Beta Version, Under Construction!

Yesterday's meeting for this past week ( for 08/22 - 08/28) was a crucial one. We decided to not bring in the Vive system for this session, because we needed to get back to the basics of communication, and find out - as a whole - exactly what we needed for both a workable Beta and possibly even the finished product by the end of September (which is just a little over a month from now). It had been a somewhat bumpy road for us for the past 2 weeks, but we are determined to make something great for this year's LexPlay, here in Lexington, Kentucky, at the end of October!

First and foremost, we talked about how, overall, this game would play out, considering some of the positive and negative feedback we acquired from our testers. We had to decide if we still wanted to try to create a 50-minute, 5-player, linearly narrative experience as planned, or perhaps "scale it down," one more time, to a 10 (or 15)-minute, single-player, randomly-generated "demo," of sorts. We are fairly certain we are going with the latter idea, as we discussed other concepts (including sound cues, replacement of certain puzzles, and even the removal of some and the invention of totally new ones) to be able to facilitate this possibly better VR experience. To sum up, each player will start the game in the beginning of the VR space (possibly sitting in a chair), then are given 10 or 15 minutes to complete a set of 3 (out of now 8) puzzles to be able to escape that part of the mansion or be taken away by Mortimer to his secret lab!

Other than the actual meat of the game and the other things we need to get accomplished on that end, the team also delved into the very possible fact that we might want to release this game on Steam for a modest fee, one day; this would help gather some funds for RunJumpDev for other projects, events, and whatnot. That considering the game would be open source still, people who buy the game could both play what we made for them, and also add to the experience, edit it, or just learn from the process that we went through. As for team members, I am sad to say we have lost a few people (who actually, just recently, are now saying they might have time to come back and help with the final details), but have also gained a couple of new ones (even including one of the play testers from last week), so we are still positive everything will get done appropriately, and on time!

Speaking of play testing, we just had our first round for our first Alpha version of the game last week, but we are still planning on play testing other versions down the road. If it might interest you to be a play tester of a more refined version of our game (in a couple of weeks, we imagine), then please feel free to follow the link below, follow the giant arrow to one more link, then fill out the brief form on the page, and we shall get back to you as soon as possible!

http://hvredev.wixsite.com/home