What do you usually think of when it comes to VR? I bet you probably think of all the great things you could do, like flying around like Superman or swordfighting with Obi-Wan Kenobi. Or would you rather play a job simulator? That is fine too, but we would recommend that you take advantage of the real possibilities of virtual reality and explore all the fun and exciting things that the virtual reality world can offer. After all, that is why it's called virtual reality.
Our philosophy as game designers is that you should not try to imitate realism, because you can do that every day of your life. Although technically you can interact with the world in a similar way to picking up a broom in a shop and starting to break things, you'd probably get arrested very quickly, would't you? But guess what is the first thing people try when you give them a virtual reality headset for the first time? They try to break things - things they should not be doing in real life.
Here are some of the things we hope to to do relatively soon.
We pushed the system in terms of number of items we can have in the game, but we haven't pushed the size of these items yet. We have ambitious plans to make some levels huge where you can throw and manipulate large items around you (such as cars and bigger environment pieces for example).
For reference, level 5 contains roughly 2800+ physics items and it works well on GTX 970 with i7-5930K and 16GB of RAM.
We got some positive feedback about the game and we would really like to serve these kind of supporters. Playing the same levels gets boring quickly and since we believe StressOut has enough depth to it that it takes some times to fully master the mechanics. Due to this we will build level generator and the first version will be used to support daily challenges. All people will have the same 1 level available each day.
Later on we plan to put some kind of reward structure in place to reward the best players. Maybe a badge? Maybe some special item? We'll see.
Since the basic level generator will already be built for Daily New Level we plan to extend it and make it available to you. The idea is that you can generate as many different levels as you want and you can tweak the parameters. Do you want a level full of cardboard boxes and a human to throw him around? Should be simple.
We plan to add at least 5 levels for early access and another 5 for full release. Realistically we will most likely add more levels than that.
We also plan to expand the game post-release. Those updates will definitely contain new themed levels, items and characters.
We researched the ability to add a mod support to our game, and it's totally possible. Right now we have many core things to sort out, but eventually we would definitely like to support creators.
First we will work on enabling modders to add custom items, then probably level creation & sharing. We would like to do more, but can't do it alone so we are looking for people that are potentially interested in building mods, so we can build the tools to enable it. Please if you know somebody, get in touch with Romano - romano@stressout.net
VR is so early, and moves so fast, some things we've developed last year for StressOut already feel obsolete. On top of that there are many other platforms and play styles we would like to support.
We definitely plan to bring in smooth locomotion before the Early Access.
What's written above is something we want to execute regardless of the game's success. But in case the game does really well, and we can afford to continue working on it we had loads of other ideas that we hope we can bring to fruition one day:
Sandbox, "Beat Saber" mode, Built in Level Editor, Community Sharing, Ghost Replays, Fire/Water/Earth bending, Nature bending, More Levels, Skins, Enemies, Better VFX, More spells, More items, Story Continuation, Different Places, ...