First of all, and most importantly, we want to say a big thank you to our fans and friends. The feedback and warmth we have had from this community has been brilliant, and totally unexpected.
As many of you know, we created Unseen Diplomacy as a small experience game, to demonstrate the power of VR and show off what room scale volume tracking, for an event in Nottingham called GameCity. We were really worried about releasing it as it was only supposed to be a short game (because otherwise there would have been long queues to play!), there wasn’t what we would call a full game loop (things like achievements, story, or reasons to keep coming back), and the huge room space requirement.
But as a community you still have welcomed the game, and we’ve even seen many of you defending us and our decision to release it - pointing out to new players the history of the game. We really appreciate that!
We have been listening, planning, and looking ideas we didn’t get to implement for last October's GameCity. We want to keep updating and growing Unseen Diplomacy - we’re just looking at how we can.
From our side, there’s just the two of us full time! We have been working on another title, Smash Hit Plunder, for over a year and have to focus our efforts on that. However, we are looking at hiring new staff (if you are a VR Unity game developer, please get in touch!), and are looking how we can get some funding coming in so we can hire more permanent team or work with some external contractors to help grow Unseen Diplomacy.
So we’re waiting to hear back from Vive X, and just heard Valve may be offering funds, we’re talking with some teams with how we can work together to make Unseen Diplomacy bigger. For now, we’re working after hours on the project, and have already made some interesting breakthroughs.
From the game’s perspective, we have some prototypes with room scaling (still a lot of work to do!), have a giant list of room and interaction ideas, still have lots of alternate start and endings ideas, and a big list of improvements to user experience - things like the ending being hard to understand, and explaining what restricted movement option actually does.
As for hardware support - even though we have Touch, we are still only working on Vive for Unseen Diplomacy. The Vive is the only device at the moment that can track the full height and volume of the room space we need, and the design of the Touch controllers means that you cannot crawl with them (darn that loop!). We don’t want to compromise the physical nature and design of the game trying to support other hardware. I don’t believe that there is anything that can stop players from trying Touch, but see this as a warning as we don’t want you to be breaking your Oculus hardware trying to play Unseen Diplomacy! For future games we will always design the game for capabilities of the hardware we plan to launch it on, so to offer the best experience for that platform.
We can’t make any promises, but we really wanted to thank everyone for the support, and let you know we’re trying as hard as we can! And if you want to learn more about the development of the game, have a read of this blog post we did for Unity.
