Quintessence
A downloadable VR experience
Hello fans new and old! Please read the following letter if you have a moment: https://pushypixels.itch.io/quintessence/devlog/169257/a-letter-to-all-our-new-fans
Motivated by a post on reddit I jumped into setting up my first official VR experience.
Quintessence is a triple-pun for the game; one pertaining to a movie with comparative environmental styling, one regarding one of the character's names in the game and one well, that's a secret.
Controls:
- Left stick moves, right stick rotates
- Click right stick in to switch between smooth and snap rotation
- Grab anything to climb. Even air!
- Press triggers to create cubes
- A button toggles gravity
- B button toggles cube axis alignment
- The device on your wrist protects you from falling to your death, but it uses a strange backend that I haven't fully tested.
- Let me know if you run into any weirdness.
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ROADMAP:
Phase1: Developer Days
Snap turn < -- YOU ARE HERE
Teleport system <-- I AM HERE
Phase2: What an Exciting Time We Had
Hovercraft and flight system <-- I AM ALSO HERE
Sphere lock art
Sphere locker art
Helipad area art
Scrolling forward flyer sequence
Glove unlock art (whatever *that* looks like...)
Phase3: Dactyl nightmares
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Version 0.19 is now out which adds snap rotation.
The project has now launched on Sidequest! This is likely the easiest way to install the game for Quest. Check it out here:
https://sidequestvr.com/app/1428/quintessence
If you are curious about current tasks and upcoming features, I've made my Trello board public here:
https://trello.com/b/icT1OxiL/quintessence
The PCVR version is available now, and is officially on Itch's interface now. Found a workaround using GitHub for hosting, thank you GitHub!
It should work on all major PCVR headsets but please let me know if you have any difficulties. Most of the physics work is still in very early stages but I'd also like to know if throwing items (or yourself) is difficult (it shouldn't be).
Note, I am *not* an artist. I'm a programmer/designer. The art is thanks to the wonderful talented work of IL.Ranch who created such amazing asset packs to work with. If you are a developer, check their stuff out.
The project is Pay What You Want. Money will be used to purchase assets/commission works and to increase available development time. An hour I don't have to spend delivering food is an hour I can spend developing! :>
WARNING: The current project does not run locked at 72fps on Quest. If you have motion sickness sensitivity, especially due to framerate, please limit your time playing on these early builds.
| DOWNLOADS (itch) | 167 |
| DOWNLOADS (sidequest) | ~1700 |
| PURCHASES | 9 |
| TOTAL REVENUE | $165 |
| AVERAGE PURCHASE PRICE (not counting free downloads) | $18.33 |
| TOTAL HOURS SPENT DEVELOPING | 80 |
| EARNINGS PER HOUR OF WORK | $2.06 |
Data updated 11/22/2020 8:15PM PT
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Development log
- DevLog #7: Sometimes the easy stuff is the hardestAug 12, 2020
- A letter to all our new fansAug 10, 2020
- DevLog #6: A bumpy SaturdayAug 09, 2020
- DevLog #5: New name! Sidequest launch! What a week!Aug 06, 2020
- DevLog #4: First character progressAug 05, 2020
Comments
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I havent been able to find any info on Quintessence since august last year, is the project abandoned?
Yep, still working on it, but progress has been slow. I got gummed up in my action sequence so I'm skipping ahead to work on a separate story sequence that may end up coming first anyway. I also have been stressed out trying to find income so that I can pay my bills and continue developing. Got another interview this morning, wish me luck! :>
Howdy! Eager to hear how you're progressing. I really like what you have so far and even go hang out to listen to Quint tell the same stories again 😁
Aww that's wonderful. I got real sidetracked but I really want to do a new recording session and get some more content in. I have all the pieces I need now to make chapter/phase 3 (Dactyl Nightmares) and I think I'm going to basically do that first before phase 2 (What an Exciting Time We Had). I may re-order things later but it might make more sense for it to come first anyway; the main reason I had pushed it out was it required some assets I didn't have at the time but I've since collected them so now it's just down to me actually building out the scenario, and making a couple creatures...
The reason I'm punting on phase 2 is because it involves a bit of movement tech and interface tech that I got a bit jammed up by; I figured it would be easier to make the action sequence as conceptually, it's quite simple. But even simple action in VR can be very difficult to get to feel right. Maybe especially when it's simple. Still learning a lot about the medium. I have several projects running at once always so that I can move between things and the lessons I learn on one project help on the others, and there's some jams that I've pressed through, but I think jumping "ahead" on the plan and cherry picking may help me with getting a proper content update done.
Making games is surprisingly hard work at times and I want to thank you for your interest and your patience. :>
This looks great, can't wait to try it. My first thought was how cool it'd be to implement something similar to richie's plank experience. an adjustable size plank off the side of a building that you can step off of and fall.
Looking great for how new this project is. Nice modeling, I look forward to updates!
Quintessence 0.18 Notes
Was able to run the application in VR mode without incident.
Framerate seems decent, I’m running an i-9, 2080ti.
I was not able to hear any audio, not sure if that was supposed to be present or not yet.
I did discover one object that I could grab and interact with – the commodore monitor. Made me try to interact with everything else, only to be thwarted. (I didn't bother to read anything before starting, so finding the monitor was a surprise)
Overall I’m impressed with the visual presentation of the scene, reminds me of BladeRunner to an extent, if it were raining… you’d be there.
I could totally see a scene based adventure game where you take cars from location to location around a city in the clouds. Maybe a cyber-detective game where your going to crime scenes, collecting evidence to solve some larger who-dun-it.
I also discovered by accident that you can actually grab onto the world with the triggers, which allows you to:
Hey, thank you so much for playing!
There's definitely audio in the game, and in fact all of the story content so far relies on it; what type of VR headset are you running?
The monitor is interactive, and some trash. Specifically cigarettes, cigarette boxes, forks (save for the ones on the food cart for now), and trash bags are all physically interactive. That monitor also was trying to talk to you the whole time, haha.
I love your ideas and I hope to take part of the game in that direction. I have some lofty goals regarding doing stuff that isn't really the norm in VR anymore, like jumping from car to car, so we'll see if I can figure a way to make it smooth and functional.
why does it get really weird after four falls out of the world?
Because I wanted to put at least *something* interesting in the game related to the story even though it's very very not done. ;>
Thank you sooooo much for playing and commenting.
Add flying cars, like driving.
Add npc dialog.
Add a Quest.
There you made a game and not a world viewer.
Agreed, that's the plan. That said there is a bit of a quest in there, even now...