A few days ago Sandra, Johannes, Anton and Klemens took part in one of the biggest game developer events worldwide: the Reboot Develop Blue in Dubrovnik, Croatia. We got the opportunity to meet a ton of people from all over the games industry and hear talks from industry legends like Patrice Désilets (Panache Digital Games), Warren Spector (OtherSide Entertainment) or Hidetaka Miyazaki (From Software)
(Creator of Assassins Creed)
(Amanita Design)
(Producer of System Shock)
But we weren’t only there for meeting people, we also used the opportunity to represent our student organization by showing off a game in the indie developer area. FruitHuntVR is a seated VR game for the HTC Vive. Your objective is to shoot as many fruits as possible within three minutes. The shooting is done using the vive controllers. You grab a water balloon, put it into a slingshot, tension the rubber, target a fruit and let it go.
Among the players that tried our game was a teacher from Germany, game developers from Poland, Russia, Hungary, China and many other awesome people. As our cliental was so diverse, we got a lot of great feedback for our game from which we could derive great new game-features. The feedback was especially precious because we had both people that never played VR before, but also veteran VR gamers like the aforementioned teacher. This gave us some great impressions on where the game is too hard for beginners and what things are missing to make advanced gamers utilize their skills to the fullest. Apart from that it was great to see that showing off a game can break the language barrier instantly. FruitHuntVR helped us getting the attention of people and starting conversations after they played the game.
Overall, we are proud that playing our game caused a lot of smiles for both the players and the spectators. For us, this is what developers should aim for.
April 20, 2019