First of all: If you haven't opted in to another branch before, this guide will be useful: Opting In and Out of Steam Client and Product Betas. If you want to try this current build, simply pick the "lazers" branch.
And here's what you'll get:
https://gaming.youtube.com/watch?v=6aNjSNJ9RKs
I have also posted this to Reddit
Back in October 2016, and again in January 2017, I mentioned an upcoming "sword-mechanic" for Holodance here on our Steam Community Forums. The idea is to have a progression in mechanics to give you more variety to play with. We already have environments that you can unlock with a "grinding progression" (your accumulated score). This one, however, is unlocked based on your skill (not on that lazers branch - that's for testing and only has laserblades ;-) ). The full deal is sword & shield, dual wield and eventually, laser-guns. And instead of making this a linear progression, we'll have a kind of "skill-tree", so you can decide in which order the additional mechanics are added.
I had even played with a sword-mechanic much earlier in 2015, while still working with Razer Hydra (primarily as a workaround for the tiny tracking area at that time - but it was easy to see how much fun this would eventually be), and a sword-based mechanic was also suggested to me here on Reddit in 2015 when I posted one of the earliest prototypes. It really clicked, however, when I saw Lightblade VR, a really nice little "practice game". With that, and what I already had in Holodance, it was kind of obvious where this should be going - long before last weekend.
One really tricky thing in game development is prioritizing which item to implement when. Usually, there's a kind of natural order to it, inherent to the development process: First, polish the core mechanics. Then, add skill-tracking. Then add new gameplay mechanics which are based on that skill. Also, make sure to answer feature requests from your players when they fit with the direction you're going. It happens that we are just finishing skill-tracking and procedural beatmapping.
And then came Beat Saber.
Awesome polished game, amazing video! Kudos to the developers, they are doing a great job with this and I'll definitely spend some time playing their game because I think it will be a lot of fun. I'm super happy that this took off the way it did because this will help VR gain more adoption, so that's good for all VR developers.
But as I had seen with Audioshield, even when you show a mechanic much earlier and even get a little bit of press coverage as we did in 2015, most people will think that the game they first heard of was the game that "invented" some mechanic (which in this case now will obviously be Beat Saber because everyone saw it). Not necessarily the game that actually did or was the first actual playable game ... especially when it's nothing but a few mentions in forum postings.
So I decided to get this ready to play with and put it into your hands. Speeding things up a little, like in Speed of Link ;-)
Even though we use a similar weapon, the mechanic we have in Holodance is quite different from Beat Saber. It's the defensive art: Lasers shooting at you that you need to block. As you can see in the video, depending on the beatmap you play, this can be fairly easy, or near impossible. We have a pretty good difficulty metric in Holodance now that will help find fitting matches ;-)
We will have slicing, too, but that's for Spinners, which are kind of rare - and those things are big, and you'll get a chance to slice through it several times (in fact, the more slices, the higher the score - this may even be easier for people to immediately get than how Spinners are spun). Sliders and spinners are not done, yet - but as mentioned above, you can already play what you see in the video, today.
Guns and actual dancing will arrive a little later (as usual, as options for those who enjoy those mechanics ;-) ).