Howdy ,
First off - sorry this is so late :)
Plan is for these to be weekly going forward - September ended up being sort of crazy. Lot of stuff happened!
Estimated read time: ~3 minutes
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I Launched Hand Cannon Virtuoso!
Holy cow let me tell you this is a huge monkey off my back.
Have you ever had that feeling where you just wanted to finish literally anything?
I have started and stopped so many projects, it was driving me nuts. I think the breaking point for me was when I was attempting to learn how to vertical farm soybeans in my apartment and had a sudden "wait a minute what the hell am I doing" moment.
A month later I got back into game development (something I had enjoyed in the past), started making VR stuff, and 2 years later it feels good to have finally finished something.
On Wednesday I launched Early Access for Hand Cannon Virtuoso. You can check the game out here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1255680/Hand_Cannon_Virtuoso/
Do you know anyone who has a VR headset? If so, could forward them that link? It would mean the world to me.
What's Next?
Launching Early Access was a "finish line" in the sense that real live internet strangers are now buying and playing the game. It was also a "starting line" in the sense that I now have a lot more work to do to get the game to a 1.0 launch.
In case you are curious, I will not be quitting my day job any time soon :) The game is no runaway financial success. I have earned something like $0.20 per hour spent on the project so far lol (and that's pre-tax!).
That said, being my first game and a small market (indie VR) I am happy with how launch has gone. I took a few days off work to focus on launch and am having fun talking to players, working on features, and planning the roadmap. I even fixed a bug for a player on the other side of the world caused by dotnet globalization issues. Great stuff.
So far I've been getting some positive feedback and forum interest. My goal for New Years is to have 10,000 hours of time played across all players 👍
What else happened in VR?
So the other reason September was crazy is just that so much happened in VR!
Probably the biggest you should be aware of was Facebook Connect (formerly Oculus Connect), Facebook's VR development conference.
I took a day off of work to attend the conference in, uh, VR.
The experience was awesome and I remain convinced that social applications of VR are some of the coolest. The ability to chat over voice, use hand gestures, make eye contact, etc. made it feel so much closer to a live conference.
Highlights for me were...
I met my game dev hero John Carmack! (In VR)
We talked about game dev and VR stuff for like 10 minutes before our huddle of people got DC'd mid-conversation. My fanboy level was running at about 10,000 fanboymeters.
Facebook Announced Oculus Quest 2
It's hard to overstate how big of a deal the Oculus Quest headset has been for VR.
The Quest was released in May 2019 and until this month it was the only "hybrid headset" on the market, meaning it can run games standalone via it's mobile chip or on your PC for extra processing power via wireless streaming or a USB cable.
This flexibility is a big deal because it means you don't have to own a VR-capable gaming PC to experience VR. That, coupled with the Quest's $400 price point (low relative to other headsets) made it the first choice for a lot of folks looking to get into VR last year. In it's first year on the market Quest did around $100 million in software sales which is huge money relative to VR's historical market size.
Needless to say it was no surprise when Zuckerberg announced Oculus Quest 2 during his Facebook Connect keynote. It's clear Facebook is leaning into the hybrid headset line and announced the new model would be shipping in October starting at $299 with some really impressive launch titles.
I am hoping this new headset makes VR more accessible to a lot of people. As much as I complain about Facebook's stranglehold on the market, I already pre-ordered mine :)
What's coming next
Next week I'll ship my first post-Early Access update to Hand Cannon Virtuoso. I also have a surprise coming up that I can hopefully fill you in on next week!
My big focus right now is on growing this lists audience, so if you like the newsletter consider sharing it with a friend who likes VR:
Or you could link them to Hand Cannon Virtuoso's store page :)
Thank you for reading. I'd love to hear from you as well, so please feel free to reply to [email protected]. Stay healthy and catch you next time.
- Tadatoto
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