What I've been up to

It's been five months since I last posted here. I posted a poll where people could pick between two games for me to mod. Since then, a bunch of life stuff happened, I burned out a bit on the VR modding, and a few exciting projects showed up. This eventually caused my VR mod work to grind to a halt.

VR mod work is probably gonna stay paused for a while longer. So don't expect any new VR mods from me any time soon. If you feel like the subscription is no longer worth it, I completely understand. So what has been happening?

Official VR ports

Most of you probably aren't aware, but a while ago I tried working with a small developer to create an official port of their game to VR. I even released a demo on Steam, but ended up having to give up on the project, since I felt like I couldn't justify the effort.

I kind of gave up on the official port idea for a while, but I was recently presented with a couple exciting possibilities. Nothing is set in stone yet, but if all goes well I will be working on two official VR ports starting some time this year. I can't share too much right now, but I can say that these are two very popular indie games, which makes me very excited.

The plan for my involvement in these projects is a bit different. For the first project, I will be working together with the original game developers for a short while as a consultant. I'll be working on the core VR features, and then the original developers/publishers will actually polish it up and turn it into a shippable product. This one is pretty much decided, contracts have been signed, etc, so I can say it will almost definitely happen.

The second project is much larger scope, but also a bit more undecided. I'll be working with someone else on this one, and if all goes well, we will be developing the official VR port, and taking full ownership of this version. This means we'll also have a hand in publishing, marketing, etc. This will be a bigger leap of faith, but I'm confident we can succeed.

I will share more information about these projects as soon as possible.

Gomps

If you follow me on Twitter, you might have seen this video I shared about Gomps, a project I've been working on. That tweet got some attention there. Far more than any of my VR mod tweets. I'm not particularly fond of Twitter, but it seems to be a good way for me to advertise my projects and interact with creators who are into what I do.

I'm still reluctant to read the small tweet boom as a prediction of the success of Gomps, but it caught me a bit off-guard. It was just a fun side-project I started during the Winter holidays, and I guess I didn't expect most people to actually want to use it. I'm very curious to see if there will be a significant amount of people using Gomps, and exactly how people use it. Since it's more of a social experience than anything else, and it doesn't really affect the games you're playing (other than cluttering your view with a bunch of floating blobs), I feel like people will have to get creative to have fun with it.

I planned on releasing Gomps in its current broken-ass state and hiding being the "Early Access" banner. But Valve is taking a long time reviewing the app. Usually it takes like 3 days to get approved, but this time they're showing me this message saying the automated tests failed. Hopefully the manual tests are okay. None of the products I submitted to Steam before went through this extra step, so I'm not really sure what to expect. Gomps doesn't use Steam for networking, but it does rely on Steam for the user accounts and for communicating with the Gomps website (a web app that you can use to write notes in the game worlds, and eventually do other stuff).

If you're interested in this project, make sure to add Gomps to your Steam wishlist. If you want to test the beta version, send me a private message here (or in the #rai-vip channel of the Flat2VR Discord), and I'll send you a Steam key as soon as I have a version that works well enough without me having to explain everything to each individual person. I will only be sending keys to people who were already patrons before I made this post, I don't want to make it seem like I'm selling beta keys. If you went through this wall of text, I'm gonna presume you're a good candidate to have access to these ULTRA SECRET project.

The future

I always feel like I don't post on Patreon enough, but I often feel like most people that stick around do it because they want to support me, and don't really care about the actual Patreon content. In any case, I will try to post more frequently about all my projects here, whether or not they're related to VR (although they'll probably always be related to gaming in some way).

I'm always open to suggestions, so let me know if there's anything else you'd like to see in this Patreon during my personal VR mod dry season.

Also someone tell Patreon to get their shit together because formatting these articles is whack. They have a button to preview the article before publishing, but the preview looks nothing like the actual thing? This is what you guys are paying 8% of your pledges for!