where you were being actively attacked by wizards and dodging shrapnel, as your castle was getting destroyed. The team behind that game believed that it needed to look AAA and be way more complex (skill trees, etc) if we were going to release. We didn't release, but instead I turned back to the crowd pleasing beach ball whacking project.
We released it on launch day against all the other VR launch titles & were promptly buried. Had we waited a week or two for people to start looking for content, we may have reached more folks.
We we kept updating the game and tweaking things based on demos we did to friends and game conventions. We watched how people played and kept up the goal of making it accessible and fun. It's been a blast seeing people play it & seeing families where the kids play the game and then play with their parents with the keyboard controls. It's also lots of fun seeing the extra trackers in play - giant paddles on your feet is hilarious.
We've come a long way - figuring out lots about the UX behind VR & how to experience something using only pizza paddles. We've wrapped up all that we've learned and are packaging it into a nicely accessible beach ball paradise.
Beach Ball Valley started out a long long time ago. It started back when HTC was going to Release the vive in December 2015. We had 2 months to learn VR development and develop a game in VR. This game made a lot of people smile and laugh at VR demos in 2015, so we figured we'd build it out for a release with the Vive.
Release schedules changed to April, and we shifted to work on a different game entirely - a castle defense crossbow game where you were being actively attacked by wizards and dodging shrapnel, as your castle was getting destroyed. The team behind that game believed that it needed to look AAA and be way more complex (skill trees, etc) if we were going to release. We didn't release, but instead I turned back to the crowd pleasing beach ball whacking project.
We released it on launch day against all the other VR launch titles & were promptly buried. Had we waited a week or two for people to start looking for content, we may have reached more folks.
We we kept updating the game and tweaking things based on demos we did to friends and game conventions. We watched how people played and kept up the goal of making it accessible and fun. It's been a blast seeing people play it & seeing families where the kids play the game and then play with their parents with the keyboard controls. It's also lots of fun seeing the extra trackers in play - giant paddles on your feet is hilarious.
We've come a long way - figuring out lots about the UX behind VR & how to experience something using only pizza paddles. We've wrapped up all that we've learned and are packaging it into a nicely accessible beach ball paradise.