Greeting pilots!
We've finally released version 1.0.3 and just got out of early access! Toy Plane Heroes has grown so much since our first early access release and it's really exciting to see how much content we were able to develop for this project, even though it started really small in the Oculus DK1 era. It's also super interesting to look at the leader boards and see how you guys became a lot better then us! :D
After this time we've definitely learned a lot about creating vr games and it was crazy to see that there was a community war starting between Vive and Oculus. We've always tried to deliver the same quality to both headsets and made sure that all players can play against each other no matter where they buy our game and what device they are using. It's sad to see that the vr community got a little bit divided by this but we think it is already getting better! In the end both headsets are great and this competition will result in better hardware from both companies. :)
But we've also noticed the downsides of this war. An anti gamepad movement has slowly started and a lot of players only bought games with motion controls support. While we absolutely love motion controls, we are still thinking that gamepad games should also have a future in virtual reality. Sometimes it's cool to sit down, relax and just visually enjoy vr and sometimes it's amazing to be all in VR with pretty much your whole body.
The second problem we've noticed during our development was how to sell a game which is really intense in VR. We put in warnings in almost every description text of Toy Plane Heroes but we underestimated the amount of people that would buy this game even though they are sensible to motion sickness. We've released on day 1 when vr came out so we should have expected that a lot of people would be trying out vr for the first time. This resulted in some bad reviews and refunds so we knew that we had to focus on this issue, but at the same time we wanted to keep the intense feeling of flying in a toy plane. So we've developed an OPTIONAL comfort mode and tested it with a bunch of people until almost everybody could play the game. :)
So to sum it up, we've released a unique gamepad vr game which has a lot of intense movement in a time where roomscale vr was the holy grail. Financially Toy Plane Heroes was not able to cover the development costs but we just kept financing it through side projects because we love the charm of our game and wanted to keep making it better.
The final version doesn't mean the end of Toy Plane Heroes. We still have some reaaaaaaaaally cool plans that we will develop in our free time. So stay tuned!