Hello everyone,
Today Craft Keep VR enters its full release. With it comes some new chapters and support for a new platform, the Oculus Touch. We would like to thank everyone who has purchased the game during its early access period and hope that any new players will enjoy the game too!
To celebrate there is a 25% launch discount and we have created this spiffing trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4L9xaDhUSQQ
If you come across any issues in this update, do let us know!
It’s always a difficult transition when moving from Early Access to Full Release and I wanted to talk about some of the development and obstacles we faced to be a little open with how the game had progressed. Initially I wanted to cover the very questions that were asked on Craft Keep VR’s store page, and see if we had hit them.
We still believe that Virtual Reality is still in its infancy, there are three major players in the VR world. However, we had chosen to go full on with virtual reality with room scale and this meant that the only technology available to us was the HTC Vive as it was able to fully replicate hand movements. Later on Oculus Touch support had been added too. We wanted to grow a community, however we did struggle to gain some traction with this as the audience is still pretty small and reaching out to those who have VR is quite difficult.
We had approached both Vive and Oculus before the game had released in Early Access to see if there was a way to further communicate with those who own VR, but was not successful. We also launched at a time when Steam’s discovery system had been going through a few changes which could have meant some visibility was lost and impactful traffic meant that we ended up not targeting core VR users. I don’t think we had a large enough community to shape the game, those that were with us, we are truly grateful for, but I wish we could have built that.
We did discover some interesting things from watching people play and had chosen to implement a few subtle changes to try to make the game feel better. Some of them included feedback on how the teleportation system worked and introducing a brand new tutorial to help players learn to play.
We are about 5 and a half months in development for Craft Keep VR so we did hit the intended release date. Today we are releasing all seven chapters which have progressed the story and have added some new gameplay mechanics like teleportation, some new recipes to create, Sushi to eat, hats to wear.
We had increased the number of swords with the inclusion of daggers, gold ingots, fire bomb arrows and a few chapter specific crafting recipes like flame oil. There is also a shooting range and the story now has an end with an unlockable item within the hub area (I won’t tell you what it is!)
This was the original Craft Keep VR.
We were considering increasing the price with some chapters, however I must admit that we did not hit an audience and gain enough traction to input into development to add major features that would warrant a price increase. Therefore, the game stayed at $14.99 indefinitely.
We had some great involvement during the first few weeks of Craft keep VR and had a lot of engagement and ideas, however we did see quite a large drop in activity and we had some trouble reaching new players. We did spend a lot of time trying to gain new players and feedback by attending a few exhibitions and contacting several press and media. However we did struggle with Valves new discovery system as it changed some of the algorithms which made things a little difficult. But overall, we did have some trouble reaching players to help support the game and allow us to spend more than we anticipated on the project. I wish that we were better at that!
The Future of VR
So today, while we are adding new chapters, adding support for a completely new VR platform and entering a full release, it is at the same time quite a sad day too. While we anticipated a 4-6-month development time as a worst-case scenario, something that we could guarantee. We found it difficult to reach the audience needed for it to be sustainable and allow us to continue development even further.
We have had more fun developing in VR than we have had developing many other titles. We are strong believers of the importance of VR in gaming and see a lot of great promise in the technology. However, if I’m being honest, the audience is not yet there to become sustainable and we’ve seen a lot of VR games release in such a short time span, many of these being free technical demos.
With around 175 million players using Steam, much less than 1% of those are VR users. Consider that 1% may not even want a blacksmithing game, this is an example of segmentation and means that the further we refine our game, the fewer the number of people are interested in it. That number will surely grow in time and as the kit becomes more affordable and accessible we’re going to see some truly awesome VR games. But to create a sustainable development you need to make sure that people can see and want to play your game.
There are some awesome VR experiences that do not compromise their potential player base like Resident Evil 7. Sure, it’s not designed to be a full room scale motion controlled title, but what it does is offer a fully playable VR game with hours of entertainment! It’s tough to get people invested in a VR game for hours, and Resident Evil 7 is one of the few VR games that hits it. If they had added Motion controls, I could very well say it would be the ultimate VR experience. However, what Resident Evil 7 has done is not water down their audience. Anyone can play it, no matter whether you have a VR headset or not.
This is incredibly important for VR developers because if you create a VR game that can be played without VR, it means that you can reach those 170 million players who don’t have the space or budget for VR technology.
VR’s success relies not only on the players who support VR by purchasing the technology, but also by those who don’t want VR. There is room for VR only games, in fact it is important that these types of games continue to exist because there are things you can do in VR that cannot be done without it. In fact we could not make a non VR version of Craft Keep, as the game relies so heavily on motion controls.
We are pleased with some of the feedback we’ve received in making a VR game and are particularly pleased with this endorsement from Turps of Yogscast!
https://twitter.com/The_T/status/847459628996636672
While exhibiting the game at several shows we were looking for some feedback from players, but we had nothing but praise from many players. We do feel that this also might be due to the players experiencing VR for the very first time.
Those who make these VR only experiences should continue to do so, there’s so many things you can only experience in VR. But we couldn’t quite make it work, we couldn’t hit the audience we needed but now have a better understanding of the technology and some plans to make VR more sustainable for developers like ourselves.
So, what do I think of the Future of VR? I think it’s looking promising. There are some truly awesome games coming out which we can’t wait to play. Even though we didn’t hit what we wanted, we loved working on VR and we still want to make another VR game because we had a lot of fun developing Craft keep VR. However, it’s not sustainable for us right now… But we are not giving up on VR.
We are in the process of prototyping other projects and while we are not planning to make a VR game where VR is the core focus, we will make sure that the game also has some VR functions. As a small developer, we must target as wide a net as possible for development to be sustainable and VR right now for us is a tough one to crack. So, the next game we develop will be completely playable without VR, but to continue to support this awesome technology, the game will include VR functions.
We want VR to succeed, it has brought a completely new life to gaming and it is truly a new way to play. We will not give up on VR technology, but until the audience and install base are there to make this a less risky proposition for developers, we must consider Non VR and VR to become a single install base than separating it and reaching fewer players.
I do hope that this lengthy announcement tackles some of the core discussions with our Early Access promises, our thoughts on VR and some of the difficulties that we may have faced. I do once again thank everyone who purchased Craft Keep VR and for supporting us and do stay tuned for the future as we do intend to visit VR for our next game too.
