I'm nearing the release of the next content patch, which will bring about two new heroes and other stuff, but I wanted to take the time and explain why it's taking longer than usual and let you know what to expect.
Let me preface this whole post by saying that I'll be taking part in a local (to home country) conference, where I'll showcase my game live and hopefully get people who've never experienced VR's honest first opinion and feedback. It's fairly exciting since it's the first time I'll be attending something like that, let alone presenting, but as you might imagine, this does require some planning and time. So that's bitten a chunk of my spare time lately.
Onto the game, I didn't want to settle into a "release two new heroes and two new challenges" dev cycle, which was my original plan. Sure it would add content the game needs, but I'd rather concentrate my effort into things that will make it into the story mode, since that's the ultimate goal. So in the next release I'm adding a mission system.
Missions are basically tasks you need to complete. One of the upcoming heroes will be locked behind the game's first mission. I'm also integrating missions into the existing challenges, to let players check their score without having to look around frantically all the time.
To show these missions to players, however, I needed some fitting UI. Playing around with different ideas I came to a realization, I didn't want to have physical menu interactions in the game. This means that things like buttons and levers that need to be pressed/pulled/switched on to execute some command such as changing levels, will no longer find a place in PowersVR. Instead I'll be using the more recent system I've implemented (floating menus with laser pointers coming out of your hands) for all future interactable UI elements. What players will potentially lose in immersion (not much in my opinion), they'll greatly make up in useability and swiftness.
When placing interactable objects in the game world, devs need to take into consideration that different players have differently sized play areas. So butttons needs to be placed in a way they can always be reached, especially if players have no way to move outside of roomscale. Another thing to consider is that players shouldn't be spawned on top of interactable items, since that'll force them to take a couple of steps back before they can examine the menu.
In 0.3.0 the (few) buttons in the game have been replaced with floating menus, and work has gone into making them attractive, responsive and most importantly intuitive to use. Players will also find that looking downward will reveal a new player stat menu, which currently contains the active missions and healthbar and eventually more.
All these improvements and additions, and more will not only shape the next big patch, but feature in the story mode, which I'll focus on right after 0.3.0 launches.