I've been playing frisbee golf (I know it's really "disc golf" but we've always said frisbee just like many people say Kleenex instead of tissues) for a stupidly long time. The fact that we cannot go to any courses right now because they're closed due to the virus is killing me and several of my friends (many of whom I have convinced to buy a Quest just so we can hang out in VR!) Once you put out a version with multiplayer, we're going to be all over that. The Rec Room version is OK only because it allows up to 4 people to play together. Otherwise, your alpha version already absolutely crushes it.
Great, it seems like a lot of the fanbase for this version of the game is shaping up to be hardcore players, so I was wondering where you were on that. I've been pondering what the next steps should be for this game, and multiplayer is on my radar. Also expanding the course to 18 is on my to do list. There are huge barriers to multiplayer, like needing to have another Quest to test on (with the shortage and scalping), other people to test with, wondering if I should introduce more content before doing MP, and at what point I should put a paywall on this.
My pros for it are good as well like, the game play seems to be receiving well, having it be a social, competitive, and fun experience may be the ingredient it needs right now to take off, but it'll come at the development costs of more holes, so it would be basic multiplayer with 9 holes.
I should have some good indications by late this weekend on this stuff!
Have you suggested to your friends to try the game out?
First, before I forget, I can no longer find your game on SideQuest, which is odd considering they just featured it recently. I have told all of my Quest-owning friends about it and sent them the itch.io link instead.
One point of clarification: IRL, I've played frisbee golf for decades, but I'm not even close to "good" at it. I wanted to mention that in case I had made it seem like I was any kind of accomplished player. I am not adept, but I do enjoy playing the game and have lots of experience.
OK, back to the game. I got to play your latest update over the weekend and it really is a good quality of life update. I was able to play one game without any real issues at all but had an issue on the second one where I lost the ability to grab the driver starting on hole 7. I haven't had time to try and replicate it.
While I really would love to see more holes and maybe even some silly mini-put-esque gadgets like one of the two courses on Rec Room (wind generators, floating negative point targets, etc), I think the social aspect is what will really bring replay-ability. It's a lot less about courses and a lot more about playing with friends, and this is especially true now that we cannot go out and physically play. My local courses IRL do not change; we keep going back to improve, enjoy the atmosphere, and socialize and razz buddies or feel their pain when they miss a shot. In your game, it absolutely amuses the shit out of me when my disc bounces off the basket rather than going into the chains and I almost always feel the urge to laugh, then swear, and then look for my buddies to see/hear their reaction.
As for a paywall, I think that should come after the multi-player core experience. Paying for additional/new courses just makes all the sense in the world. Everyone is used to it in the form of DLC now. Now, once your game is polished, obviously you can charge just for the core game like any good Oculus store game.
Here's a little video I grabbed of the driver no-grab issue: https://www.facebook.com/john.tolle.14/videos/10218478541089029/
Oh, and any idea why Oculus won't allow me to livestream your game from the headset? I wonder if Oculus doesn't allow livestreaming from non-Store games. Or did you prefer not to enable it just since you want to limit bug exposure? They do note:
On their page: https://support.oculus.com/408837319677033/
It would be useful to livestream (and then share links to you) for bug reporting. What I did was record the video to the headset and then upload to Facebook, but that is a messier process.
No, I didn't choose to opt out of livestreaming in any way. I'll take a look at it and see if I can get it to work.
I'm not sure if you've tried this, but you can record the video from the Quest, and then transfer it to your computer through SideQuest. That's what I do for gameplay videos. Here's a nice little video to get it to record in landscape:
In the SideQuest settings, there is also a section entitled "Set Video Capture Size" that states that "This changes the resolution of captured videos on the Quest" and offers the options of 480, 720, and 1080, but maybe that still captures a square? I'll have to try the ADB commands vs. the settings and see. That said, a lot of the comments mention that doing this has a significant framerate cost, since this is essentially just cropping/zooming the native output from the Quest in the headset itself.
I haven't had a chance to test it yet, but I'll let you know. I decided to sleep last night instead. ;) Also, if you get bored (because, you know, you don't have a ton of other more important dev work to to), you could also setup your game to be mixed-reality compatible, which is a very, very short list of games right now: https://developer.oculus.com/documentation/mrc/mr-quest/. Then you can show off your game like all those mixed reality Beat Saber game clips like this one:
I also recommend you create such a video featuring the most attractive woman you can find, because the VR world is still dominated by male players and we are small minded individuals. :PI forgot to mention, in regards to getting another Quest, I and 3 out of 4 of my friends who recently purchased a Quest used this site to be able to purchase our Quests: https://www.nowinstock.net/videogaming/accessories/oculusquest/.
Setup a browser alert and you can buy one within a day, usually, although you do have to act very fast since you can get the Quest purchased out from under you while you're still messing around in the checkout process.
