Cosmic Awakening VR is finally released!
It's been a long journey, about a year in fact, since we started it. We've worked endlessly these past few weeks and right up until release to bring you a great horror experience! We hope many of you enjoy the game! For those that are interested, I would like to take this time to tell a little bit about us and Cosmic Awakening VR.
Who are we?
We are gamers who have dreamed about making games for many years if not our entire lives! This is our first game on Steam and we hope to be able to bring even greater games in the future! We are a small team that has changed size a couple times through the project. The core of us are game development teachers! We teach 3D graphics, game programming, and game production.
What was the team size?
This game was started by 2 of us, with a 3rd person brought in fairly early in the development. For the last 2 or so months, we had 3 interns join us, then a 4th. These interns are students at the college we teach at. We also met David Levy, a music composer who works for Rooster Teeth, at SXSW 2017. He was very excited about our game and so he ended up doing a lot of our music. His work is amazing!
Why did you do a VR game?
We decided to do a game around February 2016. Thanks to our local scene we had an opportunity for exhibit space at PAX South 2017. We brain stormed about what we would want to do. Around that time VR started hitting consumer level. We had tried lots of VR stuff before that like the Oculus dev kits and mobile VR, but when we tried the Vive we were very excited! I, the programmer, had done lots of VR and AR for serious games at some of my jobs. We played many games and we saw all the potential, so we just had to give it shot!
What were your goals with the game?
We wanted to make a very immersive game. You put it on, and there is realistic graphics, you can interact with everything, and you just believe you are there. As a "VR veteran", I was aware of some rules like "don't do realistic graphics because everything will feel wrong and people more easily believe the environment if it's farther from what they know in real life", but we wanted to go beyond simple graphics and put people in an amazing place. We think the sci-fi environment is a good solution to that problem. Also as a VR veteran, we strived to follow all the other important rules. Maintaining 90fps, and VR comfort, were of the utmost importance to us. We believe that our game can be played by almost anyone and we urge people who have motion sickness to give it a try. VR is in it's early state, and we don't want to scare newcomers away with VR discomfort. We showed at many conventions and many of those people had never tried VR before. We feel that people's first VR experience is very important and that's how we geared a lot of our decisions in the game. That said, we do hope to update the game with more locomotion options for all the VR gaming experts out there!
Why did you do a horror game?
When we were brainstorming we came up with lots of ideas. We actually originally started development on another idea. The other idea quickly hit a bottleneck when we just couldn't get what we wanted out of todays graphics power. Ultimately we decided to drop that project and go back to the drawing board. We played lots of experiences and looked at all the games out there. At the time, there wasn't a whole lot of horror games out. We liked horror games (well, mostly making our friends play them while we watch!). We thought that horror in VR had the potential to hit a whole new level of scary. We wanted to make something that people would enjoy watching youtubers play, and taking turns playing with their friends.
What is the next game?
We haven't entirely decided yet. We don't even know if it will be VR. Of course we have tons of ideas, including VR ideas, but we just have to see what we feel like doing. It could even be a pixel art game. We like all sorts of games so don't think we are just VR! There is still some things we'd like to do to Cosmic Awakening VR. We want to add VR options, like different locomotion options. We have some other gameplay mode ideas that we hope we can implement! We have bigger ideas too, like spectator cam and spectator controls to mess with the person in VR. No promises though! It all depends on user feedback! We want to make sure you guys are happy. Also, as teachers, the fall semester is starting and we've had little time to prepare!
- Dev Team
