[PROJECT] Gorn (working title)
I've decided to procrastinate working on my game by making a thread about my game so here goes!
Gorn is a physics based VR game where you fight as a gladiator.
The idea was inspired by watching people play Budget Cuts and #Selfietennis. I noticed that most people spent more time trying to smash the robots/tennis people than actually playing the game so I wanted to make a game where the focus is on killing in a VR physics playground.
So far I've implemented physics based characters for you to fight who can use weapons and take and have limbs sliced off with swords or knocked off with blunt weapons. There's also a bow. Here's a video of a sword fight between two enemies:
Due to my lack of experience in 3D and VR there's a lot of jank but I'm enjoying the learning experience. I'm not quite sure yet where the gameplay challenge will lie - it doesn't seem like having the fights themselves be challenging would be the best so I'm considering rather having achievement hunting be the core of the game, so that the goal is pleasing the crowd rather than just winning the fight.
Right now I'm aiming to have a playable version of the game ready by Amaze and I'll build a build up here then as well for those who have Vives.
Cheers!
Gorn is a physics based VR game where you fight as a gladiator.
The idea was inspired by watching people play Budget Cuts and #Selfietennis. I noticed that most people spent more time trying to smash the robots/tennis people than actually playing the game so I wanted to make a game where the focus is on killing in a VR physics playground.
So far I've implemented physics based characters for you to fight who can use weapons and take and have limbs sliced off with swords or knocked off with blunt weapons. There's also a bow. Here's a video of a sword fight between two enemies:
Due to my lack of experience in 3D and VR there's a lot of jank but I'm enjoying the learning experience. I'm not quite sure yet where the gameplay challenge will lie - it doesn't seem like having the fights themselves be challenging would be the best so I'm considering rather having achievement hunting be the core of the game, so that the goal is pleasing the crowd rather than just winning the fight.
Right now I'm aiming to have a playable version of the game ready by Amaze and I'll build a build up here then as well for those who have Vives.
Cheers!
Comments
I got some tips from punchesbears that have helped a bit since this was filmed so it's getting better.
So when will there be a playable version? ;)
I also made some quick and super bad videos, free fraps logo and all:
Procedural bruising:
Getting some art help now so these will hopefully look a bit better soon!
I'll leave this here for you: https://obsproject.com/
1. The initial shock of intimidation is SO REAL. The hulking enemies coming towards me slowly TOTALLY gave me that fight or flight response.
2. It was super fun doing the bashing.
3. When their attacks land on me there was definitely dissonance - I don't feel the hit, and I'm not sure where I'm getting hit. Working out the visual/audio feedback on this would be an important challenge.
4. I feel like I want to be able to outsmart/outmaneuvre them. As it is now they're probably too good at facing the player. Or too big too.
Really rad and polished presentation so far too, looking forward to more! :)
So at Aug 27 I made my first and only post about Gorn one the Vive subreddit. You can see there was some attention but not crazy amounts. at around Sep 5 someone else created a thread ( https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/520ztc/gorn_is_awesome/ ) which actually got less attention then mine, but because it wasn't made by the creator (and perhaps because it was the second time people saw it?) it got more attention towards the game itself. Since then there have been one or two more threads, smaller than that one, that have also brought in more views/downloads than the original post. Pretty illuminating about the mechanics of reddit and marketing in general (what's that rule about someone has to hear about something 7 times...?).
1000 downloads isn't a lot, but considering the small number of vive's out there this is pretty encouraging for me, especially since the game has managed to keep momentum without any action from my side.
Need a Vive so that I can GORN!
Each piece can be added or removed by itself, hopefully changing the tactics of each encounter according to what's exposed. When fully armored he has no exposed weak spots and you'll have to knock a piece of armor off first.
Unfortunately it's from the older build so it must have been filmed a week or two ago, but it's nice to see the game still getting some attetntion.
Work has been coming along decently on GORN. Besides the usual physics/handling/AI improvements, we have also have a test/proxy version of the arena up:
We've added two handed weapons:
I've started work on a metagame/unlock/progression style system. This isn't something that I have much experience with, and the added challenge of thinking how to present all the affordances in a diegetic VR UI is quite tough, so I've separated the two issues and am prototyping how I think the metagame should play out in (a very ugly) mouse-driven UI. The idea is to get some feedback and get things working before doing the second tougher job of making it work intuitively in VR.
Several casualties have been claimed:
The game has been gaining momentum via word-of-mouth in the VR community.
Lots of lets plays have been made and a strange phenomenon (tentatively named "the GORN effect") has come to light, where a youtuber will receive far more than their average amount of views on any GORN video they make, which has lead to a snowball effect in Youtube coverage:
http://imgur.com/a/Uon7Y
The average daily view/download rate has been increasing or at worst staying the same since I originally put it up and made a reddit post about it. The spike the last couple of days is people who own Oculus who've somehow figured out how to get the game running on there.
Current goal is to have the game on Early Access on Steam by end January.
This is pretty incredible. Have you considered stopping work on the game and just charging youtube streamers usage rights? (/s)
My only issue was the spear. I'm not exactly sure how you are meant to use it, so I just ended up using one hand to slide it through and the other to shove it into the enemy. Is that the right way? The right hand seems to lose a bit of control with this one and it tends to glitch around a lot.
Otherwise it's definitely one of the few genuinely addictive VR games out there. Can't wait to see what the final version looks like.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/578620/GORN/
Cowabunga industries and Deon Van Heerden are working with us on a new trailer, and we're going to take a few more uptodate screenshots, otherwise this page is what we're planning on putting out to the public.
Any feedback welcome!
@roguecode not sure, I think break even is somewhere between 10-15k sales.
IF that's the case, and game reaches the kinds of sales numbers the popular VR games reach (20,000 to 40,000 sales) the game would more than cover what we've spent on it to date (I'm not actually certain what that is, as we're not too worried about breaking even, but it's significantly less than the revenue 20,000 sales would bring). Of course we're still developing GORN, and incurring more cost as we go, but we'll scale our ambitions based on what the reception for the game is.
The cartoony style is great and holds up well at all distances from the enemy (and with being able to use them as flails, we're frequently close enough to bite off chunks :D ). The whole style obviously follows from that with the crazy floating heads and ragdollish enemies.
One thing we found really frustrating with the drag/swim movement. Is this intentionally slow to avoid the player teleporting around the enemies to retain some challenge?
We kept resetting progress so each player could try from the first Arena level (to not get wiped out immediately :P ). It would have been nice to be able to rather select levels. That said we haven't tried the other mode (the door to the left that unlocks after two arena levels, so maybe there's something there that allows it.
This has been a great project to work on and we've been overwhelmed by how fortunate we've been with good the reception has been, throughout development. Currently, GORN has just over 200k sales on Steam. We are sitting at a (inflated) metacritic score of 87, and currently have about 3700 Steam reviews of which 96% are positive.
We also got a full Steam front page takeover for a few days!
Thanks to the whole Free Lives team for making this dream a reality. Happy to answer any questions people might have about dev or whatnot.
I hope you're planning a Quest port, I think it'll be a great match for the platform.
I can't wait to download and play Gorn on my Q2 as soon as I get off work this evening.
It makes me really proud to see a local company getting so much love in the international VR industry.
Apologies if you've already done it and I missed it but it would be really interesting to hear about some of the challenges faced with porting it to Quest and Quest 2.
Also, thank you for making all voice lines appear as captinedy text on the arena board (IIRC). My partner is deaf/HoH and it's been a bit of a nightmare trying to find games we can play together which don't rely on spoken instructions or games which have subtitles. Although, I think Gorn would probably be the former.